You have been a frog in lukewarm water and Google (and Apple, and Microsoft, and others) have turned up the heat without you noticing.
Well, you kind of noticed. You kind of noticed how some conveniently relevant ads started showing up in your inbox and on all the websites you started visiting. You kind of noticed how the mail that shows up in your snail mail box is really quite… relevant. You have had a sneaky suspicion that ‘someone is watching’ but you just couldn’t figure out who. Or why they would watch someone as unimportant as you.
It just so happens you are much more important than you gave yourself credit for – so much so that you have become a sought after commodity in a machine whose belly cannot be satisfied.
You have become Google’s whippin’ boy and you are starting to enjoy the pain.
You feel like you can’t get out.
You feel like there is no hope so you might as well go like an ox to the slaughter.
Let me stop you before the axe falls on your neck and remind you the following simple facts:
- There is hope
- You do have a choice and you can choose otherwise *right now*
- You do matter, and your voice and action *do* count
Now that we’ve covered that, let me unveil the inspiration behind this post. You may have read my recent article called Google’s new Daddy Alphabet and Why You Should Care but if not, read it.
Today was an almost prophetic confirmation of my gut’s instinct when a friend of mine forwarded me this article written from a European perspective.
Read this, too.
Really get it.
It’s not easy to divorce from Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc, but you only have two options: freedom or slavery.
It took me about 5 years to fully free myself from all things proprietary. Even today there are still small traces of these guys in my life, but I can confidently say I’m 99% free.
Once you are on the road to freedom it gets easier, just to let you know. It’s like any addiction. Heroin addicts convulse, sweat, puke their guts up and hate their life for quite a while before sobriety starts to look good. Don’t think Google or Apple will let you go without a fight. Even your emotions will come into play. You will miss their haunting voices for a while. But once you have tasted freedom, you won’t go back to jail.
I encourage all of you to take action today. Get connected with your local ubuntu community as a first step because it’s full of people who have answers for *all* of these pervasive problems.
See you at the finish line!
You forgot to specifically mention Facebook in your accurate assessment of our accepted privacy violations. I would argue Facebook is as least insidious as Google in their use of your personal data. Far too many of us have happily turned over every aspect of our personal life and privacy so we can keep track of people who we felt in the past weren’t even worth a phone call. Do we really care that a friend from high school who we haven’t seen or spoken with in 10 years baked blueberry muffins today???
hey! you’re hiding your IP address you scoundrel! Dish it up! Hand it over! 😉 Yes, FB is truly such a waste of my thought life that I simply didn’t give it space. And FB is so easy to quit and leave compared to the numbered company alphabet soup. Alphabet soup makes access to your own life so…. easy. And so… so very creepy. It kind of slowly creeps up your pantleg until you can’t avoid it anymore. Something like that.