Commentary: The Minuses of Google+

This article originally ran in the January 2014 issue of AVN magazine. Recently, the Huffington Post released an explosive exposé with the obligatory HUGE FONT headline: “Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit ‘Radicalizers.’” In this article, Huffpo put together three reporters—Glenn Greenwald, Ryan Gallagher and Ryan Grim—in an attempt at sensationalist journalism not seen since Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein blew open the lid on the Watergate scandal in 1972. But Woodward and Bernstein actually HAD a story to tell. Glenn, Ryan and Ryan are sort of reaching. Rather than thinking too hard about HuffPo’s seeming ambition to be the Washington Post, TMZ and Cosmo magazine all rolled into one—a confusing catfight of editorial styles that really don’t go well together—a question comes to mind: “Um, Isn’t spying on foreign “radicalizers” what the NSA is supposed to be doing?” (And isn’t “radicalizer” sort of a made-up George Bushie word to begin with? “Radicaliz’n Evil-Doers” does have a nice Texas twang to it.) Let’s face it: We are now pretty certain that the NSA has buried itself under so much data that there’s very little chance they are going to go tell your boss or minister that you were watching pirated bukkake movies last weekend. They tend to have better things to do. Like spy on the Prime Minister of Germany, or help fix the Healthcare.gov website. All of this gathering of prurient data to possibly discredit enemies goes back to the Ottoman Empire and the Doges of Venice. J. Edgar Hoover polished the black art of keeping secret files to a science at the FBI. It’s simply what governments do in the name of national security on both international and domestic fronts. But porn? I’m all for any intelligence efforts that can prevent another Boston Marathon bombing, but I’m pretty sure that watching porn and making shoe bombs have little to do with each other. And if one of these porn-watching “radicalizers” were to get snitched on to a cell leader or mullah, do you think their overseers would care that much? Heavens to Betsy, even prototypical radicalizer Osama Bin Laden was discovered to have a pretty hefty stash of porn after our guys shot him in the head. Booyah! If Huffington Post writers want to raise a shrill voice about privacy in the digital age, they probably should look at what’s happening not in the government but in friendly “don’t be evil” corporations like Google, which track just about every website you go to, every email you send, and every kind of self-indulgent online habits you indulge—data which they then analyze to show you customized ads for your every whim! If that weren’t enough to make any somewhat-well-behaved citizen a little nervous about their online surfing interests, now add to that the next level: Google+. To remaining readers who still cling to the Yahoo lifeboat and avoid Google because they suspect Yahoo is a safer place, I say you are probably wise. Google+, for those who haven’t fallen down that bunnyhole yet, is sort of a hybrid of Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr and other services where you can maintain a little running web presence of what you had for dinner, what movies you saw, and what websites you liked. However, this one goes WAY further in roping you in to get more and more data. If you have a Gmail account, you also have a Google+ account even if you didn’t know it, just sitting there ready for activation. Want to start a new account on YouTube to upload funny cat videos? You now need to do that through Google+. Want to do a video chat with some friends or a business meeting on Google Hangouts? You’ll need a Google+ account to do that. Want to book a one-to-one video chat session with a home improvement expert on Google Helpouts? You’ll need a Google+ account to do that too, plus be required to pay the expert using Google Wallet. I suppose that’s all fine and dandy to have an easy-to-remember central access point for various services, but here’s the rub: In order to launch your Google+ account, you need to tell them your name. Your real name. And you’re encouraged to upload a photo of yourself. A real one, which shows enough of your face that Google’s facial recognition software can add your mug shot to its database so other folks can “more easily” find you. And, unless you are very, very careful with your Google+ profile page privacy settings, it’s pretty darned easy to have a running log of every porn site you “plussed” and a link to Google Streetview of your house. Can we say “stalker’s paradise” for adult performers and producers who set up a Google+ account in some last-ditch hope of increasing their Google organic search rankings, or being able to upload a SFW promo video to YouTube? Sure, after you have set up your “real” Google+ account, you are given the opportunity to set up a business page, but guess what? Your business page is permanently linked to your real page for all the world to see. But wait! There’s more! (Isn’t there always more?) For several years now a large number of mainstream websites and services have used the “easy log in” method by pairing their website to your Facebook account—which, if you don’t understand what button to push, gives them permission to access all of your Facebook data, plus automatically post things on your behalf to your Facebook timeline. Creepy and invasive, but let’s face it: Facebook has nowhere near the range and scope of Google. And yes, you guessed it: A lot of mainstream sites are now inviting you to sign in using your Google+ account—with your tacit consent to share data back and forth with Google unless you dig down into the settings and prevent that from happening. Although neither is a good situation from a privacy viewpoint, I’d probably rather have the NSA knowing about all of the porn sites I go to every day and be just another needle in their enormous haystack of benign data than to have soulless technology corporations harvesting just about every little bit of personal information I have left, and then using that information to try to sell me things I don’t want. Not to mention the risk of having my real name and mug shot on my Google+ page, which also shows my Youtube SFW porn promo movies, for my “Class of 1977” alumni to find just in time for our next reunion. Maybe Huffington Post might want to take a crack at this issue? I offered to write it up for them, but they Googled my name, discovered I am a dirty pornographer, and politely declined the offer. And maybe, just maybe, they also have a vested interest? In 1994 Colin Rowntree founded Wasteland.com, the oldest BDSM and alternative sexuality website. Since then the Wasteland CEO has developed a network of sites that encompasses the full breadth of adult business sectors, from content production and distribution to affiliate program management, mobile content delivery to transaction processing. The AVN Hall of Famer has received the Leadership Award from the Free Speech Coalition and many other honors, and is a regular commentator on industry issues.