Big Google is Watching You

Google recently was awarded an U.S. Patent known as “Advertising Based on Environmental Conditions." This patent is one of the most troubling advances in the growth of Big Brother Google as it proposes that background sounds, temperature, humidity, light and air composition can all be monitored in order to serve highly targeted advertisements. The patent states that a web browser or search engine which the user is using can actually be used to obtain what could very well be highly private information about the environment surrounding the user.

“Advertisers may specify that ads are shown to users whose environmental conditions meet certain criteria,” the patent states, although it could quite obviously also be used as yet another way to gather massive amounts of private information on Americans.

After all, the National Counterterrorism Center can now hold on to private data belonging to Americans with no known or suspected links to terrorism for a shocking five years. Coupled with the National Security Agency’s new massive data center complex in Utah and the announcement from American internet service providers (ISPs) that they will soon begin to conduct the largest digital spying operation in history, this does not look good.

Google is now even being criticized by some of their former executives, including James Whittaker, who said, “the Google I was passionate about was a technology company – the Google I left was an advertising company.”

However, Google is more of a tool of the Western intelligence community than anything else at this point, and the recent announcement that the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) would be leaving for Google just reinforces this long-standing relationship.

One of the many troubling aspects of this patent is the claim that it will utilize a computer-implemented method of grabbing environmental data from a wide variety of devices including one or more of the following, “[a] mobile phone, a personal computer, a digital billboard, a digital kiosk, or a vendor machine.” This could incorporate sound, such as speech and background noise, as well as images and video signals, which Google can already hijack through their programs loaded on to smartphones.

The disturbing part of this technology is that, when considered with their new privacy policy, Google could essentially collect data covering just about anything and everything you might do in your life, store it one central location for easy retrieval, all indefinitely and all with no limits to who they can share the information with.

One must wonder if anything is stopping them from rolling out this technology under our noses without actually telling anyone. Something tells me that there is absolutely nothing in their way from doing such a thing, in fact, I would be surprised if they weren’t already leveraging their ability to remotely access cameras and other parts of unsuspecting users’ devices to gather data either for intelligence purposes or advertising.

What do you think? Should people be concerned about this patent approval and the growing tide of Big Brother technology in the United States?