So I just got back from a long weekend away. Aside from the actual holiday itself, which was rather uneventful, to say the least, it was very exciting. Let me explain.

In the iPhone adverts, they like to show all the practical uses for the apps, and the examples are always cool city types called 'John Appleseed' calling someone to meet for coffee, Twittering about his coffee, adding his coffee dates to his calendar or finding the café on Google Maps. This is all very clever because it shows off all the cool things you can do on a iPhone, while quietly associating Apple’s products with the lifestyle of cool, city people - making even people like me, who live in a county which doesn’t even have a city in it, buy in to this lifestyle that they are in no way associated with but want to be part of, as it allows them to create a flimsy facade of self-worth.

I've only ever used Google Maps to look at my house from above, and once to see how far it was from Lands End to John O’ Groats, never any of the trendy city things that Apple promised would happen to me when I bought it.

So when I went on holiday you can finally see, after that monstrous digression (I do apologize), why I was excited when I went away. I was in an unknown town, and I could use Google Maps to find the local coffee shops!

I tried it. There were none. The 'town' was called Nettlecombe: it had a population of 70, and the only building that wasn’t someone’s house or the church was a pub called the Marquis of Lorne. I went there, but they didn’t sell Coffee, only beer. And no one was called 'John Appleseed', just Ted, Robert and Enid. Really.

Now, as I have never searched Google Maps before, only navigated it manually, I have never entered a specific location. And without doing that, I wasn't to know that StreetView had been added, as that is the only way of getting the StreetView button to appear. So when I searched for 'Nettlecombe', I was amazed. The little yellow man appeared, so I tapped it, hardly daring to believe, but lo and behold there was the hamlet I was staying in, indexed by a US technology giant and immortalised forever. The fact that they had been down this tiny country lane, and every other country lane in Britain for that matter, blew my mind. Now I had the luxury of having it blown again by the fact I could walk around the world on a device smaller than my hand.

I’m beginning to sound like some insufferable middle-aged uncle type with all my talk of ‘the wonders of technology these days’, but I am serious. That’s a lot of power Google and Apple are putting in our hands and it all has to come from somewhere. There’s sci-fi novels where in the future the earth is run by big companies called InudstrialCorporateSoft, with smoke billowing out of the chimneys of their factories while crows call ominously from the rooftops and a thick, grey fog floats in, but what’s really happening is a company with a silly name, a logo in primary colours and a joke app for translating from animal to human is fooling everyone with its jolly front, it’s ‘don’t be evil’ (no capitals obligatory on pain of death) slogan and offices full of lava lamps, bean bags, sushi bars and generally the happiest coders in Silicon Valley, into thinking that it just wants to ‘organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful’, when really it wants to enslave our souls.

I know I’m not the first person to raise concerns over the worrying power of Google - in fact I’m probably the last - but it needs to be said as many times as possible. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but there seems to be such a thing as a vast array of entirely free software for every aspect of one’s life with no expense other than having to see a one-line advert about how you should buy the thing you just searched for. The price has to be paid somewhere, and it’s paid in the form of having your personal details harvested for profit.

Last week, to the outrage of the blogosphere, Facebook announced their new OpenGraph API, which allows apps to collect your information. Previously, if you were marked as ‘Single’ on Facebook, it might send you adverts for dating sites. Now, it goes a lot further.

Say you visit the BBC website, find an article about how endangered the pandas are, and post a link to Facebook so everyone can see the problem. OpenGraph will now record this, and start sending you adverts about adopting a panda. If you posted a link, chances are you care about them, and so this all becomes scarily powerful. Also, you might now be suggested to get a baby panda on your FarmVille or Mafia Wars or whatever else it is you waste your life on.

What I’m trying to say is information comes at a price. And that price is privacy. Now personally, I’m not fussed. These companies are welcome to my data; I’ve got nothing secret or exciting going on in my life, I’m just a normal guy. If Google and Facebook and the rest really care about knowing what I’m like, then they’re welcome to. I’ll block the Ads they send at me, and continue to use their services until I die of being sucked into a vortex of corporate servitude.

It’s too late to be anarchistic; we gave up fighting years ago. Just enjoy the convenience and lifestyle that these products bring, and try not to think too hard about it.

Works for me.