Google Announces Development of New “Prints” Service

Google Prints, another Google service with bold ambition, will be eagerly welcomed by those who fear Google doesn’t have quite enough information about each and every facet of their lives.

The service, which is of course free, accepts digitally scanned images of your fingerprints for use by Google in identifying ways to make life better for you. Using yet-to-be described, bot-like devices (powered by AI software derived from its self-driving car research), Google will be heavily equipped to determine what objects you have touched in retail areas, including items that you were possibly interested in but could not afford, or found to be lacking in some way. Google will also be able to supplement its records of where you’ve been whenever your phone has lost service or GPS. “Google Prints should help narrow Google’s knowledge gap between what you do offline with what it knows about your online activity,” says Jorge Soros, an Internet marketing executive at Soros Worldwide, who seemed ecstatic about its potential.

For advertisers, sources say that Google hopes to augment its AdWords and AdSense offerings to include “PrintSense”, which ostensibly will allow for highly-targeted campaigns seeking out those who have not merely searched online, but have actually touched a particular type of product.

Whether or not you wish to be included in Google’s fingerprint database, the Internet giant may soon have your prints anyway: it is rumored that numerous grocery and retail chains have already agreed to allow Google to integrate fingerprint-reading cameras into POS devices at checkout. Privacy fanatics and other technology naysayers would be required to pay cash for every purchase to avoid the seemingly inevitable inclusion into the program.