Kevin Boone

Why I de-Googled

In this article, I want to explain why I’m a staunch de-Googler, that is, why I carefully avoid all Google products and services. It isn’t easy to do this in the modern world, because Google has become so entrenched in our lives. Dumping Google has far-reaching consequences, so there really has to be a good reason to do it.

I usually write about how to de-Google, not why. I’ve generally assumed that my motivation was obvious. At least, I assumed that anybody who landed on my website already wanted to de-Google, and was interested in ways to go about it.

But clearly it isn’t entirely obvious, because people keep asking me why on Earth I would take this traumatic, hugely disruptive action. So what, exactly, is wrong with Google?

Where do I even begin?

Google does bad stuff that every large corporation does, but better

To keep this article to a manageable length, let’s leave aside Google’s convoluted, barely-legal tax avoidance schemes. I won’t get into Google’s atrocious record in workplace relations, including the constant allegations of discrimination, retaliation, union-busting, and sexual harassment.

I’ll skip over Google’s shady dealings with oil companies, and its occasional sponsorship of climate-change deniers.

Let’s put aside Google’s alarming about-face on AI research, in which the Company quietly retracted its published pledge not to support the military use of AI technology.

We’ll ignore, for today, Google’s publication of academic research without enough detail for it to be independently replicated, its attempts to patent technologies that are already in the public domain, and its willingness to claim intellectual property rights over content created by others. And so on, and on, and on.

I won’t be discussing any of these matters in this article, egregious as they are, because it’s the very nature of capitalism for businesses to push at the boundaries of law and ethics in search of profit. Google behaves no worse in this respect than many others – it’s just more successful.

Instead, I want to focus on what makes Google uniquely dangerous: its abuse of its market position to dominate the Internet, shape public opinion, destroy all notion of personal privacy, and turn the world-wide web – probably the most important technological development in human history – into a giant advertising hoarding.

Knowing the enemy

Let’s start with a look at the Company and its products. We’ll need this background to understand the sheer size of the problem that Google represents.

Everybody knows that Google is a large corporation, one of the so-called ‘tech giants’, but I’m not sure how well people understand its vast scale and reach.

Google achieved the size and value it has today, not only by expansion, but by a huge number of acquisitions: nearly 300 so far. These acquisitions were sometimes by Google itself, sometimes by its parent company Alphabet – the distinction isn’t important here.

Here are just a few of Google’s acquisitions, to give you a flavour:

And about 200 more, covering a huge range of industries.

With these acquisitions, and its own development, Google now operates a suite of near-ubiquitous end-user products and services, along with business-to-business operations, and scientific research programs in many domains, including healthcare, climate, machine learning, even physics.

Of course, let’s not forget the Google Chrome web browser and the Google search engine itself which, between them, are the cornerstone of the Company’s success. I suspect anybody on Earth can name two dozen Google products or services – Google-branded products are quite literally household names.

Among the products and services which don’t have Google branding, but which everybody knows are part of Google, we have…

There are some Google products that are not so clearly associated in the public perception with Google:

Google’s acquisition of FitBit was deeply unwelcome, and it’s not clear whether Google wanted FitBit’s technology, or just set out to destroy a competitor.

Some of these products and platforms boast over a billion regular users. Android alone has nearly four billion users. Four billion. That’s half the planet, using a single product on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

Why does this scale matter? Well, in its privacy policy, Google says that it doesn’t share personal information outside of Google except in specific circumstances. But Google’s services have global reach, and touch almost everybody’s lives. To limit their data-sharing to ‘within Google’ amounts to much the same as limiting it to ‘on Earth’.

The first uniquely Google problem I’ll mention is the Company’s virtual monopoly over many Internet-related activities, particularly advertising and search.

Google’s search engine accounts for just under 90% of all web searches world-wide. In the US and UK, nearly 90% of adults make a Google search at least once a day. Google has an almost total monopoly on web search, with all the other search providers, like Bing, DuckDuckDuckGo, Kagi, and Yahoo, fighting for the crumbs from Google’s table.

As well as its overwhelming dominance in web search, Google has significant control of web-based advertising.

Unless you’re a Google insider, it’s not easy to tell what proportion of websites use Google’s AdSense for delivering advertising. However, we do know that it’s used by some of the largest, busiest, sites: Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Walmart, NVidia, Samsung, and many others. AdSense isn’t limited to these giants, though – many small businesses will tuck an AdSense panel into their web pages, in the hope of attracting a bit of advertising revenue. Among commercial websites, I’d say that AdSense is now almost ubiquitous.

Google’s monopolies and anti-competitive practices

To be fair, Google can’t be blamed for its monopoly: in a capitalist society expansion and dominance are the rewards of success. Google got where it is by being good at what it does. Suppressing competition to the level of monopoly may be discreditable but, so long as it’s legal, a business that operates in a capitalist economy can hardly be blamed when it happens.

However, the number and size of fines that regulators have handed down suggests that some of Google’s anti-competitive activities are, in fact, not legal.

