Robert Epstein, who received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1981 and served as the former editor in chief at Psychology Today, is now a senior research psychologist for the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology, where for the last decade he has helped expose Google's manipulative and deceptive practices.
Google's powers pose three specific threats to society:
1. They're a surveillance agency with significant yet hidden surveillance powers. As noted by Epstein:
"The search engine … Google Wallet, Google Docs, Google Drive, YouTube, these are surveillance platforms. In other words, from their perspective, the value these tools have is they give them more information about you. Surveillance is what they do."
2. They're a censoring agency with the ability to restrict or block access to websites across the internet, thus deciding what people can and cannot see. They even have the ability to block access to entire countries and the internet as a whole.
The most crushing problem with this kind of internet censorship is that you don't know what you don't know. If a certain type of information is removed from search, and you don't know it should exist somewhere, you'll never go looking for it. And, when searching for information online, how would you know that certain websites or pages have been removed from the search results in the first place? The answer is, you don't.
For example, Google has been investing in DNA repositories for quite a long time, and are adding DNA information to our profiles. According to Epstein, Google has taken over the national DNA repository, but articles about that — which he has cited in his own writings — have all vanished.
3. They have the power to manipulate public opinion through search rankings and other means.
"To me, that's the scariest area," Epstein says, "because Google is shaping the opinions, thinking, beliefs, attitudes, purchases and votes of billions of people around the world without anyone knowing that they're doing so … and perhaps even more shocking, without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.
They're using new techniques of manipulation that have never existed before in human history and they are for the most part, subliminal … but they don't produce tiny shifts.
They produce enormous shifts in people's thinking, very rapidly. Some of the techniques I've discovered are among the largest behavioral effects ever discovered in the behavioral sciences."
While surveillance is Google's primary business, their revenue — which exceeds $130 billion a year — comes almost exclusively from advertising. All that personal information you've provided them through their various products is sold to advertisers looking for a specific target audience.
