Google Creepiness: Science or Coincidence? (Premium)

There is a wide range of responses to Google’s privacy violations, from those who simply don’t care to those who maybe care far too much. But as is so often the case with such subjects, there’s a much broader audience right in the middle. These are the people who think they understand the deal they’ve made with the devil and are willing to give up a bit of their personal information in order to benefit from Google’s excellent apps and services.

And yes, I fall into this middle group. And while I have nothing to offer with regards to fully understanding exactly what it is that we’re giving up so that we can enjoy the fruits of our Google relationships, I do have stories that make me wonder. Creepy stories.

Creepy can mean a lot of things. We’ve probably all experienced the creepy usefulness of Google, like when Google Photos somehow correctly identifies my kids from the womb to their current ages (20 and 17, at the time of this writing) and creates and shares with us digital memories. These things are almost always appreciated. But they’re also creepy. There’s some combination of AI prowess and surveillance occurring there, and while we are right to question this, wonder about our similarity to cows in a stockade heading to food, my God, those are pictures of our kids! How fun.

No, I’m talking about a different kind of creepy. A creepy that comes with no endearing side to take the edge off. To make us forget that Google is an omnipresent force in our lives and not necessarily for the best. That Google fun family photo collages aren’t really this firm’s central aim.

To be clear, this probably isn’t isolated to just Google. But let’s just say that Google is very obviously the biggest and creepiest offender. It dominates the online advertising and Internet search markets, creating a virtuous cycle in which each aids and feeds off the other. Google is literally the gatekeeper for the Internet, and that’s true whether you explicitly use its services or not.

A couple of stories to illustrate my point.

In early November on First Ring Daily I discussed how I had visited the New Balance website to order a new pair of slip-on shoes that I really like. The shoe in question is the New Balance 770. They cost $80 when they’re in stock. But as I found when I visited the site, it was only available in very small and very large sizes, indicating that New Balance no longer makes them. So I had to actually do some research, and I purchased other, less desirable shoes.

A week later, I did something I don’t normally do, which is to visit the CNN website. Perusing its front page, I scanned through the news of the day. And saw, in a grid of news stories near the bottom of the page, an ad for the New Balance 770. It was just a picture of the shoes with a New Balance logo and nothing else, as I recall. (I didn’t take a screenshot, sorry.)

Intrigued by this non-coincidence, I clicked on the ad. And was brought to the same page I had visited previously on the New Balance website. The shoe was still unavailable in anything other than extreme sizes. And I was left wondering about the invisible net of tracking services running eagerly in the background of my browsers.

The second story requires a bit of set-up, sorry.

Like many of you, I’m intrigued by articles in which someone details the technologies they use in the course of getting their jobs done. The New York Times has been running a series of such articles over the past few years, and while some of them are just terrible—the NBA player who travels with three video game consoles, for example—there are sometimes interesting tidbits.

Last week, I read an astonishing interview with an NYT food writer, The Most Important Kitchen Tools This Holiday (or Any Season, Really), in which she’s asked, “beyond your job, what tech product do you and your family love and why?”

This was part of her answer.

There’s always music playing in our house, a mix ranging from the “Mamma Mia” soundtrack to Debussy and U.S. Girls. My husband and I ripped two lifetimes’ worth of CDs into a digital blob, which we listen to all over the house using Roon, which is a music player like iTunes but with a much cleaner interface and it’s easier to control, plus Tidal for streaming, because it has better sound than Spotify. We stream WFMU and BBC Radio 3 through Roon, and my husband buys a lot of our music on Bandcamp, a site where artists and labels sell their music directly, as files, CDs or vinyl.

She mentions three technology solutions here, Roon, Tidal, and Bandcamp. Despite writing about technology for 25 years, I’d never heard of two of them (Roon and Bandcamp), and the other, Tidal, is an also-ran I’d never bother with. This was … confusing.

I don’t really care about Bandcamp, and I understand the point. But Roon? I had to look it up. And Roon is this incredibly expensive and nearly-pointless way to combine a personal music collection (ripped CDs) with an online service (Tidal). That there are cheaper ways to do this—-Google Play Music lets you upload 50,000 of your own songs for free, and Apple’s iTunes Match is $25 per year—is notable. But … Roon? What the hell?

This blew my mind. So I mentioned it to my wife—we often discuss some of the crazy tech and travel recommendations we see in this kind of article—and I pointed at the speakers we use in our sunroom. Instead of spending several hundred dollars on a Sonos speaker system, or whatever thousands of dollars that NYT music lover had spent on amplifiers, multiple speakers, and Roon-specific hardware, we use a cobbled-together and very inexpensive system to listen to music. And as my wife knows very well, it sounds incredible. There is almost no reason to spend more than what we did if the goal is crisp, clear, room-filling sound.

So what is this cobbled-together system? It’s a Chromecast Audio, which costs $35 (right now $15 on sale), and a pair of Edifier R1280 Powered Bookshelf Speakers, which cost $130 at Amazon (or $100 right now on sale). (We use Google Play Music and Spotify via the Chromecast to play music.) To get the equivalent sound quality from Sonos, you’d need two Play:5s at a cost of over $1000.

I’m not trying to sell you on the Edifier R1280s, per se, but if you want to buy a set using that affiliate link above, you will not be disappointed. I am, perhaps, a bit too proud of this purchase. And, that’s the thing. Off we went, smug in the knowledge that we made better decisions than that women from the NYT and her husband. Those silly rich people.

So the other night, I was browsing through the stories in the Google Feed on my phone. I do this about once a day on average as a way to either pass the time or find a longer story I might want to read later in Pocket. And in reading one of the stories it recommended—another example of Google AI prowess at work, by the way—I finally came to the end, where I found a set of those infamous “you’ll never believe what this 80’s actress looks like today” type ads that pretend they’re stories. Scrolling through that list, I came across an ad. This ad.

Yes, those are the speakers that my wife and I had just discussed.

Here’s the thing. I never opened Amazon.com or Google Search to look up the speakers before, during, or after the conversation with my wife. The speakers are not particularly famous or current or noteworthy in any way beyond the fact that they are inexpensive and sound great. Oh, and beyond the fact that my wife and I had just had a conversation about these exact speakers.

That is creepy.

And while it could simply be a wonderful—or terrible—coincidence, this isn’t the first time that I’ve seen an ad for a product or service that my wife and I were discussing. In a room. With one or more Google Home smart speakers. And both of our smartphones.

Look, I’m not a kook. I don’t believe that our Google Assistant-powered devices are actually silently listening to, recording, and analyzing our conversations. This is perhaps more akin to the fake randomness of song playback where you start to hear the same bands repeatedly in a very non-random way. Or when you’re shopping for a particular car and suddenly see them out on the road all the time.

Maybe. But the thing is, Google’s success is based very much on a preponderance of data. And on its ability to understand that data and apply to aims both good (“remember that day” memories on Google Photos) and, if not bad, then at least questionable (ads on random websites).

And I have written about these speakers before. If you search for Edifier on Thurrott.com, you’ll find that they’ve come up four times in the past, each time in a context that makes sense: I have these speakers, they’re inexpensive, and they sound great. Google must be taking information about me from work, combining it with what I do out in the world, and coming up with some digital Bouillabaisse understanding of me, my likes, and interests. And is then advertising to me accordingly. In other words, it’s science, not coincidence.

But boy is it creepy.