Google's new plan: To learn everything about you from your online shopping

At some point, Google went from “don’t be evil” to “never mind.” The evidence is in its latest, duplicitous, and deceptive set of control mechanisms over online commerce.

Google’s vision involves a Universal Commerce Protocol, which allows its AI to access retailer client histories on its customers (all without human acknowledgment or accountability). The Universal Commerce Protocol leverages its shopper data to monitor and cross-reference between retailers the habits of individuals and adjust prices based on the AI bot’s understanding/projection of the shopper’s financial, personal, and psychological situation.

What seems to be happening is that online retailers have taken the AI bait. They’ve been sold on the purchase, implementation, and reliance upon so-called AI agents, which are designed to handle all possible aspects of internet commerce. It feels inevitable even though it isn’t. Either way, it’s happening. Our internet experience, even now, is being massively overwritten to effect the least-human outcomes possible.

Its grabbing up of data is cloaked, misdirected, or buried under mountains of legalese or made intentionally difficult to ascertain.

The truth is there’s been negligible-to-nonexistent customer service for most big corporations for almost a decade. Lose a box with Fed Ex and try to get an English-speaking human on the phone if you doubt this assertion. The differences in the now-unfolding AI era are mainly going to come down to the fact that whereas once a human was involved somewhere in the online experience, the new era will be almost entirely bot-derived, bot-managed, and bot-determined.

According to Lindsay Owens, who breaks all this down in a viral X post, “As one Google exec explained, it allows retailers to 'offer custom deals to specific shoppers.' If you’ve granted consent or the agent identifies you via identity linking, Direct Offers uses your conversation to trigger specific offers. At first it might recognize you as a 'high value' customer and show you a 30% coupon instead of 10%, without having to extend the same thing to everybody. But Google says the plan is to use the agent’s persuasive power to encourage shoppers to 'prioritize value over price.' Put simply, not only does it want you to spend more, it targets you specifically as someone likely to agree to it."

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Photo by Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via Getty Images

For Google, which despite making everyone angry and churning out increasingly less impressive products for the last decade, the move from not evil to blithely diabolical is proved out insofar as all of its grabbing up of data is cloaked, misdirected, or buried under mountains of legalese or made intentionally difficult to ascertain. Legerdemain involving layering, shunting, enveloping, winding, and overly technical language is everywhere in the description of its Universal Protocol, and levels of fleecing the client heretofore unimaginable are now standard in the era of no responsibility or accountability corporate AI.

Owens, the executive director of Groundwork, a Washington, D.C.-based organization build to “change economic policy and narrative in order to build public power, break up concentrations of private power, and deliver true opportunity,” finishes her epic X thread with a stark conclusion. “By bundling Google ad targeting and conversational data with retailer history and third-party broker profiles, the Agent creates a perfect surveillance feedback loop. And Google isn’t the only one building wallet-seeking chatbot missiles.”

The ruthless logic of “line go up” has been coded into the machines we have come to depend upon, and resale of the data ensures the obliteration of privacy. Of course, we were warned innumerable times about this inevitability, but the shocking facts point to our complicity, or docility, with respect to even caring about the obliteration.