Google, unaccountable

I recently made a fun Google map but discovered I cannot share this map with anyone who does not have a Google account. Upon trying to contact Google to ask why I found that Google is impossible to contact, in spite of having a webpage that says “contact us”.  There is no way to get through, no link, nothing, unless you are willing to be put on hold for 9 years on the phone and then be put off some other way.

My impressions from this and other similar incidents leads me to believe that Google is above accountability. With these modern tech behemoths, privacy and accountability are gone and there is no avenue of recourse. Your only choice is at the point of entry, to join or not.

Google talks about Google “culture”, Google “values” but these terms are used in ways unintelligible to the English language. The basic culture and values is giving a free carrot and then harvesting all personal info for profit. A bottomless pit of FAQ links and chat pages masquerades as ‘customer service’. Who is serving who?

As the human touch inexorably disappears behind slavish digital obsessions and tech inertia, we find ourselves shoe-horned into situations where we cannot share our online world if we do not join the same digital tribe. So much for the information superhighway; it has devolved into tribal parochialism. Human nature wins out, the medium is not the message; the message is we are the same exploitive species we were beforehand.