For a well-known example of Google’s unlawful and destructive business practices, we need only look at the ‘Froogle’ affair. Google achieved complete market dominance in the area of on-line shopping recommendations, by offering vendors a free way to advertise on its ‘Froogle’ platform. Then, when there was no remaining competition in this area, Google disbanded Froogle and started charging businesses to appear in its shopping directory. Many small companies, it seems, were driven out of business by this strategy, earning Google a 2bn Euro fine from the EU courts.

It’s frequently been alleged, and sometimes proven, that Google’s monopoly on web search allows the company to reinforce and exploit its monopoly in other areas. After all, Google is in a position to promote its own services at the expense of everybody else’s, if everybody uses its search engine. In this way Google earned a 3bn Euro fine from the EU courts.

Over the years, Google has also used the market penetration of Android as a way to reinforce its other monopolies. Its agreements with cellphone vendors typically include a requirement that the vendor provide the complete set of Google products and services with the handset – email, documents, search, browser, and the rest – making it less likely that purchasers will seek out alternatives. Google used its position to try to prevent cellphone vendors offering products based on the Android Open-Source project, for example.

To be fair to Google, at one time it actively supported the development of open-source Android variants by hobbyists and enthusiasts. But, perhaps recognizing the growing demand for Google-free smartphones, Google recently reduced the amount of support it provides to the open-source community, at least in the Android world. This is regrettable, and we don’t yet really know what the long-term implications will be.

Google’s market dominance has allowed it to enter into price-fixing agreements that are, or at least border on, unlawful, like the notorious “Jedi Blue” deal between Google and Facebook. In this agreement, Facebook dropped its own plans to create an Internet advertising platform, in exchange for preferential rates for the use of Google’s. So far, several hundred businesses have sued Google over losses they believe they suffered because of this collusion. Whether Jedi Blue was illegal or not – and it seems that, in the US at least, it probably wasn’t – Google’s business activities remain subject to constant scrutiny for monopolistic practices, because the company has such a bad track record in this area.

Technical ramifications of Google’s monopolies

Google’s market dominance has technical, as well as commercial, repercussions, although many people won’t care, and most won’t even understand. For example, Google drove the adoption of encryption protocols like SSL on the web, by reducing the search rankings of websites that didn’t adopt them.

Why does this matter? Shouldn’t we encourage encryption for sending or receiving private information over the Internet? In fact, almost all websites that handled sensitive data used encrypted communication long before Google got involved. Nobody wants to send credit card details or photos of their medical problems over an insecure channel. But many purely informational websites, that handle no personal or sensitive data – like my own, like most archives and libraries – don’t benefit from encryption. But we all have to use it now, making everything slower, more expensive, and wasteful of energy, because Google says we must. We’re slowly allowing Google to become the arbiter of Internet standards.

Google can act this way not just because it controls search rankings, but because it controls the Chrome web browser, and the Android platform which, in most cases, includes the Chrome web browser. If your website isn’t compatible with Chrome, most people won’t see it. Google can enforce its own standards by implementing them in Chrome, and forcing web sites to toe the line, which Google can draw wherever it likes. That’s not to say that Google’s innovations in web standards are necessarily bad. The question we have to ask, though, is: do we want to put that much power – outright control of the Internet – in the hands of a single company that can’t avoid putting its own profits ahead of society’s needs?

The Internet has become one of society’s main sources of information, as well as the foremost platform for doing business. Most of us now get most of our information – on politics, current affairs, culture, health, science, and everything else – from the web. It isn’t in anybody’s interest, except Google’s, if the entire Internet ends up being controlled by a single organization, accountable to nobody but its investors.

I’m not saying that Google does engage in social engineering, only that it could, and that’s frightening enough.

As I mentioned earlier, almost everybody uses Google’s search engine, and many people seem to regard its results as definitive. It seems that only about 0.4% of Google searches are read beyond the first page of results.

It’s worth thinking about this a bit.

The results of 249 out of every 250 Google searches aren’t read beyond the first page. It’s not hard to see why website designers make such a big deal of ‘search engine optimization’, since everybody wants to be on the first page – or, even better, the first line – of a Google search.

This situation is even worse than it first looks because it’s unclear, probably deliberately so, which search results have been prioritized because Google has been paid to promote them. Again, it’s worth thinking about this a bit. Google’s search results aren’t necessarily ranked in order of how apposite they are, but on the basis of how much they contribute to Google’s income.

It’s not hard to see how a small adjustment in the way Google ranks web pages can have a profound impact on the success or failure of a business venture. Other companies succeed or fail according to Google’s whims.

And that’s not all.

Google’s searches, unlike those of DuckDuckGo for example, are adaptive; they change according to the user’s previous search behaviour. That’s why – or one of the reasons why – when I search for ‘Sibelius’ on DuckDuckGo, the top result refers to the Finnish composer. With Google, the first result was for the music notation software. Google knew that I was more interested in the software than the composer, and biased the results accordingly.

This adaptive behaviour makes Google’s search engine better than the competition’s – so long as you don’t care about personal privacy, a subject I’ll come to shortly. And so long as you don’t mind living your online life in an echo chamber where you hear only your own voice or, at least, the voices of people who already agree with you.

