George Orwell’s book 1984 ends with, “Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache…He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.” The phrase “Big Brother” has been thrown around for so long as a symbol of gray government totalitarianism that the real Big Brother has surfaced from a direction that Orwell wouldn’t have guessed.

With its Fisher-Price primary colors, its playroom aesthetic both on its web pages and in its employees’ environs, Google is the image of the benevolent preschool toy, trying only to be helpful and fun and educational. They’re a relatively open company and I don’t ascribe any malice to them. I believe that they take their motto “Don’t Be Evil” seriously.

But if history tells us anything, it’s that power corrupts, and Google’s power is extraordinary at present, with no sign of abatement. Even when power does not directly corrupt, it attracts those who would misuse it. As the linked article points out, the effect of Google’s accelerating information-gathering and prediction is the destruction of privacy, a cultural shift that I don’t believe we’re ready for.

In his book The Transparent Society, David Brin argues that since the glass houses are coming, we had better ensure that everyone lives in a glass house, including corporations, including governments. When one group of people has privacy and the other group doesn’t, this creates a discrepancy in power that leads to serious abuse. So either everyone should be guaranteed some level of privacy, or no-one should.

Which brings us back to Google. Because anyone can use Google, it seems like something that Brin would approve. But the services that Google offers to its users are qualitatively different from what Google knows about its users. It has enough information to make decent predictions about what you will want, where you are and where you will go. And it wants to know more. Google-the-corporation (not Google-the-employees) has an urge to understand you so well that it can make promises about you to vendors, that it can guarantee some rate of return, that it can depend on you without you knowing it.

I believe that the cure for this kind of quietly spreading influence is, ironically, government, which can do something no private corporation can do: declare something immoral and back it up with force. Corporations can only reason about pragmatics; on their own, the only reason they do good and not evil is that they believe it will make them more money. I think it’s time for our government to reason morally about privacy, starting with Constitutional principles and working out what that implies with regard to personal information. I don’t know what the end point of that line of reasoning will be, but I think it’s time we started on it.