Look Out for Those Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes....

As mentioned in the previous post, we're in Chicago for a few days. The girls are strolling "the Magnificant Mile" all day. I'll be meeting them in a few hours at Ed Debevic's. I enjoy Chicago but had little desire to step in and out of all those stores. We'll be doing some sight seeing tomorrow, but today I stayed back to relax and catch up on some on-going revision work. On a break from that work I read a bit of news that prompted this quick post.

Click the arrow in the lower left of the screen below if you'd like to hear a song directly related to this post as you continue to read on:



Long before there we had "a computer to GOOGLE in or WINDOWS to throw it out of" [to clean up the old expression], the word google had a different meaning, derived in part from the old German word for eye: ogle (from which we get the term goggles) but it really means to stare at, (which may explain why the Brits used to call television the goggle-box). I could go on and on with the etymology, but I digress...

To google meant to be ogling something, rubber-necking, peeking in on, poking one's nose in other people's business. In fact, there was a comic strip called "Barney Google" which inspired the song playing from the screen above: "Barney Google with the goo-goo-googly eyes." To have "googly eyes" implied that they were bulging out the way cartoonist show improper interest.

But now, of course, the verb google has an official new meaning found here at Mirriam-Webster: "to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web."

I could have written these thoughts without the help of Google, but I could not have added these links of interest. I like using Google. I wrote about using Google Earth in this January post. We used Google Map to get to our motel yesterday. At the end of the directions, it showed a picture of the motel. "Cool," we thought. We also got directions to Lou Malnati's (a great pizza place near my daughter's college). There at the end of the map was the picture from that link. "Cool," we said again.

So I say all this to confess that I'm a fan of Google, but... and let's make that a BIG BUT... let's make that a REALLY BIG BUT...

...BUT when I read this article today, it was like reading a chapter from Orwell's 1984 and Big Brother was coming to our neighborhoods. Have you heard about this? Did you know that Google may be taking pictures of our houses to be included in their mapping program? A couple recently threatened to sue them for taking pictures of their house and yard on private property:

“As the 'Street View' images show, a Google vehicle--outfitted with a roof-mounted camera taking 360-degree images--drove down the gravel path and onto the paved driveway leading to the McKee home. The Google car continued past the steps leading to the McKees's front door ... Taking photos all the time, the Google vehicle was squarely on private property....” Because the Google van was on private property, they deleted the photos from their map tool, but evidently, pictures of our homes taken from the public street will be fair game.

Not cool! It seems that our friends at Google are beginning to live up to the original meaning of their name, which prompts this question: Just because technology makes something possible, and just because the law makes it permissible... does that make it advisable?

I for one don't want Big Brother or Google--or Barney Google for that matter-- snooping around my house. Maybe I'm over-reacting, but be on the look-out for Google looking in. I don't think I'll be smiling the day I see those goo-goo-googly eyes.
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