Google is chiefly interested in accurately answering your requests because your questions have monetary potential, with predictive powers labeling you someone who likely is (or likely to become) a vegan or a yoga enthusiast, or, perhaps, a criminal. And so much the better if Big Data can figure this out before your first salad or downward dog or burglary. You aren’t just what you do but what the algorithms say you are likely to do. So, now, questions are treated like answers. From Sue Halpern in the New York Review of Books:

“The social Web celebrated, rewarded, routinized, and normalized this kind of living out loud, all the while anesthetizing many of its participants. Although they likely knew that these disclosures were funding the new information economy, they didn’t especially care. As John Naughton points out in his sleek history From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet:

Everything you do in cyberspace leaves a trail, including the ‘clickstream’ that represents the list of websites you have visited, and anyone who has access to that trail will get to know an awful lot about you. They’ll have a pretty good idea, for example, of who your friends are, what your interests are (including your political views if you express them through online activity), what you like doing online, what you download, read, buy and sell.

In other words, you are not only what you eat, you are what you are thinking about eating, and where you’ve eaten, and what you think about what you ate, and who you ate it with, and what you did after dinner and before dinner and if you’ll go back to that restaurant or use that recipe again and if you are dieting and considering buying a Wi-Fi bathroom scale or getting bariatric surgery—and you are all these things not only to yourself but to any number of other people, including neighbors, colleagues, friends, marketers, and National Security Agency contractors, to name just a few.”