Trusting Google (Premium)

My relationship with Google is complicated. And the key issue, as you might imagine, is trust.

Make no mistake, I do trust Google, and I believe that millions of other people—probably billions—do so as well.

We trust Google to accurately guide us home in the most efficient manner possible with Maps. To deliver the most accurate and comprehensive Internet search results. And to protect us against spam with Gmail.

But we also trust that Google will routinely violate our privacy, often in ways about which it is not explicit. That it will silently track our movements and activities, both online and in the real world. That it is creating a secret treasure trove of data designed more to give it an advantage over its advertising competitors than to improve its users’ lives.

That many are quite willing to trade privacy and personal data for the functionality that Google’s offerings provide is an understatement. Over two billion people use Android devices and at least 8 Google services now have over one billion users each across web and mobile. Even iPhone/iOS and Windows users trust Google to some degree.

And I am among that audience.

I use Google Chrome more than any other application on my Windows PCs, and as my primary interface to the web across both mobile and desktop. I use a Google phone running a Google platform and many Google apps and services. I’ve adopted Google Assistant and Google Home for smart home control. And use Google’s Chromecast for whole-house audio. Google has, effectively, replaced Apple for much of our entertainment/consumption needs. And has replaced Microsoft for much of our productivity needs as well. And this usage is growing over time.

And while this will be obvious to readers, I will also just highlight that I’m no typical consumer. I don’t just accept defaults, and I care very deeply about the hardware, software, and services solutions that I use. I deliberate and debate everything. Google is winning because Google’s offerings, generally speaking, are better. And they are better even within the context of this trust issue.

And I do trust Google. And yet I do not trust Google as well. It’s a paradox.

Thinking back to my Microsoft experiences over the years, I recall a similar period of unease. During Microsoft’s U.S. antitrust trial, I was riveted by the testimonies from the firm’s own executives as well as from those of its competitors. The picture that emerged was decidedly negative, and disturbing. And I walked away from the trial convinced that this software giant must be broken up, scattered to the wind, to protect the industry and its millions of users from what was clearly a culture of abuse.

I had a hard time rectifying my support for Microsoft and its products and its rapacious, predatory behavior. But what I eventually realized was that I didn’t support Microsoft, didn’t even have to like the company. Instead, my role was to support the many millions of people who used its products and services.

Two things changed in the wake of this little bout of self-realization. First, Microsoft evolved into a company that I could respect as much as the products it made. And second, the software giant lost its lofty perch atop the personal computing industry—at least partially because of its antitrust issues in the U.S. and EU—resulting in this new era in which companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple play a much bigger role.

It’s possible that Google will eventually succumb to some market reality in which its own power is curbed. But that hasn’t happened yet, and the firm has, so far at least, weathered its own antitrust challenges with more aplomb than did Microsoft. But as I’ve noted in the past, the biggest difference between Microsoft and Google during these escapades is that Google’s offerings are routinely best-in-class. And that users select them even when they are not the default.

That is a strategy that apparently eluded Microsoft, a company that routinely foisted second-rate copies of other products on its users. Or, worse, would announce vaporware in order to diminish interest in a new and exciting product from a competitor.

Google has a different problem: It’s products and solutions always arrive with an asterisk. A question. Which is, what am I giving up in order to get this thing?

And the answer is always the same, at a high level. We’re giving up some privacy. A piece of ourselves. We’re feeding a monster by giving it a tiny slice of your soul. And we are doing it willingly.

I broached this topic on a recent episode of Windows Weekly, and Leo asked me, pointedly, what the problem was. We know what we’re getting into, after all. This is just the way the world is now.

But we don’t really know what we’re getting into. The unease I feel, the distrust, is not about what I know Google is doing. It’s about what I don’t know it’s doing. Google today is like the Microsoft of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. It’s involved in a lot of bad stuff. And that is only now coming to light.

Google is the company that hid a Google+ security breach that it knew was active for almost three years. It’s the company that lied about its collection of location data, making users believe that when they turned off location tracking that, you know, location tracking was actually turned off. It’s the company that rewarded several executives who were charged with sexual abuse with lucrative exit packages and public statements of support. It is a company, put simply, that none of us should trust.

And yet. We do.

As a technology writer and reviewer, I have an out: I can claim, somewhat accurately, that Google is a fact of life, something I cannot ignore. And that I should support the billions of people who use the company’s various offerings. I can make a similar claim about Apple, another company that drives me crazy, in this case with its faux humility and hubris.

But I’m also a user here. I choose to use Google products and services. They are often so much better than the alternatives that I’d be stupid not to. Round and round we go.

And I can’t resolve this. I recently wrote an article about Microsoft called Integrity because the software giant has changed a lot in the past 15 years or so. I don’t know what it will take for Google to make similar changes. Or what it would take for me to stop being hypocritical about what’s really import and exorcize this demon from my life. But I just can’t do it. And I suspect many of you can’t either.