Google reminds me of Adam, the cute, 100-foot-tall toddler in the 1992 Rick Moranis film, Honey I Blew Up the Kid. In case you missed it, Adam keeps stumbling over buildings, mistakes real cars for toys, and ultimately threatens the existence of Las Vegas. Adam is also the name of the errant father of the human race. And Google is the company named after an astronomically large number (1 with a hundred zeros after it) that controls access to most of the information on earth and that finds innovative new ways to get in trouble several times a year.
In 2010, Google’s Street View teams – the mobile crews that are systematically filming every street and building in the world, including your home – were accused of deliberately capturing people’s names, telephone numbers, emails, text messages, passwords, search histories, and even online dating information as they drove from neighbourhood to neighbourhood in the US and more than 30 other countries between 2006 and 2010. Google snatched the data from Wi-Fi networks. This is akin to what those nasty adults in the white van were doing when they drove around the neighborhood trying to find ET, but on a spectacular scale.