What Google Hasn’t Done: Explained Why We as Users Would Want a Unified Online Identity

After years of providing us with many very good products — search, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome — Google is now on a mission to turn itself into one big product that understands each of us as one unified person. In a forceful Gizmodo essay called “The Case Against Google,” Mat Honan argues that Google has become evil, because the company’s leadership now realizes that, in a world divided into apps and social networks, playing on the open Web won’t cut it anymore.

Google is in the process of tying all its products together so our usage of each one can inform the others, but it hasn’t really told users what’s going on and what it means. And as its set of products becomes more interwoven, Google is cross-promoting them ahead of the competition. As Honan accurately describes the situation, in order to answer complex and subjective queries, Google needs to know a lot about the person asking the question. And that requires entrusting Google with lots of our private data and control.