By: Gian Volpicelli
May 29, 2019
When I meet her, Margrethe Vestager is not one of the frontrunners for the presidency of the European Commission, yet. The European elections haven’t happened yet, and Vestager is still fully focused on enforcing antitrust law across the European Union. She’s very busy.
And she has strong ideas about my digital life. We are sitting in her airy, wood-floored office on the tenth floor of the Berlaymont building, in Brussels’ European Quarter, and I have just been telling Vestager, the European commissioner for competition, how much Google knows about me.
I own a Google Pixel smartphone running Android OS, which means the company is in control of my contacts, app data, and personal email – a Gmail account at that; I am quite an active political content-consumer on (Google-owned) YouTube; Google Maps sends me creepy breakdowns of every single trip (home-work, work-home, home-gym, gym-home – an uninteresting life) I have taken, every day, every month. The phone can work out when I am running, and passes the information to Google Maps so that my late-night jog can later pop up in the monthly reviews.