“He sees you when you're sleeping, He knows when you're
awake, He knows if you've been bad or good, So be good for goodness sake!…”
Well, maybe. But that was then and this is now.
Santa is old tech. Today, it’s Google that really knows.
“The Google,” as former President and all-time great
wordsmith George W Bush, the “bard of the Potomac,” called it, has access to
more information about you than Santa ever dreamed of.
That little database at the North Pole was puny compared to
Google’s globe-spanning network of server farms.
Thanks to Google, you no longer need to listen to the radio
to check the traffic on your commute. Google’s Now app knows, and it will tell
you before you can ask.
Google also manages your Christmas shopping. It’s been
listening to you, your family, and friends all year and will tell you what to
buy – and where to get the best prices. Sometimes, these can be found at
Google’s Play Store.
Google is also helping us all play nicely together by
providing the Google Translate app that instantly turns words in one language
into another. It’s hard to have an overall Translate favorite, but this one,
from a Korean language cell phone review a while back, is tough to beat:
“Being frank more, more when it tries to talk, it leans
against you in the land of the product which is Samsung also there is different
mysterious expectation. Like all things to in gear composition and Samsung SPH
m4300 which degree is big in PDA market, hoyk with the product which it draws
it is visible with the polyvalent opinion thing. Of course at the degree where
the reaction of the market against hereupon will correspond in him hot thing
authorization also is an unknown….”
Right.
Google cares about you so much it doesn’t want you to be
forgotten. Remember that little run in with the Miami Beach cops during Spring
break a decade or so back? Google does. Just enter your name, and it’s there,
for ever and ever.
Except if you live in the EU. The good people of the
perpetually dangling subcontinent don’t want
The Google to keep information on you forever, so they’ve passed laws creating
a “right to be forgotten.” If you ask, your name is deleted from Google’s
database. Except, of course, Google servers accessed in other parts of the
world are unaffected. International law firms really, really love this stuff.
Since the EU’s right to be forgotten effectively applies
only to US companies, it might sound kind of anti-American. Not so. EU
countries will cheerfully give American companies – including Google – legal
deals that let them avoid almost all their taxes, including those owed in the
US.
Back on this side of the Atlantic, Google has launched
Google Fiber (or GF as its known to poets)
a new enterprise which is stringing fiber optic cable through various
urban areas. Because it’s competing with Big Cable for Internet and TV service,
GF is now hands down the most popular company in the US.
We Americans love to hate our cable companies.
I’m told that there was a secret preview of a new film,
Godzilla vs. Comcast, at the Sundance Festival. Critics reported that the
audience stood and cheered when the elderly Japanese monster ripped off the
side of a building, scooped a cluster of dark-suited people out of a conference
room, and slowly ate the wriggling cable executives one by one. Outside the
theater, t-shirt vendors quickly sold out of their “Go, Godzilla, go!” line of
clothing.
EA is rumored to be producing a follow up computer game in
which a golden-haired girl with a bright red GF on her chest attempts to
destroy the Temple of Cable Greed. The game requires great skill, because the
temple is aggressively defended by portly, white-haired state legislators and
congresspersons wielding powerful weapons made from enchanted campaign
donations.
Google is restless, ever seeking to improve. Sources tell me
that, in its continuing quest to help us manage our lives, the big G will soon
roll out its New Year’s Resolution Keeper app.
Resolution Keeper is simple; you enter your resolutions and
it reminds you over time with increasing levels of annoyance if you don’t do
what you promised. Reminders will be in writing, in sound, and in little videos
that will appear whenever they’re most embarrassing. They’ll be everywhere all
the time, not just in Google’s own apps.
To protect your resolve, once the resolutions are entered in
the app you won’t be able to turn the reminders off unless you actually do keep
to your promises.
If you can’t turn Google’s Resolution Keeper off, how do you
make the reminders go away? Not to worry.
The Google will always know whether you’ve been naughty or
nice.
