No matter what contributions they've made to open source and various projects, I'm starting to think that Google's total contribution to society has been a net negative.
Few companies in the world can be said to have tried harder to destroy the individual's right to privacy. And with recent developments it's even more damning that they're doing this.
> Privacy is all about the individual human being. So, it's somehow fitting that the biggest privacy surprise in 2013 was created by one individual human being, the courageous whistleblower, Mr Snowden, who opened the world's eyes to the almost unimaginable scale and scope of mass government surveillance. We'll have to wait until 2014 to learn if governments do anything meaningful to improve transparency and oversight of their spy agencies' work. I have low expectations.
And this:
> More countries around the world passed privacy laws modeled on Europe's. The US continued down its path of exceptionalism: the Federal government debated, but did not pass, any meaningful privacy legislation, but many US States actively filled the void with sweeping new privacy laws, fulfilling their historic role as laboratories of potential future Federal laws. Technology advanced, raising new questions and igniting new debates. Law suits and prosecutions came and went, and in my personal case, happily, mostly went.
It's not about the blog post and not about this specific law, but Google's attitude as a company. Their business model is at odds with privacy.
The only thing that Google can do to show that they respect their users is to stop storing so much information about them and change their TOS to restrict usage of data and ensure there's a convenient way to control it for the end user. Instead they force them to input more info like their real names and phone numbers.
As for this blog, it's so ridiculous that they talk about Snowden and yet Google is one of the main personal information providers included in the revelations. I don't think I've seen one post from a Google employee that demonstrated they understand privacy, they are hopeless.
Part of me thinks.... what happened to google just being a bloody great search engine? It was great then. Thats all I wanted, a decent search engine. And now all this crap.
However, how about just dont sign in to google at all? Click the dont track me stuff. Dont use other google products, like chrome. I mean, I do wonder how many people criticise google, from a chrome browser. I am right in thinking there is some choice here, right?
No, I dont particularly like how google has gone from being a great search engine to being this huge insane money and data slurping machine, but as long as one can avoid it, then, does it matter?
I tend to think that what is actually damaging to society is the choices society lazily makes, with out a decent level of knowledge and the possible future consequences. As long as we can get email for free, maps for free, browsers for free, and so on, who cares?
Anyone ever paid for a browser? I mean separately, not as part of buying Windows or Mac OS.
"I dont particularly like how google has gone from being a great search engine to being this huge insane money and data slurping machine, but as long as one can avoid it, then, does it matter?"
The problem is that you can't avoid Google. How many websites use Google Analytics? How many serve fonts via Google Fonts? Or serve JQuery via Google? How many sites serve up ads from Google's ad network? Google's tentacles reach every corner of the web. Android lets Google track you across mobile and tablet. Now they can track you on desktop with ChromeOS which potentailly tracks everying you do in the OS. Some people are fine with this if it means a more personalised service. I find the privacy implications horrendous.
Consider the following scenario: you visit a site with Google Anlaytics, then a site that serves up fonts through Google, then a site that serves JQuery via Google. Then you sign into GMail to check your email and immediatly sign out after. Then you vist YouTube (signed out). Does Google join up these journeys? We don't know. Google's privacy policy is deliberatley vague about what they capture.
People simply aren't aware of the amount of tracking that goes on. It's clearly not in Google's interest to be placed under greater scrutiny over what they track and record. The tech community are happy to oblige, giving Google an easy ride on such matters.
Read the article? They've trying to kill the EU Data Privacy law through lobbying and such PR statements. It's not just them. It's also Facebook, probably Microsoft, too, the US government itself, and others. But I think they are among the big ones.
It's also true that Google's lobbying budget has increased quite rapidly over the past few years. Initially I thought it was just to get self-driving cars allowed, and Google Fiber, which I was mostly fine with because in the case of Google Fiber I knew many states had poor laws against any competition to local monopolies, and in the case of self-driving cars, while regulation needs to be carefully weighed, I also think it should happen sooner rather than later.
But now I think they're going to use more and more of that money to either kill strong privacy laws, in US, and EU or other places, and also to try and pass new laws that allows them to do more surveillance of users [1].
Just saying that they are "trying to kill the EU Data Privacy law" assumes that the privacy law is good to begin with. I'm not saying it is or it isn't(I don't know much about it other than high level summaries).
Just going on names alone, I could argue that anyone who tried to kill Americas Patriot Act hated patriots.
And they keep chucking apps people use in the bin. That is their right and I don't have to use them, I know, but it is annoying.
Let's all move away from "THE CLOUD" back to microcomputers.
Collecting ridiculous amounts of data just because they can, without stopping to think what that data might be used for and is already used for. Using shady practices to override existing protections to collect even more data. Changing the rules mid-game to force more personal information out of people.
It's right there in their mission statement "Organize the world's information". Most people didn't realize that included their own private information.
Ah, by "this" I thought you were referring to something in the article. I guess you were referring to the previous sentence?
I'll still disagree with your hyperbole (for instance, the privacy law he's objecting to does absolutely nothing to guard your data from intelligence agencies in EU countries...), but that makes a lot more sense.
That does not surprise me at all. I've been to an overview talk here in Hamburg/ Germany by a guy responsible for Google research in Europe. The whole topic around 'Privacy' was not existing for him. Google does everything to sabotage any progress. 'Privacy' is not in their interest as a marketing company whose money is made with collecting and selling all kinds of user data.
They don't architecture services with as little user data as possible. They are also don't care if user data is 'secure' (during transfer or storage). Google takes the opposite approach: collect as much data about a user as possible (mails, contacts, documents, movements, ...) and then let's see what one can do with that. For example classify the user and predict his actions. Each user request to Google helps them predicting more and more accurately what the user is doing and what he will do. Then they design offerings around that and sell it. This data is so valuable, that the government can't ignore it. They want the data and the prediction possibilities, too.