This adaptive search gives Google a unique opportunity to engage in social engineering, whether it intends to or not. Its ranking algorithms favour content that matches a user’s previous searches, and so can hardly avoid strengthening pre-existing biases. There’s a real risk that Google’s search encourages political polarization, and helps to disseminate misinformation and fake news, particularly to people who’ve shown a preference for false or misleading sources before.

The problem isn’t really with Google’s behaviour: it’s in the fact that most people now use no search Engine but Google’s, and have no experience of how different search engines will return different results for the same query. Many people think, if they think about this at all, that a search engine is completely neutral; they don’t understand that any search engine has to make a choice about how to rank results. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the way Google does it, except that most people never use any of the alternatives, and so are consistently presented with partisan information.

The unthinking, slavish devotion to Google’s search means that many users regard the information they get from Google as the totality of what’s available. Google’s search is, in a sense, our interface to all the world’s knowledge. It’s now granted an almost guru-like level of unquestioned acceptance.

Google and privacy

And so to privacy, my main area of concern.

Google tacitly collects a vast amount of information from anybody who uses its services, including records of web searches and browsing history, location, shopping habits, sensor data from mobile devices, nearby Bluetooth devices, and many, many other things. I’m not speculating here: Google has a privacy policy which makes perfectly clear what information it gathers. The purpose of collecting this data, according to Google, is to improve its products, and to provide personalized services. In practice, “personalized” really means “with targeted advertising”.

Google doesn’t just get information from direct interaction with its services. Its huge number of business partners – including, in effect, everybody who uses its advertising platform – allows Google to track your activity all around the web. To do this it uses technologies like 3rd-party cookies and browser fingerprinting.

All this means that Google knows more-or-less everything you do on the web. Google knows where you’ve been, what you did there, and with whom. If you’re a FitBit user, Google knows your heart rate, the amount you exercise, and probably your weight, possibly your blood pressure. Google collects information about you from diverse sources, and compiles into a profile. Again, I’m not speculating: Google is open about this. It does it to “provide a better service”.

All this means that Google and its partners maintain a vast repository of detailed personal information. We know that Google is willing to share this information, and it may be required to share it with Governmental agencies, as a condition of continuing to do business in a particular jurisdiction. Google’s assistance of law enforcement authorities has led to prosecutions, for activities that I believe most of us would regard as unobjectionable. Of course, Google can’t be blamed for complying with the laws of the countries in which it operates; but it can be blamed, I think, for storing so much personal information that it’s a viable target for a legal demand for disclosure.

Centralizing large amounts of personal data is inherently risky. We read and hear every day about corporations, large and small, leaking colossal amounts of private information. We’ve learned the hard way that information doesn’t like to be contained: it likes to be shared. The more personal information its systems store, the more Google becomes a target for villains. And some of those villains have state military backing and the resources to match.

Is this a problem? Google clearly doesn’t think so. Here’s an astounding remark from Eric Schmidt, one-time CEO:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

This is a statement of such breathtaking, staggering complacency that I find it almost impossible to credit to a person who, I presume, can wipe has own backside without assistance.

Perhaps Mr Schmidt has the good fortune to hold values that align perfectly with those of the authorities in his region. I presume he isn’t a journalist investigating a corrupt regime, or a vulnerable woman hiding with her children from an abusive partner. Or just an ordinary Joe or Jane seeking information about an embarrassing medical complaint.

In reality, we all do and say things we don’t want to be public knowledge. Even me: a man whose life is so stultifying dull that you couldn’t pay anybody enough to snoop on me. Even I do things I like to keep to myself.

We can’t live by advertising alone

Leaving aside the issue of personal privacy, it’s worth asking whether we want the Internet turned into a vast advertising behemoth. One of the reasons for Google’s success is that it’s easier to make money – in the short term, anyway – by advertising, than by providing useful goods or services. At the very least, this is an aesthetic problem: I don’t like it that everything I see on the web is surrounded by flashing, beeping advertisements for things I don’t want. In fact, I count it a good day if I don’t seen any advertisements at all. But it’s also a socio-economic problem: in the long term civilization can’t survive, if we do nothing but advertise to one another. We also have to make and do. Google, intentionally or not, is contributing to the slow destruction of the western economy.

Closing remarks

You could argue that Google isn’t the only culprit, in any of the problem areas I’ve mentioned in this article. All the large tech corporations are engaged in similar activities, albeit perhaps not on the same gargantuan scale as Google. I try to avoid all the tech giants, but I try hardest to avoid Google, since I believe it to be the most dangerous, simply because of its success.

In summary, then, I’m a de-Googler because Google uses its monopoly to get control over the Internet, one of humanity’s most powerful resources; and because Google – perhaps unwittingly at present – engages in social engineering through its search algorithms; and because Google exercises too much power over business and commerce; and because Google encourages large-scale data harvesting, profiling individuals and storing their information in a way that can’t be made secure; and because I don’t want to contribute to making the Internet even more of an advertising banner than it already is.

What further reasons do I need than these?


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