Nick Cohen: Google's downfall is just a mouse click away

Many people, particularly the elderly, found Street View cameras an invasion of privacy. Photo / Supplied

Opinion

Google's corporate slogan - "Don't be evil" - has always bothered me.

No one should "be" evil, of course.

But why did Google need to spell out its determination to avoid Satan and all his works with such vehemence? When a husband declares to his wife that he would never dream of taking a mistress, or a chief executive interrupts a board meeting to announce that she isn't embezzling the company's funds, the audience is entitled to wonder if they're listening to the voice of a guilty conscience.

Hundreds of millions of people find the idea that Google could be evil unthinkable.

It has so woven itself into the fabric of everyday life that it has gone from being a proper noun to a verb: "I google"; "You google"; "The whole world googles."

I doubt many users think of it as a business at all. The simple home page carries no adverts or PR puffs; it feels as much a public space as the street outside your door.

When you reach the search results, Google does not call the adverts running down the side "adverts" but "sponsored links", as if it were a charity and philanthropists were helping further its noble endeavour.

To be fair, Google does have touches of nobility. It showed real guts when it stood up to the Chinese Communist Party and refused to censor searches by Chinese users on the regime's behalf.

But it remains a business, which exists by selling its users to its advertisers. Most on the net have yet to grasp that when they are on free sites - Facebook and Twitter as well as Google - they are not citizens enjoying a public service or customers whose wishes must always come first.

They are the product whose presence the site owners sell to the real customers in advertising.

If its executives could have been at the British House of Commons hearings into Google Street View last week, they would have learned that members of Parliament at least understand the dangers.

An unnoticed consequence of the election was to bring net-literate MPs into Parliament who are willing to protest against invasions of privacy and breaches of property rights by corporations as by the state.

They see no contradiction between opposing ID cards and opposing Google, a firm with a virtual monopoly, which is giving every appearance of suffering from the early stages of corporate megalomania.

Even as it was first sold, Street View was an intrusion. Anyone is allowed to take photos of public highways, but to build an interactive map of a whole country is like conducting a private census without democratic control.

Many, particularly the elderly, objected to Google taking pictures that gave web-surfing burglars a view of their homes. Parents objected to Google taking picture of children playing in their gardens.

In May, we found that was not all Google was taking. Its camera vans were also taking people's Wi-Fi data without their permission. Google said there was no harm done and our supine information commissioner agreed.

Last week, Google admitted it had taken emails and the addresses of websites users had visited, much as the Chinese communists want to do.

I always listen when politicians attack targets I had naively assumed they were in public life to defend.

So when one Conservative told Parliament that Google was guilty of "the biggest breach of privacy in the history of this country" and David Davis, a former Conservative home affairs spokesman, said that Google's actions represented a "systematic pattern of behaviour backed up, frankly, by systematic mendacity", I took notice.

Google spokesmen say they are not selling the information on to junk mail companies and they will destroy the data they've collected when they find time.

Google was inadvertently breaking into networks without their owners' consent, they said, because collecting the positions of Wi-Fis allowed them to triangulate locations and produce better directions for mobile phone owners using Google Maps, which, in turn, will allow Google to generate more advertising revenue.

But their protestations missed the heart of the issue. If the right to privacy is to mean anything more than the right of randy celebrities to impose super-injunctions, then it has to mean multinational corporations cannot seize people's computer data.

Google suffers from the same delusion as WikiLeaks - that if it has information it can use it regardless of the consequences. WikiLeaks saw no moral problems in telling the psychotic reactionaries of the Taleban the names of Afghans Islamists could want to kill.

Similarly, Google Street View identified a refuge for battered women , allowing any vengeful man to discover where his ex-partner was hiding. The refuge's managers had to protest repeatedly before Google accepted it had a responsibility to protect women from violence.

The hauteur of the company is best summarised by its chief executive Eric Schmidt's pompous and menacing statements that Google "know ... roughly who you are ... what you care about ... who your friends are", and that the young should consider changing their names to avoid being embarrassed by their online pasts.

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt intoned, apparently unaware that he was repeating the excuse of authoritarians the world over.

A fall will inevitably follow such hubris.

Apple supplanted Microsoft because consumers thought it the more friendly and anti-establishment company.

Users do not have to believe that Google is evil for it to suffer an identical fate. They just need to think that it, too, is a part of an establishment that wishes to exploit them. As soon as they do, the search engine that will break Google's monopoly will be waiting for their custom.

Just one click of the mouse away.

- OBSERVER