Lines and Circles

If the half-friends of Facebook were slightly creepy, the infiltration of Google into our lives is unsettling on a much deeper level. As we go about our daily business on the Web, browsing, writing, reading, texting, talking, buying, and selling, Google has slowly become the book we write ourselves into. As most people noted, the launch of Google+ was not a monolithic construction. Instead, Google+ revealed the strategic nature of products developed by the company over many years: The search engine that knows what you've searched for. The word processor that knows what you write about. The spreadsheet that knows what you count. The chat program that knows who you talk to, and what they in turn say about you. The list goes on: To some extent, most of us were already enmeshed within this text before we knew it.

Sometimes, the pieces of the paranoid conspiracy start to come together. You realize, suddenly, that the pieces are lining up with each other.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in 2009,

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. (as cited in Tate, 2009)