Let me point out one thing straight away. I like Google. I'm not just saying that because DeepMind may be scanning everything I put out into the world (and I mean the world, not just the Google ecosphere). I like Google because I generally get something worthwhile from using it. Be that this free blogging space, free email, storage, basic office apps, sat-nav with traffic alerts; generally Google does good things for the average person even if the price is no doubt some US group with a three-letter acronym being able to discover anything they like about me.
Compared to Facebook which tries to track my every move over the web by installing tracking cookies on every site possible without giving me anything useful in return, Google is an every day essential. Recently however I have been critical of YouTube - a service which gives nothing back to the everyday viewer and encourages content makers to buy into their everyone-is-a-potential-buyer mentality. I recently wrote an article about how Theta.tv is attempting to bypass the central-controlling service model and encouraging viewers by paying them (radical, I know!).
Since then, I have become increasingly aware of how frequently I am now being hit by Google's reCaptcha system. You see a while back the big G told us all that our data could be spied on over the networks we used and so they insisted that everyone should sign-in first so their data could be encrypted using the https protocol. Yes it's true that data was generally unencrypted although anything transactional would have end-to-end encryption (remember the little gold SSL padlock on the URL bar?). So in fact, all this reasonably unimportant stuff like news articles or forum posts could be viewed by anyone scanning what was going on across their network. Did I really care if a network techie could see I was reading an article in the local online rag? To be fair, anyone with those skills is generally too busy to care more about the 99% of detritus floating along networks.
The big G's quest to have us all identified down to the tiniest data point is however a reason they should be worried. As a NASA spokeswoman mentioned on their theta-stream yesterday, 'crypto' means hidden. Crypto is all about the right for privacy to do whatever you like so long as nobody gets hurt in the process. So what happens when a service like reCaptcha actually causes financial harm. Let me give an example of how this happens.
An artist decides to jump on the NFT bandwagon and release their latest project not knowing whether or not anyone will buy their work. Informed speculators see what is being released and wait patiently for the sale to begin. At the absolute second of the art going on-sale, they click buy. The reason is to get the lowest possible mint number; the equivalent of the first newspaper off the press or the first manuscript of a book. Up pops a reCaptcha box, delaying the completion of the deal and now instead of the first mint, our buyer has number 137 or 214 or any other number which isn't 1. So this is how we have proof that Google's supposed 'frictionless' system leads to... well friction, resentment and probably a good amount of justified anger too.
