The navbar at the top of my blog has acquired a google+ Share button. Oh, yippee! It
slows the download, so now I have to wait for the page to drop before I can do
anything with it – and there’s a zero at the side of it which doesn’t look good.
I didn’t ask for this thing, you know. You don’t with Google;
they foist these things onto you whether you want them or not. It’s like all
those hover buttons they have all over their products, splattering the page
with unwanted speech bubbles that follow you around the page and won’t go until
you click off, only wherever you point the pointer you find yourself hovering
over yet another hover button. Trying to find a bit of clear space in a Page by
Google is like trying to find a well thumbed copy of the Gideon Bible in a Barcelona brothel.
So c’mon, Google. If you want to be clever, be properly
clever. Back off, will ya? Clear the decks a bit. Google Plus indeed!
4 comments:
Here's another thing about Google that i'm sure you won't like... i just learned that they save all your Google searches for 10 years... probably to sell the info to ad companies and also law enforcement and the government, here in the US anyway, can access a 'person of interest's' Google search histories.
We have similar concerns over here. It seems the principle role of government and the police is to protect the system now. Serving the public is taking second place. There are those who argue it's the same thing, but I don't believe it is. It's a matter of emphasis, and if you go too far down the road of protecting the system, you end up with the kind of totalitarian state that western 'democracies' have always railed against. That's the direction in which we seem to be headed.
Alex and I are at this moment watching a documentary made in the UK, Disappearing David, about this sort of thing. You should look into it and watch. Very interesting. This guy is looking into all the ways the government tracks and keeps info about people via the Internet, credit card purchases, mobile phone use, etc, etc.
Ironically, one of the present government's pre-election pledges was to 'reduce the surveillance society.' When in opposition, they voted against the previous administration's attempt to bring in an Act increasing powers to read e-mails and texts and listen to phone calls. Now they're trying to do the same thing. They say it's in the name of 'keeping us safe.' But at what price? And experience shows that such movements become obsessive and you end up with something resembling a police state.
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