Google recently unveiled intentions to partner with Apple on a new coronavirus tracking system.  Citizens should proceed with caution before using it.  Google's do-good claims have previously proven to come with ulterior motives.  This case is unlikely to be an exception as this new product could help them walk away with more user data to grow their ad business and market power.    

In its plan, Google proposes to work with government health agencies to develop a Bluetooth-based system that can track distances between people.  If someone is confirmed with the virus, users who have encountered that person will be alerted.  Despite a universal desire to fight the infection, the prospect of further deepening Google's reach into our private lives is causing considerable unease.  

Several criticisms have already emerged, with people questioning privacy protection, data advertising usage, and even the overall effectiveness of the system.  Some experts have speculated that businesses could use the technology to track the stores users go to, learning valuable information about shopping habits.  Given Google's history, such possibilities naturally raise questions about its endgame aspirations for developing this tracker.

Google has a long record of warping the privacy conversation in its favor.  A recent example is the company's ban of third-party cookies.  In an attempt to monopolize its online ad business, Google used the dominance of its Chrome browser to effectively block the files that companies use to stay connected to users, improve advertising, and generate research.  Its response to criticism was that it was simply protecting user privacy by centralizing cookies.  It's just a happy coincidence that the move happened to have financial benefit to the company.

The company has further justified this power play with arguments over security, saying limiting access to data will guard it.  This fig leaf of concern is just as pathetic as the one it is using to convince us to provide access to our every movement to power its virus-tracking system.   

Google's history with user data, to put it lightly, isn't great.  Some of its most prominent platforms spent years exposing private data while it worked to cover it up.  When it isn't exposing data, it is collecting them.  This has led to a public image of the company as both large and intrusive.  Despite the high-minded motivations offered, advertising dollars seem a constant motivation for Google's actions.  

Google is indisputably an advertising company, as online ads make up 83% of its revenue.  But fierce competition from Amazon has helped push it toward new and ever more controlling ways to stay ahead, and along the way, privacy always seems to suffer in service to profits.  

Google has long had designs on accessing Americans' medical data, and the proposed tracker would be a novel way to advance those aims. 

Normally, Google's deceitful actions are revealed after the damage has been done.  Thankfully, in the case of the company's COVID-19-tracker, legislators are heavily scrutinizing the proposed system before its launch.  Led by Missouri senator Josh Hawley, Congress is expressing concern over the potential usage the Bluetooth tracker could have once the virus has been defeated.   

Writing to the top executives of Google and Apple, Senator Hawley asked that both firms commit to being held "personally liable if [they] stop protecting privacy, such as by granting advertising companies access to the interface once the pandemic is over."  He later expanded that "pairing the data from this project with the GPS data that both your companies already collect could readily reveal individual identities" and that it could "create an extraordinarily precise mechanism for surveillance."  

Google thus far has been unwilling to offer strong guarantees of protection, a fact that should alarm consumers and compel decision-makers to accelerate their efforts to defend the citizenry.  It is imperative that the tech giant not be allowed to abuse the public's need to stamp out the coronavirus to position itself to further damage user privacy, small online business, and the overall health of the market.

Michael Daugherty, is CEO of The Cyber Education Foundation and founder of The Justice Society.  He is author of The Devil Inside the Beltway: The Shocking Expose of the US Government's Surveillance and Overreach Into Cyber-security, Medicine and Small Business.