Who Died and Made Google God?

search results != omniscience

Can we just talk about the backlash against the European court decision to allow petitioning of Google to remove undesired search results?

Oh, the outcry! This is an impediment to free and open access to information! People will sanitize their records! All must be known, forever! Massive repercussions for journalism and inquiring minds everywhere!

Google is not the tablet of truth. It is a powerful search engine with secret, ever-tweaked algorithms for returning results. Results depend on many things: what site the information is on, how many sites refer or link to it, and who is asking, what is their search history, what are they likely to want to know.

Google can only return results that actually exist. There are many facts that are not online. There are many sites that have disappeared, posts removed. Public records are unevenly digitized, depending on budget and regulations and tech-savviness of various jurisdictions and bureaucracies. There is also vast assymetry of digitization in relation to time; data about the now will always be richer and more abundant than that about the past, and some of the past might as well have never happened.

Entire indistries are devoted to gaming search results, enhancing brand or personal reputations, generating junk content. People in economically challenged coutries are being paid to jam comments sections with various political talking points. Infoproduct marketers spam the system with backlinks and referrer sites. The powerful exercise their power already with regard to information available about them — most potently at the point of origin: keeping it offline.

These forces war with the algorithm masters, who wrangle the twin desires of users for objectivity and thoroughness, and radical personalization.

And this much-vaunted right-to-know (tilting in court and in print with the right-to-be-forgotten movement) has confused search results with anything faintly resembling truth or completeness or impartiality.

Google obviously has internal guidelines, and let’s hope, some ethical sophistication, regarding returning results for specific terms, especially, in this case, people’s names.

The truth is that Google has sufficient, nay, abundant data to tie anonymous activity online to specific names. It’s not just that they bought Blogger and YouTube and integrated them into single sign-on and then tried to force G+ as the grand unified real-you open-sesame on all users. Google knows where we spend out time online, what we’ve bought, what porn we watch, who we like, who is about to break our hearts, and more about our parents’ health than we do. Google knows the IP addresses we use at work and at home, the times of day we tend to spend on which site, and when we go to sleep. Google knows I am writing about it at this very moment.

Google does not, as yet, reveal all these connections in search results. The fact that my Blogger blog is, nominally, “anonymous,” means it does not come up in search results for my real name. But it does come up in search results for the email address tied to it, and Google absolutely knows that email address mine, me by my name mine.

All it takes is for one person, one site, one time to make that or those sorts of connections *explicit* *in public*, to complete that circuit, and it is fair game for search results, forever.

Not quite forever, of course, because Google is not yet, at least in its product line, offering to be the Wayback Machine. Which means that dated content can be deleted from sites, or domains expire, or businesses close, and, after a time, those facts and entities will not appear in search.

Think about how valuable all this information is, all the invisible connections and affiliations, all the data that *informs* search results and is implicit in them. This data is vastly valuable to economic and political entities. Google, again, has its own experts, legal department, and, one would hope, professional ethicists, to help determine its policies with regard to protecting or revealing the vast underbelly of data.

But those of us who who experienced 9-11 as grown adults watched as grief and horror was leveraged into swift passage of the Patriot Act. All this NSA stuff is absolutely a direct result of the fact that those who cautioned there would be just such civil rights repercussions of broadening government secret powers were shamed and silenced as unpatriotic.

All it takes is one terrorist act, one war, one equivalent-of-Red Scare, and Google (and using them here as a stand-in for all data gatherers and repositories, which is starting to be every company and agency), in the name of “National Security,” will be required to hand over things we do not even know about ourselves, ambient and aggregate data so specific that, were we privy to it, we would suddenly doubt the existence of free will and instead see our lives as inexorable infographics, plotted and fated and terribly small.

The powerful and rich already manage their online presences. So it is more likely that the less rich and powerful will discover persistent negative factoids or old bad behavior records following them around for years. They have fewer strategies for burying these results with incessant PR.

So some schlub wants his shoplifing record scrubbed. What about the people whose kids never got a record because they were friends with the judge? What about you? Are every one of your transgressions available in search? Don’t we have a right to know? Shouldn’t it be evenly distributed, the public naming and shaming?

And if we have a right to know, and to forever have access to, the ostensive search results, why should we not demand a surfacing of the unseen? All of your screen names, all of your browsing activity, your health records, how much you drink and under what circumstances?

Who draws the line, and at what point in time?

Is there something sacrosanct and inviolable and precious about what is currently indexed by Google and showing up in results? Do we really think this glorious moment in human knowledge should be preserved forever? Must we worship at its altar?

Mr, Hidden from Google http://hiddenfromgoogle.com surely does. By Jove he is going to prevent every parking ticket and bad review and stupid social media post that anyone wants removed from search results to be not only available but marked as even more valuable by dint of its preservation on his site. It’s a matter of principle! Because information wants 2B free!

And those people who lucked out because their county never digitized the records, because the site where they said that horrible racist thing under their real name no longer exists, because their parents were more vigilent about their computer use, because a cadre of scrubbing-bubble PR experts sanitized their reputation for them? Mr. Hidden from Google has no problem with you. Because nobody’s agitating for infinite regression in time to the beginning of the web, for all search results snapshots at every moment in time to be preserved and available.

But why not? What is so special about now that we freeze it in time and declare this, all of this, is what we have a right to know?

We are at a point where our data collection has far outpaced the sophistication of thinking we are applying to its ramifications, maintenance, use, and decay.

What does it mean to forget anymore, anyway? Will we have to reinvent an organic decay process for digital artifacts? At what point is it possible, and then again, at what point is it ethical, to truly delete something?

Who are the custodians and arbiters of the data provenance and accuracy and completeness?

And those things that do not have to be deleted because they never entered the system, what relationship do non-indexed, non-searchable facts have to the ones at our fingertips? What hierarchies of knowledge are we constructing?

We are, have been for some time, tinkering with what it is to be human, what it is to experience, know, remember, grieve, forget.

But the tinkerers-in-chief have been technocrats, and on the whole, too young to know what they really were doing when they were moving so very fast and breaking so many things.

The chickens have not yet begun to come home to roost. (!) But this kerfuffle about some guy who would really really like to get on with his life without the Google-result toilet paper sticking to his shoe, is exposing the sheer naivite of partisans on both sides, and the scale and nuance both of what really is, and has been, at stake.