Google is watching

Summary

Swinging the spotlight, for a moment, from politics to big tech.I upgraded my mother-in-law's internet service recently. As part of that upgrade, I installed a new wifi access point with better security. That meant changing the network name, which of course meant all the stuff in the house that wanted to be on the internet needed to be tended to.Some years back, I'd bought her a Nest video camera to keep an eye on the property. She and my father-in-law have a home on the shore of a beautiful lake. They travel some. She enjoyed being able to check out the weather and look at the view out her back door, wherever in the world she was.That camera is old! It was one of the first models made by the company Nest, before it got acquired by Google. To Nest's and Google's credit, it's continued to work just fine for all these years. But, with the network name change, I needed to update the Nest app and its settings in order to reconfigure the camera.As part of that update, Google demanded that I allow the app to track her location at all times, whether the app was active or not. The stated rationale was that it would allow Google to manage devices in her home, based on whether she was there or elsewhere. Like, if you leave town, maybe Google should turn your thermostat down. And maybe we would be willing to share that location data if we wanted Google to do that for us. But she doesn't. All she wants to do is look at the pretty lake on her phone screen when she feels like it, whether she's home or someplace else.Of course, Google doesn't want that location data for her convenience. It wants it because it is absolutely rapacious for data that it can turn into money. The more closely it tracks us, the more intimately it spies on us, the better it can do at targeting us with advertisements and media that make its share price go up.I've thought about it for a bit and I'm just not going to turn that location service on for Nest. It means throwing away a still-working internet came...