Google is Evil: Rubik's Cube Edition

Don’t go to Google’s home page if you want to be productive today.

Whoops.

What is this google?

The EU seems to think google might be Evil too:

‘European Parliament to vote on Google break-up’:

The European Parliament is due to vote later on a proposal to break Google’s search business away from its other services.

It is the latest twist in a four year antitrust investigation which has so far failed to reach a conclusion. The body has no power to break up the net giant but the vote will send out a clear message about whether politicians want regulators to take a tough line.

Senior US politicians have criticised the proposal. A joint letter from two US government committees said that the way the EU is targeting US technology companies raised questions about its commitment to open markets

“This and similar proposals build walls rather than bridges [and] do not appear to give full consideration to the negative effect such policies may have on the broader US-EU trade relationship,” wrote senators Ron Wyden and Orrin Hatch and congressmen Dave Camo and Sander Levin.

Meanwhile trade body Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) said that the “increased politicisation” of the Google competition investigation was “deeply troubling”.

‘Google told to expand right to be forgotten’:

Google is under fresh pressure to expand the “right to be forgotten” to its international .com search tool. A panel of EU data protection watchdogs said the move was necessary to prevent the law from being circumvented.

Google currently de-lists results that appear in the European versions of its search engines, but not the international one. The panel said it would advise member states’ data protection agencies of its view in new guidelines.

At present, visitors are diverted to localised editions of the US company’s search tool - such as Google.co.uk and Google.fr - when they initially try to visit the Google.com site.

However, a link is provided at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen offering an option to switch to the international .com version. This link does not appear if the users attempted to go to a regional version in the first place. Even so, it means it is possible for people in Europe to easily opt out of the censored lists.

The data watchdogs said this “cannot be considered a sufficient means to guarantee the rights” of citizens living in the union’s 28 member countries.

A spokesman for Google said: “We haven’t yet seen the Article 29 Working Party’s guidelines, but we will study them carefully when they’re published.”

The European Parliament doesn’t actually have the power to do that, though.

The folks who are trying to screw up Google are folks being paid money by Google’s competitors.

The thing is, suggesting that Google has some kind of monopoly in search is ridiculous, because literally anyone could make their own search engine and have it accessed by every device… The reason everyone uses Google is because their search engine is the best. But hey, you’re free to go use ask Jeeves if you really want to.

Sources please?

The problem, at least as far as European politicians is concerned, isn’t the monopoly in search. It’s the monopoly in internet advertising, which is driven (among other things) by the dominant position in search.

The choice of all discerning gentlemen (was it ever ‘british’?, i think it is owned by an american company now). Anyway, yes you are right we can use a number of other search engines (Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo etc) that are all more or less as good as Google.

Facebook enters the same arena over data storage of euro users:

‘Facebook data row reaches top Euro court’:

And sorry about the new look BBC, it’s doing the in-vogue ‘mobile look’ thing, and losing functionality as per usual in all that.

And a bit on that (as i can’t seem to find a specific ‘Facebook is evil’ thread):

‘Leave Facebook if you don’t want to be spied on, warns EU’:

The European Commission has warned EU citizens that they should close their Facebook accounts if they want to keep information private from US security services, finding that current Safe Harbour legislation does not protect citizen’s data.

The comments were made by EC attorney Bernhard Schima in a case brought by privacy campaigner Maximilian Schrems, looking at whether the data of EU citizens should be considered safe if sent to the US in a post-Snowden revelation landscape.

“You might consider closing your Facebook account, if you have one,” Schima told attorney general Yves Bot in a hearing of the case at the European court of justice in Luxembourg.

When asked directly, the commission could not confirm to the court that the Safe Harbour rules provide adequate protection of EU citizens’ data as it currently stands.

Somebody have to turn this into a drinking game. One where “[corporation name|european union] do [evil|stupid] thing to fuck people privacy and freedom”

Facebook’s privacy issues are small-time compared to AT&T. Now these guys know how to be evil.

If you have AT&T’s gigabit Internet service and wonder why it seems so affordable, here’s the reason—AT&T is boosting profits by rerouting all your Web browsing to an in-house traffic scanning platform, analyzing your Internet habits, then using the results to deliver personalized ads to the websites you visit, e-mail to your inbox, and junk mail to your front door.

The mother of all spywares.

So, I ask myself. Is privacy a indefeasible right?, you can be open about this and that other thing, but can you sell the 100% of your privacy to other party?, your medical record updated in real time, your sex life, your friends and what you think about them, where you are in real time, what you eat, what you shit, and everything else.

The modern world is much easier to swallow if you come to the terms with the fact that privacy, as currently defined, is an outmoded concept and we are entering the post-privacy era.

Theres things that are worth fighting for, and one is privacy.

My life is boring and theres nothing interesting in it, but is mine. And sure, theres a lot of people that don’t know how to draw a line.

And this one is about google, and uk users of safari being able to sue them:

‘Safari users win right to sue Google over privacy’:

How did a thread about a Google doodle get resurrected to be another one of those threads?

I want an program which makes random searches on search engines, for me. An agent, you might call it, whose sole purpose is to muddy the waters sufficiently that it means your metadata is basically worthless.

The best part of this is AT&T isn’t cheaper than, say, Google, for the same service – and Google, the root of all evil, doesn’t track you the same way AT&T does. It’s absolutely amazing.