August 30, 2018
September 5, 2018
March 19, 2019
On Tuesday, Trump also accused executives of making behind-the-scenes comments about a “certain group of people that happen to be in power, that happen to have won the election.”
“Something is happening with those groups of folks that are running Facebook and Google and Twitter, and I do think we have to get to the bottom of it,” he said. “It is very fair, it’s collusive and very, very fair to say that we have to do something about it. And if we don’t, you know, the incredible thing, we can win an election and we have such a stacked deck.”
Trump did not specify what he meant by “do something about it.”
Republicans are trying to stack the deck of apportioning voting districts with census questions. They want oversight on Google searches. Expect Google 2020 searches for “Trump Economy” or “Trump accomplishments” to bring up Fox News articles for the first 8 of 10 searches. They’ll threaten Google, Facebook and Twitter with accusations of monopolistic power to get the below the table oversight to ensure biased news delivery that they want.
I think Google will beat Trump.
Yeah, but remember Warren wants the same. And let’s not kid ourselves: Google has been asking for this. They ditched Don’t Be Evil a while ago, and have been up to some shady shit, as the EU has determined.
I’d hardly describe the stuff the EU has found against Google to be “shady shit”.
Here’s what the EU fined Google for, btw. Let’s see what the DOJ actually decides to pursue and what mitigations it desires. If they hammer on “looking at” search algorithms for ex rather than the ad market.
The European Commission is hitting Google with a fine of 1.49 billion euros (some $1.7 billion) for “abusive practices” in online advertising, saying the search and advertising giant broke the EU’s antitrust rules and abused its market dominance by preventing or limiting its rivals from working with companies that had deals with Google. The case revolves around search boxes that are embedded on websites and that display ads brokered by Google.
Those ads are powered by AdSense for Search — a business unit within Google that allows websites and apps to make money on search ads, much as Google does on its main search page.
But for years, AdSense contracts also gave Google a wide range of control in how the ads work, the EU says. Google included the conditions in contracts that covered how its brokered ads would appear in search tools that are commonly embedded on newspaper sites, blogs and travel companies.
The conditions evolved over time, from exclusivity clauses in 2006 to “relaxed exclusivity” in later years. But the practice still damaged competition, European regulators said, noting that later requirements let Google control how its rivals’ search ads would appear — including the size, color and font they used.
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“This is illegal under EU antitrust rules,” said EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who is in charge of competition policy. “The misconduct lasted over 10 years and denied other companies the possibility to compete on the merits and to innovate — and consumers the benefits of competition.”
She added that in addition to the fine, the ruling means “anyone who has suffered damage because of Google’s behavior can also claim compensation from Google through national courts.”
The EU had fined Google three times for antitrust violations, for over $8 billion in fines.
Yeah, I’m fully aware of exactly what the EU fined Google for.
Fundamentally US and EU anti trust laws are very different. In the US has to show that a “monopolistic” company actions have hurt consumers, while EU the law is aimed at protecting companies from unfair competitive practices. (A cynic would note that means hurting European companies)
I’ll admit that the US news media probably doesn’t cover EU enforcement but a quick Google search doesn’t doesn’t turn up many EU against many actions DeBeers, Nestle, Siemens, Allianz or Bayer etc… The only one case was against Daimler, and other European auto companies conspiring to lie about meeting diesel emission standards . Which I bet was due to the US actions against Volkswagen.
To prevent negative news about herself appearing in search results?
(Snark aside, I believe I know what you actually meant instead of this.)
Google and Facebook both need to be, ahem, financially motivated to respect users privacy. I realize their business model revolves around selling users data. They need to be more transparent about it and let people opt out easily, and allow people to delete their data entirely whenever they want. They’ll still make plenty of money because a lot of people don’t care, and many even like having the internet personalized for them.
I think Microsoft is on the right track here, privacy wise, but they make money in other ways. They aren’t dependent on creepy digital voyeurism to make money.
All that being said I do not trust the Trump DoJ to act in our best interests, at all. So fuck this, give them hell Google.
Dude, this is a bullshit statement.
I have total control of what stuff Google tracks about me. I can easily prevent them from tracking and sharing anything about me.
You know what though? I voluntarily let Google track all kinds of stuff about me. You know why? Because in exchange, Google provides me with all kinds of extremely useful services.
This is the ideal situation for me as a consumer. I engage in a voluntary exchange with a company to get useful services at essentially zero cost to me. And if I want, i can trivially choose to not provide them with information about myself.
I don’t need the government fucking with that relationship. It’s good.
Can you cite a single instance of Google selling user data? Since their business model revolves around it, and the company makes billions, you should be able to do this with ease.
Whoa triggered the Google defense force!
I’m glad you’re happy with the arrangement. I’m not super thrilled with it. It should be opt in rather than opt out.
You’re saying there’s only been one EU competition enforcement against an EU company? Are you serious?
If everything is transparent and well communicated, you’d be right. But it’s not. Cambridge Analytica proves that Facebook, for example, is more interested in moving fast and breaking stuff than guarding your personal data. There was nothing you could do to prevent your data from being used by them. They scraped friends of friends and there was no opt out.
