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Thought no one was brave enough to take a stand against the prying eyes of the federal government?
You’re wrong. Meet Google Boy, the teen-aged superhero in tights with a blue, red, yellow and green “G” stitched across the chest.
He was more shaped by events than born into this world like you or me. Sure, he had a mother, a father, and they guided his personality to some degree. But their influence disappeared the day a speck of radiated plutonium, released accidentally from a lab near his job, settled into Google Boy’s eye.
By the next morning, he could see everything.
Google Boy puts his eye to work squeezing cash out of the advertising business. After hours, a desperate need to do away with evil takes over.
After 10 minutes of conversation with the boy you’d realize he’s never had a world-ending failure to reconcile and rebound from. So he’s never really learned those valuable survival lessons.
You have to respect what he’s done, who wouldn’t? 400 million customers, $12 billion or so in annual revenues? But at the same time, you want to grind his face with your fingers, just a little bit so he finally realizes what it’s like to feel a little pain.
As you can imagine, by now there are hordes of Google Boy villains trying to send the world crashing down on him.
Danger lurks in his latest steel cage match.
Of all the villains so far, none have been able to truly exploit Google Boy’s secret weakness. You see, all his powers are tied directly to the fact that Google search users willingly give up loads of personal information in order to use Google features. With all that info, Google can market advertisers’ products better and make more money.
Google users don’t really mind the one-way exchange, because to date there’s never really been any consequence worse than a few unwanted marketing emails.
But the DOJ is, in a backhanded way, creating a consequence to using Google so freely, a rather big one. Who would want their search habits under a federal government microscope? Kind of cools the whole notion of “Googling” doesn’t it?
A rather bold, brilliant tactic, eh? Let’s hope Google Boy has an equally stellar move in response.