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If You’re Reading This It’s (Not) Too Late: Can Google Save Us From Spoilers?

CREDIT: HBO
CREDIT: HBO

Television is everywhere, whenever we want it. We can stream anything, anytime, anywhere. But the teeny tiny hitch with this technology — so futuristic and yet already taken for granted — is that we can no longer reasonably expect, that all of us are watching the same shows at the same time. Our beautiful, frictionless entertainment economy has created a uniquely modern monster: the spoiler.

The spoiler is a reminder that there are people who have seen things you have not yet had the opportunity to see and those people will go about recklessly discussing these matters in the open internet.

As if on cue, on Wednesday, a new patent was awarded to Google that describes a program for blocking spoilers. The system would track a user’s progress on any given show, movie or book and blur out posts in social media feeds that contain what are determined to be spoilers based on your earlier activity, as well as send a pop-up warning when spoilers may appear. Kind internet citizens can voluntarily label something as a spoiler, too.

CREDIT: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
CREDIT: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

An initial reaction: this is great! People hate spoilers. If we didn’t, we could call them… saviors? Spoilers suck the fun out of everything. Should you have a job that requires you to spend time on the internet, or should you just be a regular person who happens to use the internet on a daily basis, avoiding spoilers requires Gumby-level contortions. Every generation gets the technological innovation we deserve, so I guess this is why we have a spoiler-killer, and also the Apple Watch, and Uber for laundry. What a time to be alive.

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However, in the interest of thoroughness, a question: is this app, and the apparent joy with which it has been received, a sign that we are officially, totally overdoing spoiler-aversion? Maybe we should hold back on getting so excited about what essentially amounts to child-proofing the internet through a program that sounds, to a layman, potentially quite invasive.

Take a look at the language in Google’s patent (emphasis added): “A system for processing content spoilers includes… a progress module for determining a first progress stage for a subject associated with the activity based at least in part on the activity data.”

“Based at least in part on the activity data.” Okay, Google is keeping track of your “activity”: what you watch or read, when you watch or read it. Google is watching you and everything you do; mah nishtanah.

But if “activity data” is just one part of the equation, what’s the rest? How is Google going to keep track, not just of what shows you’re watching but exactly what episode, to the minute, you’ve already seen? By reading your emails? Searching your Gchats? Storing every search you do for future investigation? As if Google doesn’t paw through our data already; as if we don’t already have reason enough to be concerned about the utter disregard for privacy companies like Google seem to possess.

Considering the fact that most people don’t watch television shows through Google, it’s not really clear how else Google would figure out where a user is in any given show. Google would presumably have to partner with, for instance, Netflix, to access what Netflix considers to be proprietary information about viewing habits. Why would Netflix have any incentive to share such valuable data? Netflix, famously, does not provide data to anyone about anything: not how many people watched any given show, not the number of streams or hours watched, nothing.

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There must be better, less intrusive ways to rid social media feeds of spoilers besides pulling information from user data. A couple years ago, this then-17-year-old coder won the TVnext Hackathon by creating a spoiler-blocker of her own: an extension to the Google Chrome browser in which a user could type in words to block and the duration of that blocking to make tweets containing key words vanish. (Chrome now has such an extension, the Chrome Silencer, although reviews are pretty bad.)

Even if these privacy concerns are non-issues for a user, there is also this not insignificant caveat: the program could only be applied to sites Google owns. When was the last time you logged into Google Plus? Probably never. Odds are, you find your shows spoiled elsewhere: on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and also literally every other website.

There is a school of thought that people who obsess about spoilers care about shows for the wrong reasons — in our viewing habits, as on The Bachelor, it is apparently crucial one be there “for the right reasons” — but it is a theory to which I do not subscribe. Spoilers are terrible, no argument here. We are the savviest television audience, perhaps, in the history of television. We see everything coming: we know what actors didn’t renew their contracts, we read the books before we watch the show, we solve the riddles before the characters do, we compile so many series finale predictions that, inevitably, one of our guesses will prove to be right.

There are few pleasures in pop culture life so pure as the genuine surprise. And, increasingly, so rare: even the surprise album drop is not a surprise anymore.

But isn’t there something a little juvenile about believing an information source as vast and comprehensive as the internet should blur itself out on your behalf just to save you from the plot of a television show that has already aired? Most professionals who write about television already litter our stories with spoiler alerts.

If it’s so vital to not have a particular show spoiled, maybe shuffle your schedule around and actually watch the show the night it airs. Look, now you don’t have this problem anymore! I know, you’re welcome.

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Also in the category of “reasons to slow your roll” is this comment from a Google spokesperson: “We hold patents on a variety of ideas — some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t. Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patents.” In other words, this spoiler-stopper may not exist anywhere except the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and/or our imaginations.