The Changing Focus Of My Paranoia

When I was a young lad, it seemed like my mother knew way too much about me. “Don’t even think about it,” she’d say as I was planning some small deviation from the established rule book. How could she know what I was thinking?

Later, as my sins grew more adult-sized, it was the God of my Catholic education that was always looking over my shoulder and knew what was going on in my day-to-day life as well as my most secret thoughts and feelings.

For a while, I was concerned about the growing tendency of the governing power elites to act like Big Brother, tracking every element of our lives and using that data to control what we believed, thought and did.

My mother no longer seems omnipresent. The Creator is too busy playing with Quarks to pay attention to my insignificant stuff. Governments, power elites and Illuminati have proven to be bumbling idiots who can’t actually get their own act together, let alone control the rest of us.

So, who scares me now? Google, that’s who.

Google has become the omniscient and omnipresent presence in my life. It knows almost everything about me.

Google knows exactly what I am interested in each and every day. How? Like you and millions of other people, I search for information using the Google search engine.

Even if I'm not using Google search, Google still knows who I connect to, what information I have accessed, and all my online activities. How? My primary Internet Browser is Google Chrome. Feedburner tells Google what I subscribe to, so they know what I am reading. Just to ensure they don't miss anything, they've added Google Reader.

Google knows who my friends and business associates are and what we say to each other. How? I use Gmail.

Google even knows what I am thinking and talking about each day. Even when I blog using Wordpress instead of my Google owned Blogger blog, Blogger grabs my Wordpress blog posts and reposts them.
<<<--- See the left hand column? My most recent Wordpress blog posts are right here in this piece of Google property. And, of course, there are also my YouTube posts.

Google knows what projects I am working on before anybody else on the planet. How? I use Google Docs as my project planner.

And, now they’ve convinced me to tell them anything they might have overlooked about me by giving me the space to tell the world about myself and my activities by introducing Google Profile.

What else? They know where I am planning to go. I use Google Maps and Google Earth.

They are everywhere. They know everything. They see everything. They are watching all the time. GoOgle is the all-seeing eye. They're probably listening in to my cell phone calls and have installed mini-cams in my bedroom too. Google Streetview catching me exiting my local pub? Ha. Soon it will be Google watching me sleep at night, tracking my REMs to see when and what I am dreaming about.

It's gotten so bad that when I want to find out about myself, I no longer sit down to reflect about my life, I just Google myself.