Re: When Google Runs Your Life?
The money Google is making, its capturing of data, has made it a target for backlash. But it is a commercial entity, making money is the goal, and it's doing so by providing good services that people willingly use. In exchange for those free services, people pay with their data. No different from credit card companies and any other commercial entity capturing our data.
Same with Apple, they provide a cohesive useable, albeit closed, experience. It is completely singular. (But Google is losing it with Android, they're going down the fragmented 80s MS-DOS path because they aren't a hardware company, although they're now trying to fix that with Android Silver).
This is why they're successful. As opposed to so many less innovative archaic entities (I don't mean just tech, any brand out there that has something to sell) that are flogging their dead horses by constantly diversifying and trying to create new, smaller market demographics they can own. I see this in my line of work all the time, it's sad.
It doesn't bother me if Google run my life or Facebook owns my data. What does bug me is because I don't 'own' these services, they're constantly being tweaked and/or broken for the purpose of improvement or whatever corporate strategy invisible to the users. Eg. when Google closed Google Reader, it completely disrupted my digital life.
The question these days, when private services are used by so many people that they might as well be a utility, do the companies that created and own the services owe some kinda responsibility to the people who rely on them?