The paranoid view is that Google is a NSA frontend.
> The paranoid view is that Google is an NSA frontend.
The sad thing is that they don't even have to be that on purpose. They collect so much data on every person, that NSA is going to use them as a frontend anyway, which is exactly what they did, until they discovered what NSA was doing recently, and made some changes, by encrypting data in transit within their network. However, I still don't think they are encrypting data at rest. So if NSA breaks their transit encryption again, they will be free to collect all the data again.
The day when Google can naturally be seen as an enemy of the Internet and human privacy has come. Up until SOPA/ITU they could still be seen as a net ally, because they did help with some pretty big issues against the Internet. But from now on, I don't think they will be doing anything as major in favor of the users, while they are doing major actions against users of the Internet, such as trying to kill the privacy law in EU. So they are a net enemy to the Internet already.
While they've created that "campaign" with some other big companies against the NSA, the goal of the campaign itself sounds very weak to me. They're just trying to be more transparent with what they can tell people about what the government is requesting of them. I think they could do so much more, such as joining Mozilla's "StopWatching.us" movement. The reason they aren't doing that? Because Google is "watching us", and they probably believe joining such a campaign would be detrimental to their business, even if fighting for user privacy is the right thing to do.
So whether they have a clear stated goal of "killing privacy worldwide" the way NSA does, or not, it doesn't matter. Because the incentives to do just that are too strong for them, and they are pushing them in that direction anyway. For them to stop doing that would require rethinking their business model that's based on "tracking everything" (which I think should happen), and align themselves with the users.
> Fleischer’s comments come a day after EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding showed no interest in dropping the rules she first proposed two years ago. In a speech yesterday, she said the 28-nation bloc must “move full speed ahead” toward clinching a deal on data protection.
I hope she will prevail. She has already demonstrated in the past she is a strong commissioner.
Ugh, I would have hoped by now we'd be moving to the US implementing privacy laws. Instead it seems like we're moving in the opposite direction. Corporations are learning how to spend money in the EU to stop pro-consumer legislation as effectively as they do in the house and senate. So we're stuck with out of date legislation.
I just hope that this is Google being desperate and trying to use PR to stop the new data protection guidelines because their lobbying efforts are faltering.
I always assumed that the mess that is the EU (I mean 27 countries, 24 official languages) would somehow be protecting it from corporate lobbying. I guess I was wrong, everybody speaks english in Brussels.
As a EU citizen it truly pisses me off that American corporations lobby against our civil rights protections.
I consider this a much better reason to boycot American online services than the NSA crap. The NSA "only" infringed on our rights, Google e.a. are actively trying to destroy them entirely.
> The other big surprise of 2013 was something that didn't happen. Europe's much-ballyhooed, and much-flawed, proposal to re-write its privacy laws for the next twenty years collapsed. The old draft is dead, and something else will eventually be resurrected in its place. We'll have to wait until 2014, or perhaps even later, to learn what will replace it. Whatever comes next will be the most important privacy legislation in the world, setting the global standards. I'm hopeful that this pause will give lawmakers time to write a better, more modern and more balanced law.
The gist of the article seems to be the EU nations have dragged their feet regarding implementing the law. That's to be expected, and variations are to be expected too. But that hardly makes it dead in my view.
Personally, I like to try to trace what is happening inside Google when things like this happen. That is why I wrote several comments mentioning Vic Gundotra for example.
I'm surprised of much of the comments here, I'll chalk it up to ignorance, but every start up and company in the world should be wishing for this EU privacy fundamentalism to die. And grandstanding politician to get in grips with reality. Yeah NSA and some other state actors have done fucked up but that law does nothing to curtail government surveillance it instead introduces unreasonable limits and restrictions on innovation and even basic function. Indirectly balkanize data flow and introducing more cookies law style useless notices is the least of it. It's seemingly vindictive against US companies and an miscalculated move to grant an advantage to local ones disguised as reform.
I live in the EU and I rather we keep our direction on privacy, than you very much. I agree that the law about cookies is not much use, but neither is saying that we should just give up on this. I don't see this as vindictive, I see it as I, and many with me, don't want our private data handled the way most US companies want to do it. So we move our business to companies that do it the way we want it done.
> I agree that the law about cookies is not much use
Have you actually read the law in question? It seems fairly sensible to me, it's the implementation guidance that was ridiculous. The banners we have at the top of every page now are nothing but cargo cult, everyone copying what everyone else is doing without ever applying any critical thinking.
I think it is less cargo-cult and more nobody wants to be sued over something they don't really understand so they choose the (dumbest) option with the least risk that still lets them do what they want.
And how much time and $ has been expended on this pointless make work.
I worked for a large publisher and they wasted a vast amount of time and limited release dates to implement the cookie law - all that could have been far better used in improving their sites.
Cookie law is snake oil-grade security, and giving a false sense of security is almost always a bad idea.
Real solution is fixing client software. But, meh, all popular browsers are made by companies that are - one way or another - heavily dependent on advertisement (thus, tracking).
"Data privacy is not highly legislated or regulated in the U.S.. Although partial regulations exist, there is no all-encompassing law regulating the acquisition, storage, or use of personal data in the U.S. In general terms, in the U.S., whoever can be troubled to key in the data, is deemed to own the right to store and use it, even if the data were collected without permission."
Few companies in the world can be said to have tried harder to destroy the individual's right to privacy. And with recent developments it's even more damning that they're doing this.