The new year dawned on me along with a hangover that made me wish it hadn’t. I was uninspired to write any new year’s resolutions while still stuffing my face with Christmas cookies and eggnog in the days leading up to no-longer-2011. Instead, I had planned to debauch all I wanted until the ball dropped and only then sit down on the first of January and list the ways in which I might, for ideally at least a month, resolve to make my life a better place to live. Unfortunately, severe brain dehydration left me unable to write these resolutions on the day they were supposed to go into effect. My friends went to the gym while I spent the day making multiple trips to the john. I had missed the bandwagon.  

Here’s the good news: as January winds down, the majority of my friends who did make new year’s resolutions have already broken them. I’m writing mine just in time for the Chinese new year based on a “minipiphany” that struck me on the head with the force of a Newtonian apple: Google is taking over the world, and I don’t like it.

Jan. 28 is Data Privacy Day. Data privacy as a concept reminds me of Santa Claus: a nice idea in theory, but he’s not actually anywhere I can see him. I fully felt the threat to my data privacy over the summer, when I found two profiles on Facebook in my name, both with a profile photo of me, but only one of which was actually mine. My identity had been stolen, albeit my credit card bill was intact. From that moment, I began to see Big Brother everywhere.  

Mark Zuckerberg owned incriminating photos that would make running for office a little tricky. My student loan company, benignly named Sallie Mae, managed to track me down overseas in a country that didn’t have any record of me being there. In London over winter break, I was watched on every street corner by a video camera. There is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. Google maps has satellite footage of every inch of the globe.

And then it hit me: Google is the biggest of the Big Brothers. Besides being the world’s number one search engine, Google owns Youtube. Google owns Blogspot. Google owns GoogleDocs, Google maps, Google calendars, Google books and Google chat. Put succinctly, Google owns my soul. It knows what I search for, because it makes recommendations based on my history. It knows the content of my emails, because when I write a joke about genitalia to a friend, sneaky advertising banners on the right side of the screen offer enlargements for appendages I don’t even have. It knows my major, my date of birth, my banks, my family, my friends, my vacations … it knows everything about me.

On Jan. 24, Google announced a change in its privacy policy that, from what I understand, basically allows them to gather more information in order to target its users’ interests more. Despite the fact that it already shares a great deal of our information with advertisers, everyone still seems to trust Google. When I tried to explain to my roommates my desire to extricate myself from Google’s clutches, they laughed. My father said, “But I love Google.” I used to love Google, too, with its smooth, no-nonsense interface, its quirky homepage changes on holidays, and its oh-so-simple search engine. But our love affair has run its course, and I am already moving on: I use a different search engine now, and have sacrificed my Gmail in favor of an email service that does not give my information to advertisers—or so it tells me. 

Google’s changes to its privacy policy go into effect March 1, and I hereby resolve that by the end of February, Google and I will be broken up.