Google got where it is primarily for one reason: because of the amount of information it collects about its users on a daily basis. This isn’t a particularly controversial statement, it’s something everyone knows (or at least everyone should know).
[Este es el nuevo Google.com, la simplicidad muere gracias a los widgets]
After all, it is thanks to all this information that Google is able to display personalized ads for each user, with offers and topics that interest them, and therefore, they are more likely to click on them and generate revenue for the advertiser. None of this is new. What you might not quite understand is the incredible amount of information that Google gets from regular internet use.
The program that is ‘chiva’ from Google
The developer Bert Hubert showed how often our computer sends information to Google in a very simple way; created a program that beeps each time the system connects to an IP address owned by Google. It is very simple, since the program does not detect exactly what data we send to Google, but it is just a demonstration that, if we use the Internet, we are constantly connected to the company’s servers.
I created a very very simple tool that makes noise every time your computer sends data to Google. Here is a demo on the official Dutch government job site. The noise starts when entering the domain name already. Code, currently Linux only: https://t.co/ZjKeOSfYff pic.twitter.com/dEr8ktIGdo
— Bert Hubert 🇺🇦 (@bert_hu_bert) August 21, 2022
And the boy does he show it. In a video, Hubert demonstrates how something as simple as opening the Google Chrome browser and typing an address results in a series of constant beeps. This is because every letter we type is sent to Google’s auto-complete servers, to show the suggestions as results that we might be interested in.
Even if you know Google gets so many connections, that’s a very different thing to hear. Even when Hubert browses on other websites, such as an official Dutch government site, beeps are heard thanks to the Google code embedded in the websites for analysis and user registration.
I demonstrated the Google noisemaker which makes noise every time your computer communicates with Google. This demo was based on Google Chrome and made a lot of noise. People told me to expect that, because it was Chrome. Here is a video showing the exact same thing on Firefox: pic.twitter.com/btFbIbEivg
— Bert Hubert 🇺🇦 (@bert_hu_bert) August 22, 2022
Some critics claim that this behavior is normal, since in the video Hubert uses Google Chrome and the Google search engine. To show that this is not an isolated case, he uploaded an identical video with Mozilla Firefox, which, despite being a privacy-focused open-source project, has also million-dollar agreements with Google to implement its default search and, therefore, It also sends information.
The program is only available for Linux, because that’s where Hubert developed it. This isn’t the first time this developer has publicly denounced Google; after all, he is the creator of PowerDN, a privacy-focused nameserver program.
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