I was among the first generation to google our car keys.
Mom and Dad describe the amazing advances before my birth as if they were no big deal. At first, Google was just this search engine. Soon it became the best search engine, and the only one to develop its own verb.
Google didn’t stop there. Searching webpages became searching news stories. Which became a homepage. Searching and indexing extended to not just webpages, but to books as well. And once there was a foothold in the “physical world”, they extended their grasp.
My parents didn’t think Google Maps and Google Earth was a big deal. “At first, it was just an alternative to Mapquest,” they said, referring to a then commonly used site to get directions. It was only when they moved beyond directions that people started to switch. Sure, the ability to grab the map and move it around was important- Google was a pioneer in taking static webpages and letting you grab and move them around as if they were sitting there on your kitchen table. The real draw was the satellite imagery. View your house from space! See what the layout of your area was! Find someone’s address online then post pictures of their house in a threatening manner! Yet all of this didn’t worry people. The populace seemed to be satisfied with “We understand your privacy concerns and can assure you that the satellite images on Google Maps are taken from a variety of commercial and public resources and are not real-time in nature. The images that Maps displays are no different from what can be seen by anyone who flies over or drives by a specific geographic location.”
Meanwhile, another Google project contributed the other half of what was to come, but it didn’t draw much attention. Called simply “Google Wifi”, they began to provide free wireless Internet access to all of Mountain View, California.
It took a few years, and some work with the government, but soon the ideas were merged: Free wifi access beamed down from satellites to the entire United States. Every citizen of the US now had access to free wifi wherever they went. It was hard to argue, since the endeavor was licensed by the government, but like everything else they did, it was free of charge. It all fit into Google’s strategy. And it worked, and sparked a revolution.
With Internet access everywhere, and with the wifi receivers already becoming smaller and cheaper to produce, everything started to use the wifi network. Phones were the first obvious choice: voice over ip had already become stable, and thanks to high profile smart phones like the iPhone, more phones were being built with wifi anyway. Services like Skype took off as the traditional cell phone and landline networks collapsed. Many phone companies merged together to build a stronger network, while others tried to diversify to stay ahead of the times. CASN (Cingular ATT Sprint Nextel), pronounced Cassion, was the last big cell phone company, in an attempt to provide as much coverage in the country. It was too little too late: cellular, which had to charge for calls, was dead. Wifi phones, which operated thanks to the charity of Google, were here to stay.
It was a big step in hindsight, but seemed so small at the time. Maybe it was because I was a teenager and didn’t have a sense of the big picture, but when the first ordinary wifi-enabled objects were announced at CES, it just didn’t seem like a big deal. Within a year, wifi TVs, wifi shoes, wifi clothes, wifi remote controls, wifi cars, and wifi car keys were all over the place. Any object you owned could now be wifi enabled so that you always could keep track of it. Thefts went down as everything could be tracked, but lawsuits went up over disputed property. You could register everything you owned via a Google login.
Maybe it was inevitable that Google’s security would be cracked, or maybe it was their plan all along. But soon, wifi signatures could be tracked privately from pirate servers in Sweden and Sealand.
I was among the first generation to google our car keys.
But I was also the first generation that could be googled.
By Dave Chalker
Iago Schütte - Goggle? sou muito mais 'Cadê?'
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