Securing the platform: how Google appropriates security

ABSTRACT

Google is increasingly developing a manifold of security products for its users, businesses, and national security actors like the US Department of Defence. However, the company and its employees struggle with whether, and how, it should be involved in practices of security, war or weaponry. To unpack how Google emerges as a security actor, I bring new media studies perspectives regarding the socio-political roles Google plays in today’s society to critical security studies. With this interdisciplinary approach to studying Big Tech’s role in security, this article analyses how Google appropriates security throughout its ecosystem of platforms, products and projects. The article illustrates that Google’s first and foremost objective is to secure its platform by carefully balancing between being perceived as both neutral and progressive. Google thus appropriates (in)security by developing seemingly mundane and neutral security products, services and projects that align with its platform logic. In doing so, Google locks in new users into its platforms, whilst reshaping (in)security issues into platform issues and identifying the platform as a public and security concern.

KEYWORDS:

• Google
• process of appropriation
• artificial intelligence
• private security
• critical security studies
• platform politics
• Big Tech

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/clustering/clustering-algorithms (last accessed December 2020)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (research project ‘FOLLOW: Following the Money from Transaction to Trial,’ Grant No. ERC-2015- CoG 682317).

Notes on contributors

Anneroos Planqué-van Hardeveld

Anneroos Planqué-van Hardeveld is an PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on how Google, and other ‘Big Tech’ companies, emerge as security actors and unpacks how their politics of knowledge and expertise in machine learning/AI shape current understandings of (in)security.