Civics & “Big Tech”
This position as all-seeing middleman does indeed allow Google to collect vast tranches of information about you. The corporation can gather and store every word you say on or near your phone, and everything you do online—every time you break the speed limit, every massage parlor and weekend fling, even, with increasing accuracy, every cigarette, beer, and Twinkie you consume.
The existence of an all-seeing middleman is not, in and of itself, new. The postal system a century ago, AT&T fifty years ago, the internet itself twenty-five years ago—each of these old-school platforms also stood between us and the people with whom we wanted to speak and deal. And hence each of these platforms had access to enormous amounts of intimate information. But back then, the law required such entities to provide the same service on the same terms to everyone. Which meant they had few ways to profit from your private information, hence little interest in paying to collect and store it.
What makes Google and its peers unlike any corporation we’ve faced before is our failure to impose similar constraints on them. Unlike AT&T, we have failed at enforcing the laws that would prevent them from treating you differently from your neighbor.
