Do you ever get the feeling Google is ascending to technology overlord status? Siva Vaidhyanathan raises that troubling possibility in a New York Times’ Bits Blog piece about Google’s ever expanding reach and the backlash it now faces from some activist groups. He says,

We’ve been perfectly happy to let Google be the benevolent dictator of our web experience. It has made the web pleasant and usable as well as navigable, making things like malware and pornography less obvious. We should be happy with Google becoming the operating system of our phones as well. But now it is striving to become the operating system of our lives.

Vaidhyanathan is the author of The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry), a book that examines the ways we have used and embraced Google and exposes the dark side of our Google fantasies.

Head over to the New York Times Bits Blog to read more about the growing resistance to Google and Vaidhyanathan’s advice for how the company can better engage with its community.

 

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