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By Google – Ankit Tharwani, Annalaissa “Reality” by Google Ankit Tharwani, Annalaissa Johnson, Guillermo Monge MIDS 231­2 Overview Over the past fifteen years, Google has developed an exponentially growing impact on our methods of searching for, gathering, and relaying data. As the company grew from a small search engine querying websites for mildly relevant data to a technology giant that offers applications for everything from thermostats to streaming video, Google managed to claim the most coveted spot in the industry for how the public incorporates data into their lives. While they offer state­of­the­art tools and unparalleled convenience to users, the extent of their reach raises the question as to how safe it is to trust one corporation with almost every piece of data defining our identities. Additionally, as Google’s reach continues to grow, society treats the collection, distribution and retrieval of data differently, allowing it to affect our decisions and sentiments. This paper seeks to address Google’s impact on our identities through its extensive reach of applications and products, as well as how the boundaries and limitations of Google can project onto our world views. By studying these aspects of how Google affects daily life, we hope to recognize the best ways to actively participate in the symbiotic relationship between humanity and Google. Impact on Identity and Privacy Human­Technology Interaction Search engines don’t show us what people think, rather they lend us insight into how people think. This quotation from the film Ex Machina1 best summarizes what the connection of the ​ ​ vast amount of data that google has can holistically amount to. Not only does the information that Google gathers tell a lot about the description of a person (physically, mentally, demographically), but it actually provides a profile into how that user makes decisions, conducts business and personal relationships, and expresses creativity. Specifically, search engines alone can impact our contemporary selves through defining our notion of distance to knowledge similarly to how social media has now distinguished geographical distance from emotional closeness. Rather than following breadcrumbs of citations in articles of scholarly journals to original sources, we can use search engines to find an original source immediately, along with multitudes of other related sources. Rather than frequenting a restaurant to determine the most popular and crowded times during the week, we can search for the restaurant and immediately see Google’s 1 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/ analytics for popularity by the day of the week and hour. Likewise, instead of waiting for the 8th minute to listen to traffic information on the radio, we can use maps to access real time data from the roads. This change in the culture of how we view the convenience of information and data comes with the consequences (both positive and negative) of changing our mindset in how close we are to answers. As a result, these resources (Google search, Google maps, Zagat, etc) shape our reality and how we view the real world. Augmented reality, such as viewing notations on Google Earth or traffic information on Google maps, is a more obvious example of how we can become immediately accustomed to receiving information about real world entities. In a more subtle way, however, the use of apps like Zagat, Yelp, and Google Reviews now quietly regulates which restaurant we pick. Even basic analytics, like the popularity of a restaurant throughout the day that appears on a Google search for a restaurant, can determine the choices that we make (like when to schedule dinner), on a daily basis. Because society modifies its behaviors, choices, and expectations based on the information received from these applications, it’s clear that search engines and the related products serve to shape society, while society in turn shapes the search engines with the data it provides. To get more insight into typical use across Google products, we developed a survey to gauge information on frequency, depth, and related byproducts of continuous use. Survey on Typical Usage and Thoughts on Privacy While Google has proven to be a powerful and convenient tool, its recent developments and acquisitions in the past decade have gathered a wide user base: 1.17 billion unique visitors used google search in December of 20122, and more than 500 million people have gmail accounts3. With such a breadth of user adoption, the situation begs the question as to whether people realize how much information they are actually providing Google through all of its subsidiaries. Google has an impressive number of user applications and tools, including the social media network Google+, thermostat Nest, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Zagat, Google drive, and Google Play. While a user may think that the information he provides to one particular application doesn’t amount to enough for the data conglomerate to identify him, it is possible that through all of the devices, there is enough data to build a complete profile of a person and determine behaviors. In our look into Google’s impact on identity, we wanted to find information about the typical usage of Google entities as well as consider the impact on our identity has on the public’s perception of personal data privacy. To assess the typical usability of our peers from all age ranges and technological literacies, we developed a survey (see appendix) that asked demographic information for use in analysis, basic questions about the frequency and intensity of usage for various Google products, questions about how the removal of Google products from the 2 http://www.statista.com/chart/899/unique­users­of­search­engines­in­december­2012/ 3 http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/01/technology/gmail/ ​ marketplace would affect daily life, and questions about the limits of Google’s resources. The questions aimed to not only get real data about personal usage of Google products, but also to gauge user understanding of how much of their personal data is available to Google. Additionally, we wanted to measure the respondents’ typical reliance on Google products by measuring impact on a life without Google. The survey was a success with 75 responses from age group 15­19 all the way to 60+, and was geographically diverse with respondents from the United States, Mexico, India, Japan and Europe. Fifty percent of the respondents were in the 20­29 age range and 47% were currently living in the United States or Canada. We asked respondents to self report their own ability in using Google search on a scale from 1 to 5 and received answers in every increment, with 55% responding 4 out of the “expert” level 5. In determining the usage of primary Google products by respondents, we asked how many accounts each held for Gmail, YouTube, and Google+. The overwhelming majority (96%) of survey takers held at least one Gmail account, with 43% of total survey takers holding multiple Gmail accounts. The figures for YouTube saw a slight decrease, with 81% holding at least one account and 15% holding multiple accounts. The least popular of the main applications was Google+, for which only 67% of the respondents held an account. Over 89% (67 out of the 75 respondents) held at least two of the three major Google accounts, meaning that Google has the ability to gather data on these people from different sources and connect that data through account linkage, IP information, name profile, and more. While information about the number of accounts held by respondents is helpful, we really wanted to evaluate the usage frequency to better understand how much data Google could collect on the user. Google search was by far the most popular Google product by our survey takers, with 93% claiming that they used the tool daily (with an additional 6% responding “weekly”). Gmail and Chrome were also popular for daily usage, garnering 84% and 81% respectively. Finally, Google maps and YouTube pulled in moderate usage with a respective 87% and 91% of respondents using the tools at least weekly. The frequency analysis of the responses shows that people use these products enough for Google to potentially gather substantial information from each source. For example, Google searches, video searches on YouTube, and e­mail subjects between friends that all include the terms “Taylor Swift” could conceivably create an alert on Google’s side to use this information to develop targeted ads for the user. After asking about the frequency of use for 16 different Google products, we asked the participants to reflect on the reach that the company has through the different applications. We phrased the question “Are you concerned [Google] may have too much information?”, and allowed users to check multiple boxes. Fifty­four percent of users responded that they didn’t think Google would misuse personal information, leaving 46% to doubt the safety of their personal data. Almost 22% indicated that they were unaware of how many of these common products were owned and operated by Google, and 37% claimed that it was inevitable that Google would eventually have access to too much of their personal information. The survey allowed us to get insight into Google’s reach through multiple applications within a small group of users; we found that for the vast majority of respondents, Google had access to personal information through many different sources. This analysis in depth and frequency of use allowed us to better develop our research on how Google impacts our identity as a society. Examples of Privacy Concerns With Google products infiltrating our lives at seemingly every turn, the issue of privacy is a recurring one. The concern from holding accounts and providing streams of data through separate products is one concern, but there are also just as many threats to personal data security within individual products.
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