Big brother is here, and his name is Facebook
Personally, I think Google is just as terrifying, possibly more.<p>As an example, just take a fairly normal life situation like going out for dinner with some friends, and think about how much of it goes &quot;through&quot; Google:<p>---<p>One of your friends sends an email to 6 others, to ask if everyone&#x27;s free for dinner on Friday. 5 of the 7 people involved use gmail or a google apps address.<p>You&#x27;ve never heard of the restaurant they&#x27;re suggesting, so you search for it on Google to see what kind of food it is.<p>You click to the restaurant&#x27;s site. It uses Google Analytics, so even though you&#x27;re no longer on Google, it still knows the exact path you take through the site while you&#x27;re &quot;outside&quot;.<p>You decide the restaurant looks good, and enter the dinner into Google Calendar.<p>On Friday, you use Google Maps to get to the restaurant, so Google knows exactly where you were before, what time you left, and the route you took. While you&#x27;re driving, maybe you send a couple of text messages using the Google voice assistant.<p>At the restaurant, it turns out your friend Doug is there, even though he wasn&#x27;t part of the emails. During dinner, you&#x27;re all trying to remember the name of that movie where Shaq plays a genie, so both you and Doug grab your phones and google for phrases like &quot;shaq movie genie&quot; at about the same time. Even though Doug wasn&#x27;t included in any of the planning, Google now knows that you&#x27;re almost certainly together, and what you&#x27;re talking about.<p>You finish your meal and pay via the restaurant&#x27;s Square system, which emails the receipt to your gmail address. Google now knows exactly what you ate, and how much you paid for it.<p>You use Google Maps again when leaving, telling Google exactly how long you stayed at the restaurant and where you&#x27;re going next.<p>---<p>I didn&#x27;t even push that very far. There are multiple other things I could have easily added, and you can do this with almost any situation. It&#x27;s quite insane how much Google knows about what people are doing all the time, and the level of detail they can get by combining these things.