“I hadn’t learned anything from Google—except all the things I couldn’t know. I wondered if I was being unfair, if the Orwellian atmosphere was just the side effect of Google’s legitimate prerogative to maintain corporate secrets, and to protect our privacy. On its corporate website, I’d even read a little note about it (which later disappeared): “We realize that data centers can seem like ‘black boxes’ for many people, but there are good reasons why we don’t reveal every detail of what goes on at our facilities, or where every data center is located,” it said. “For one thing, we invest a lot of resources into making our data centers the fastest and most efficient in the world, and we’re keen to protect that investment. But even more important is the security and privacy of the information our users place in our trust. Keeping our users’ data safe and private is our top priority and a big responsibility, especially since you can switch to one of our competitors’ products at the click of a mouse. That’s why we use the very best technology available to make sure our data centers and our services remain secure at all times.” Google’s famed mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Yet at The Dalles, they’d gone so far as to scrub the satellite image of the data center on Google Maps—the picture wasn’t merely outdated, but actively obscured. In dozens of visits to the places of the Internet, people I’d met had been eager to communicate that the Internet wasn’t a shadowy realm but a surprisingly open one, dependent to its core on cooperation, on information. Driven by profit, of course, but with a sense of accountability. Google was the outlier. I was welcomed inside the gates, but only in the most superficial way. The not-so-subliminal message was that I, and by extension you, can’t be trusted to understand what goes on inside its factory—the space in which we, ostensibly, have entrusted the company with our questions, letters, even ideas. The primary colors and childlike playfulness no longer seemed friendly—they made me feel like a schoolkid. This was the company that arguably knows the most about us, but it was being the most secretive about itself. Blum, Andrew. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (pp. 248-249). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Blum, Andrew. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (p. 248). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. Blum, Andrew. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (p. 248). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. ”
