Wednesday, 1 November 2017

Free services

Bing's picture of the day today is a striking picture from a place called Uummannaq, an island just off the west coast of Greenland, just across the water from Baffin Island.

Curious, I went across to gmaps (reference 70.677187,-52.1188768) to find that the StreetView cameras had got there by August 2015.

Considering that advertisements are not very intrusive at all in the parts of google that I use, that is a lot of service. Somebody has to pay those camera men to wander around far flung parts of the world and to pump the images out onto the Internet.

Thinking with my fingers, I dare say google knows a good deal about me and tunes what it turns up for me accordingly. This is often a good thing, as careless search terms often turn up the right thing, that is to say whatever it was that I was looking for. Sometimes what it thought I ought to be looking for. But maybe they actually get paid by selling my email address to people who want to send me advertising emails, people like theatres. So maybe I pay for my google services through theatre tickets. While other people might pay their share through other online goodies. A sort of indirect tax like VAT, with the difference that this tax is going to a for-profit entity, rather than to my elected and reasonably representative government. With a small slice going to those nice tax haven people in the Duchy of Luxembourg.

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