There have also been times where Facebook said they stopped doing something but actually didn’t. And let’s not forget this little chestnut:
As for Google, experts aren’t super jazzed about their new privacy tools, either.
http://time.com/5585676/google-new-privacy-tools/
And just 9 days ago another inquiry was opened about their data privacy practices in Europe.
So yeah, if they actually practiced what they preached, were transparent, and gave us plenty of tools to manage our own data, maybe that’d work. But they aren’t and it doesn’t.
Time for a US version of GDPR. Make it cost them money to screw up, and force them to ask people to opt in to every use of their data.
Hey Facebook is a dumpster fire. That’s why i don’t use their service.
But i do use Google’s service, and I’m totally fine with that arrangement.
Thus far, we’ve had a few folks make vague claims of nefarious wrongdoing by Google, but they haven’t been able to back them up with real examples. Google is not Facebook.
You’re citing a recent inquiry as though it were some great example of evil. It’s not. It’s an inquiry, largely driven by competition who wants to fight Google in court rather than the market.
Really, if you don’t like Google… Here’s a secret: you absolutely do not need to use their services.
Google doesn’t actually have a monopoly on anything. You don’t need to use their search engine, on their browser, or their mapping software, or their email, or their phones. There are a multitude of other options for all of those things. You are not at all required to ever give Google any information about you at all. Ever.
But that’s the thing, right? You want to use their stuff. Because it’s GOOD stuff.
So you have a choice. But that’s what life is. You don’t get to just have whatever you want, all the time.
But even when we acknowledge the simple truth about having to make choices… It’s still the fact that it’s easy to control your days with Google. The fact that it’s not automatically done in exactly how you might like? That’s too bad for you.
So just stop using Google if you think it’s nefarious. But don’t fuck it up for me.
Citation needed for multitude. Although you can argue that you don’t need to be online… somehow.
I’m counting 8 google sites that I’m sending information to by just opening this thread (doubleclick.net, google-analytics.com, google.com, googletagmanager.com, googlevideo.com, gstatic.com, youtube.com, ytimg.com), and while, yes, they’re trivial for anyone on this site to block (which will get removed from their browser at some point), they’re not trivial for the common person.
Now, I don’t have much of an issue at the moment because, as you say, it’s good stuff and they’re not being harmful. There’s also the facts that it’s easy to do a cleanup of your data now and then and that they have a business incentive to never, ever slip on my data protections. But their intentions are pretty clear that they want to build a profile over everyone’s life that keeps getting improved as technology matures. Most of what they could do at this point in time is fairly tame, but it already almost includes being able to fake you in a video, with your own voice and words that you use. Should anyone really have that capability unregulated in a monopoly, bearing in mind that it’s available under a gag order to who knows what secret agencies, courts and hackers? And that’s discounting the fact that they are already controlling and impinging de facto web standards (AMP, for one, but a few good ones as well).
Me, I’m another lazy idiot who created an account here with my Google account, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t think are potential huge problems that could turn up overnight. I’ve got about as bad ideas how to regulate it as anyone else, but we definitely should not stop looking.
You really don’t have a choice unless you go out of your way to use a proper ad-blocker like uBlock origin (which btw Google is actively working on preventing andonly allowing simple “approved” ad blockers in chrome unless you jump through a bunch of hoops).
Any website that implements google analytics (which… is a lot) is you giving Google data about you. Any website that has a Facebook Like icon on it, you are now giving a lot of information to Facebook about you as well even if you never signed up to facebook. It’s trivial to de-anonymize you via fingerprinting specific browser based data and correlate that data against other sites you visit. Go to most websites and if they are being honest look at their privacy policy, those are all companies you are giving data to without your consent.
Edit Hell if you have even emailed someone on Gmail then they have a good amount of contextual information about you without your explicit permission.
Edit 2: Ever have to complete a Recpatcha (the standard captcha system) before accessing a site or feature? You just gave Google information (and helped their machine learning algorithms at the same time for free). Or when you click the the “I am not a robot” checkbox which explicitely checks your browser and OS’s unique fingerprint to determine if you are a bot or not. Or if you text someone with an android phone…
So no, “just don’t use google services” definitely is not enough to keep your data off of Google, and most likely Google has way more data on you then they present in their privacy controls, what they present is the obvious parts of the data they contain that’s already pre-correlated.
It’s impossible to opt out of tracking regardless of the company. We can debate wheither Google is evil or not with the data till the cows come home with anectdotes but to claim that they only have data via your consent is naive.
Edit 3: Also let’s remember that an absence of evidence is not evidence that Google has not done bad things with your data. Cambridge Analytica happened YEARS before it was uncovered, and there are a ton of data brokers out there doing things with your data (and selling them in the same fashion) that just haven’t been caught yet. Google is not some altruistic company doing things out of the goodness of their heart, they are doing things because your data makes them a shit ton of money (even if they find ways to not directly expose it). Anonymization of data is hard, which is why people have successfully gamed Facebook (and most assuredly Google) to do things like rent discrimination and other shady practices because of the granularity of the data these companies have, which cause problems even if details of a specific individual isn’t directly exposed.
Can you find a case of Google doing what you claimed is central to their business model, or can you not?
“I was just repeating what I’ve heard other people say” is also an acceptable answer.