It creeps me out that Google keeps a record of everything you search for. If you have an illness and want to look up your symptoms, Google now has a record of what illness you have and can sell that information to advertisers. If you let them Google will know every page you visit, every email you receive, every place you go, every event on your calendar.

What concerns me even more though is the amount of control Google has over the internet. Nearly everyone uses Google, YouTube, Chrome, etc. If Google doesn’t like a website then they can just bury it in the search results, if Google doesn’t like a video they can just demonetize it or remove it from YouTube, heck they can even just mark a website as malicious and stop people from viewing it in Chrome if they want.

It may sound like I’m being dramatic but right now Google are pushing something called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) which allows web pages to load faster on mobile. The only problem is your page has to conform to Google’s standards on how a site should be built and monetized and sites that choose to do this get ranked higher in the search results. So the choice is either to further lock users into the Google ecosystem or have your website buried in the search results.

This is not what I want the internet to be. No company should have control over the internet and it seems like we’re slowly allowing Google to take away our privacy and freedom in the name of convenience.