The Google Buck

June 18, 2022

A response to ~tfurrows' post “A Nielsen Buck” (That's right, I'm responding to a Phlog post on Gemini because I'm that much of an asshole that cool)

I remember getting some time in the past few years a mailer from the big G that was something similar. It was actually worse though, it was something to the tune of plugging a thing into your router and it MITMs your traffic (or at least your DNS requests) to study your habits. I just remember being literally repulsed to even skim the mailer.

It had the same dumb wording (“be a voice for the community”), only accompanied with google's awful “Alegria art” too. Also had the same bait, a crisp fresh-from-the-bank $1 bill with a promise of like $20 in google play credit—the assholes couldn't even cough up cash for that sweet sweet data.

I saved the bill for a while and then figured since it was so crisp it'd be perfect to fold into various dollar bill origami shapes like I did a few times as a kid. I have no clue where it is now though lol.

Despite no longer having the bill itself, the Google Dollar is still living in my mind unfortunately. I think it's the sheer absurdity of like… holy shit you guys somehow can't manage to collect enough data, you have to go run some shitty consumer survey to siphon up more? And your motivation to get people to do it is a small amount of virtual scrip and a single United States Dollar?