Why Google Gets Away With So Much

It’s time to stop letting ourselves be the ‘abandoned carcass’ of our data

Jumana Abu-Ghazaleh
OneZero

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Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

“We shine the light on whatever’s worst
Tryna fix something
But you can’t fix what you can’t see…”
Beyonce, “Pretty Hurts”

Just say what pops into your head first, no Googling. When you hear Amazon.com, who do you think of?

Jeff Bezos, right?

Let’s try this again. When I say Apple, you think…

Steve Jobs or Tim Cook. Automatic. Maybe you threw in Steve Wozniak. (Look at you!)

And Facebook?

Well, duh: Mark Zuckerberg, with Sheryl Sandberg trailing behind.

Now let’s try a slightly harder one: who first comes to mind when I say Google?

It’s possible you said Sergey Brin or Larry Page, but unlikely — neither Google co-founder has ever become a household name like Jobs or Bezos or Zuckerberg.

Maybe you said Eric Schmidt, the closest thing Google had to a public leader for much of the Obama era. Or perhaps you said Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and now its parent company Alphabet.

But it probably took you, at the very least, a half-second longer than it did for Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. That is, if you thought…

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Jumana Abu-Ghazaleh
OneZero

Founder @ Pivot For Humanity. Published in Fast Company, OneZero, IEEE Technology + Society. Board member. Palestinian. Start with empathy, always.