On the road to Bandol

Some people believe that a photograph may give access to their souls, just like a voodoo doll does. In primitive culture, an identity basically consists of a name and an image, so an image gives direct access to your inner self, your soul. This week-end was Father’s day in France, and I usually take this opportunity to share with my father’s a philosophy book of some kind (the only such read in the year for me, but not for him). This year, as I was busy, I picked a small book, called Court traîté de l’âme, by Philippe Lazar (A short treaty of the soul, but it is not available in English, sorry). This book is written by a scientist, who also happens to be a materialist, and not much of a religious man.

For Philippe Lazar, a soul is purely physical, and it is made of the traces left in other people about a person: what they look like, what they have done together, what they have written and others have read. All of these traces, put together, make our soul. A person can then be considered as the combination of a body and a soul (like usual). Such a soul has very interesting properties, as stated by Lazar:

• It accompanies me since my conception, as my parents start a relationship with an unborn baby
• It constitutes the essence of what identifies me to others.
• It is separated from my body when life leaves the body.
• It has the capacity to survive the body.

With this definition, a soul may not be eternal, but these properties are nevertheless very interesting. Even more interestingly, this definition allows a scientist to reason over souls, to build models. For instance, Lazar defines a culture as a topology over the space of souls, i.e., the definition of a distance function between souls: you share the same culture with someone if your souls are close with respect to some function.

Now, let’s move to the virtual world. It is very easy to extend Lazar’s definition of the soul to the web. A soul also comprises all the bits on all computers of the world that relate to a person. This definition of a soul explains easily the success of social web sites: by allowing us to build new relationships, they help us building a new soul. And interestingly, they give some of it back to us: in some sites, it is possible to know who looked at your profile. However, such relationships are shallow, and the interactions are very limited: social networks have little meaning, and they also have little soul.

Think about Google, now. They have access to a lot of information about me: as I am a registered user for many of their services, they know what I search on the Web, they know what I like, they know about my pictures, they can even read my personal e-mail. Everybody knows that this is a bad thing: this data is personal, and we should own it. However, Google also has a lot of other data about everyone of us: who searched our name? What did they associate it with? What subtle links exist between us and other people on the web? Google does not release any of this information about the way in which others relate to us (of course, it is considered as someone else’s personal data). And here, the information goes way beyond what we get to know on social networking sites; it is much closer to our soul.

In fact, Google releases a little bit of this information to select users: with Google analytics, I can know where my readers are from, how they got to my blog, and other information like that, uncovering a bit of my soul. For instance, I know that I have at least a reader in Tehran, who regularly connects since August 2007. I may have one, two, three, or more, but I know that some people in Iran are reading this blog. I actually have had visitors from a little over 100 countries over a year, which I find amazing. But then, if I try to get a little deeper, I rapidly get frustrated, because the information just isn’t available.

Google is keeping a lot of the information about me away from me. So now, I am sure of it: more importantly than my personal data, Google is stealing my soul, and I can prove it.