Cory Doctorow has written a shockingly compelling piece of speculative fiction, entited “Scroogled,” about what happens when Google turns evil. In the piece, Google teams with the Department of Homeland Security to profile the contents of individuals’ search results in order to build a pretext with which to enable closer legal surveillance.
“The courts won’t let them indiscriminately Google you. But after you’re in the system, it becomes a selective search. All legal. And once they start Googling you, they always find something. All your data is fed into a big hopper that checks for ‘suspicious patterns,’ using deviation from statistical norms to nail you.”
Doctorow’s contract with Radar calls for the work to be released under a remix-friendly Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, so we’re likely to see a myriad of intelligent remixes of Scroogled in various media.
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