Google "do no evil" meta thread

DuckDuckGo (DDG) is an Internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results.[3] DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by deliberately showing all users the same search results for a given search term,[5] and emphasizes returning the best results, rather than the most results, generating those results from over 400 individual sources, including crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, and other search engines like Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex.[6][7]
...

Click to expand...

PMBug said:

I use Firefox (FF) too. By the way, two excellent extensions for FF are NoScript and PrivacyBadger. NoScript give you granular control over what javascript has permission to run. It's great for security (blocks malicious javascript), privacy (blocks javascript that collects info on you for 3rd parties) and faster browsing (less overhead). PrivacyBadger supposedly blocks web beacons and such that also track your movement from site to site, but I'm not well versed in exactly how it works (but I trust the author/EFF).

Click to expand...

...
Gizmodo's Kashmir Hill recently accepted a monumental challenge: blocking tech giants from her everyday life due to privacy concerns and sheer curiosity. But she took the challenge to extreme lengths to demonstrate just how pervasive these companies are beyond just the apps they provide.

How? By actively blocking all communication with Google's 8,699,648 (!) IP addresses on every device she owned. Not merely finding alternatives for the various Google apps we all rely on, but preventing those devices from pinging a single Google server.

The results were both calamitous and eye-opening.
...

Click to expand...

Google-owned YouTube manually adjusted search results for “Federal Reserve” after MSNBC host Chris Hayes complained about the prominence of anti-Fed videos in the top results, according to a source who worked at the tech company.

Google allegedly added the search term “Federal Reserve” to a “blacklist” file of “controversial” YouTube search queries. This caused search results for the term to be re-ranked to favor YouTube-approved mainstream media sources.
...

Click to expand...

With the release of Chrome 76, Google fixed a loophole that allowed web sites to detect if a visitor was using Incognito mode. Unfortunately, their fix led to two other methods that can still be used to detect when a visitor is browsing privately.

Some web sites were using Incognito mode detection in order to prevent users from bypassing paywalls or to give private browsing users a different browsing experience.

This was being done by checking for the availability of Chrome's FileSystem API, which was disabled in Incognito mode. If a site could access the FileSystem API then the visitor was in a normal browsing session and if it could not access the API the user was in Incognito mode.

As Google wanted users to be able to browse the web privately and for their browsing mode choices to be private as well, they have closed a loophole by making the API available in both browsing modes. As part of this fix, instead of using disk storage for the FileSystem API, when in Incognito mode they are using a transient memory filesystem that gets cleared when a session is closed.

The use of a memory filesystem, though, create two new loopholes that could be used to detect Incognito mode, which are described below.
...
Unfortunately, sites have already started to use Mishra's filesystem quota detection method to determine if a visitor is in Incognito mode.

As noted by Microsoft Edge developer Eric Lawrence, the New York Times, is testing this method to detect when a visitor in in private mode.
...

Click to expand...

PMBug said:

So YouTube is owned by Google, the "don't be evil" company. Surely they wouldn't engage in capricious and arbitrary censorship, right?



More: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019...results-in-response-to-msnbc-hosts-complaint/

Click to expand...

A group of state attorneys general led by Texas are likely to file an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc’s Google and are working on potential litigation for later this year, a person familiar with the situation said on Friday.

The Justice Department is also moving toward bringing a case as soon as this summer, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
...

Click to expand...

US Navy Opens Medical Vault For Google​

The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday filed its second antitrust lawsuit against Google in just over two years. ...

This lawsuit, which is focused on Google's online advertising business and seeks to make Google divest parts of the business, is the first against the company filed under the Biden administration. The Department's earlier lawsuit, filed in October 2020 under the Trump administration, accused Google of using its alleged monopoly power to cut off competition for internet search through exclusionary agreements. That case is expected to go to trial in September.
...

Click to expand...

...
Experts interviewed for this article said the DOJ will face the challenge of charting relatively underexplored areas of antitrust law in proving to the court that Google's conduct violated the law and harmed competition without benefitting consumers. Though that's a tall order, it could come with a huge upside if the agency succeeds, possibly expanding the scope of antitrust law for digital monopoly cases to come.
...
Compared to the DOJ's earlier lawsuit, which argued Google maintained its monopoly over search services through exclusionary contracts with phone manufacturers, this one advances more nontraditional theories of harm, according to Francis, the NYU Law professor and former FTC official. That also makes it more likely that Google will move to dismiss the case to at least narrow the claims it may have to fight later on — a move it did not take in the earlier suit, he added.

"This case breaks much more new ground and it articulates theories, or it seems to articulate theories, that are right out on the border of what existing antitrust prohibits," Francis said. "And we're going to find out, when all is said and done, where the boundaries of digital monopolization really lie."
...

Click to expand...

Google's trial begins today. The Department of Justice has sued the tech giant for cornering more than 90 percent of the search engine market. The government argues that this dominance reflects anticompetitive practices, while Google counters that its search engine is simply a preferred service.

"It's the government's first major monopoly case to make it to trial in decades and the first in the age of the modern internet," notes NPR. "The Justice Department's case hinges on claims that Google illegally orchestrated its business dealings, so that it's the first search engine people see when they turn on their phones and web browsers. The government says Google's goal was to stomp out competition."
...
... The Google trial is set to last for three months. Judge Amit P. Mehta, an Obama appointee, will decide the case.

Click to expand...

pmbug said:

More:

The trial begins: DOJ is suing Google over search engine dominance

The Department of Justice has sued the tech giant for cornering more than 90 percent of the search engine market.

reason.com

Given that Google is such a huge asset to the NSA, it surprises me that the DOJ is going after them.

Click to expand...

Digital Market Act designations: the interoperability of Google Android​

It’s a big year for the oozing creep of corporate paternalism and ad-tracking technology online. Google and its subsidiary companies have tightened their grips on the throat of internet innovation, all while employing the now familiar tactic of marketing these things as beneficial for users. Here we’ll review the most significant changes this year, all emphasizing the point that browser privacy tools (like Privacy Badger) are more important than ever.
...

Click to expand...

Pure EVIL: Google Creates RACIST AI​

Google to destroy browsing data to settle consumer privacy lawsuit​

Voodoo said:

They are getting pissier with youtube. Brave on anything older than Windows 10 crashes if you try to go to youtube. You can disable the ad blocking and then it will work.

Not to mention they crashed by computer, for the second time, when I mentioned silver breaking out in their scam site.

Click to expand...

Europe’s top court just delivered multi-billion-dollar blows to Apple and Google​

Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google’s ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online.

The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.

The story of the deliberate creation of the modern mass-surveillance state includes elements of Google’s surprising, and largely unknown, origin. It is a somewhat different creation story than the one the public has heard, and explains what Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page set out to build, and why.

But this isn’t just the origin story of Google: It’s the origin story of the mass-surveillance state, and the government money that funded it.
...

Click to expand...