The NY Times has a rather good article out about the impact that the loss of net neutrality would have on user privacy:

Without neutrality, say advocates of online privacy, the Internet becomes more like a mall — where users are from the start viewed as consumers — and less like a public square.

“The people who are pushing for a nonneutral world are pushing it for monetary purposes,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for privacy online.

“Interfering with packets,” she said, echoing Mr. Saxon’s concerns, “creates the space for this kind of surveillance.”

Google has no incentive to be in favor of "net neutrality". It is already a monster, the Monster of Mountain View. Because of its size, it can strike deals with internet service providers like Verzion, ensuring that its "services" are delivered through the fast lane. So what if everyone else gets screwed?

Google isn't interested in being the web's gateway. Rather, Google's executives want Google to be the destination. The only place you have to go when you connect to the Internet. Er, make that the GoogleNet. Google envisions itself as handling all your communications needs (email, chat, and social networking) providing a global storefront for you to buy physical goods, digital content, plus software "apps", and giving you a place to store your data (photos, documents, spreadsheets, etc.) Since you'll trust Google with all your information, everything, Google will know pretty much everything about you. And they'll be able to use such knowledge to monetize you.

It is already happening:

For a recent series in The Wall Street Journal about how Web sites track their visitors, called “What They Know,” The Journal studied the top 50 Web sites in the United States to see how many tools they embedded in visitors’ computers. Many use more than 100 such tools; only Wikipedia had none.

Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia Law School who is an advocate for free software and online privacy, sees frameworks like the one proposed by Google and Verizon as emphasizing the business of the Internet at the expense of the privacy of the Internet.

“As the network does more to adapt to what commerce needs, it becomes more and more about knowing what’s inside the head of the user, about what the person is doing and buying,” he said.

Google has sold out on net neutrality, just like it sold out on user privacy a long time ago. If you are bothered by this, do what we've done: Leave Google behind. It's possible. And it's rewarding. You'll see more of the Web, you'll see it faster, and you'll see it with less clutter and junk.

No, this is not an April Fool's joke:

In the wake of Facebook’s F8 conference this week, where it apparently bid to become the new Sheriff of the Internet, Facebook’s plans to effectively put ’social’ into the very structure of the Web has a few people a little concerned.

The main issue is that there are concerns that Facebook, by default, now opts you in to allowing third party sites like Yelp to ‘personalise’ your experience, and there are questions about how much information is given away.

The result is that lots of geeks are considering leaving Facebook, and perhaps even more interestingly, veritable droves of Google software engineers are among them.

Maybe those engineers should consider finding another place to work in addition to decamping from the world's largest social network. The Monster of Mountain View is far more invasive and pervasive than Facebook, with its array of spyware-laden products and services. Most people have no idea that they're being tracked by Google Adsense and Google Analytics as they surf the Web. Adsense and Analytics are embedded into so many websites now that it's become more unusual to stumble across a website without them than one with them.

Facebook is merely following in Google's footsteps. That doesn't excuse the company's behavior, but it's clear who their bad role model is.

The engineers deactivating Facebook accounts as a user privacy protests aren't the only hypocrites working at Google. A few years ago, the Monster of Mountain View blacklisted CNET for publishing a story in which it demonstrated how easy it was to find information about a person by using Google. The person CNET chose to be its example?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is evidently obsessed with his own privacy whilst not caring that his company invades the privacy of millions of people.

Too many people naively think that they're anonymous when using the Internet. Truth is, as far as Google is concerned, nobody should be anonymous. The Monster of Mountain View is doing everything it can to make privacy an ideal of yesterday:

Google's roving Street View spycam may blur your face, but it's got your number. The Street View service is under fire in Germany for scanning private WLAN networks, and recording users' unique Mac (Media Access Control) addresses, as the car trundles along.

Germany's Federal Commissioner for Data Protection Peter Schaar says he's "horrified" by the discovery.

"I am appalled… I call upon Google to delete previously unlawfully collected personal data on the wireless network immediately and stop the rides for Street View," according to German broadcaster ARD.

Schaar might be horrified, but given what we know about how Google operates already, we're not. We're simply not surprised at all.

We have to give Germany propos for having a Federal Commissioner for Data Protection. The United States - where Google is headquartered - really needs one of those. The Federal Trade Commission is a joke. It doesn't keep pace with Google at all. And that allows Google to get away with things like this.

The EFF reports that Google has embarked upon another creepy project:

Lawyers from EFF warned this week of the implications of Google Sidle, a new beta product the company describes as, "Bringing our mission of organizing the world's information to your cafeteria," but which one EFF lawyer described as, "Creepy, even for Google."

Companies and schools subscribing to Sidle will have the convenience of not having to bus their own trays in exchange for allowing Google-nominated "Foodlers" to review leftovers for what the company describes as "analysis intended to improve food offerings and better target future nourishment." Customers can later visit personalized webpages describing what they didn't eat and how tasty it turned out to be.

"Google's business model has always relied on collating all the great free stuff on the Internet -- stuff that you might otherwise have missed," said the official blog entry announcing the service. "Our maintenance staff noticed a lot of free food in our award-winning restaurants was going to waste. After that insight, it only took Google engineers a few weeks to take the benefits of our foraging to millions. It also gives our hungry Googlers (or 'hungrooglers,' as we fondly refer to them) the opportunity to sample cafeteria food from around the country."

While initially cautious beta-testers have been reportedly swayed by the bright primary colors of the mu-mus early "Foodlers" have worn, privacy experts warn that new Sidle customers may be giving away more than they realize.

"Consumers should ask themselves some hard questions about this free service," said Kurt Opsahl, Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "such as 'Why don't these people just buy their own food,' 'Where do they take this stuff,' 'Why do they wear those gloves when they're taking it,' and, most importantly, 'Why do they keep staring at me while I'm trying to eat?'"

Even some employees within Google are said to have concerns about how much pre-launch testing the new, experimental service has undergone. "Usually we extensively self-trial these new social networking features within the organization," said one anonymous source, "but as soon as the Sidle people started talking about 'dogfooding,' everyone just stopped sitting near them at lunch."

Sidle is reportedly a "20% project," a unique Google custom where the 20% of the engineers with the poorest socialization skills are put to work on projects that management does not closely supervise and can retrospectively deny all knowledge of. Other 20% projects have included the "GTalk Slightly Too Loudly" instant messaging client that relayed private conversations to the Google search index (as well as everyone else in the room), and the extremely short-lived "Google Boggle Ogle
Goggles (Street View Edition)."

Seemed like it might be real for a minute, didn't it? Happy April Fools' Day!

Why settle for controlling the user experience on only two out of three screens? The Monster of Mountain View has revealed plans to extend the Googlenet's reach to television:

Google and Intel have teamed with Sony to develop a platform called Google TV to bring the Web into the living room through a new generation of televisions and set-top boxes.

The move is an effort by Google and Intel to extend their dominance of computing to an arena where they have little sway, the TV.

What are Intel and Sony thinking? Google doesn't have partners, it has stooges. Mozilla and Apple are discovering that Google isn't much of a friend; it seeks to use them for its own purposes, and doesn't have their best interests at heart.

Sony and Intel will eventually learn this lesson.

The New York Times' sources say the "Google TV" contraption will be based on Android, the Google-approved spyware that ships on mobile phones.

A few weeks ago, Google announced that its Blogger "service" would drop support for File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, publishing. Blogger's FTP publishing option has long been used by people who want to publish a blog as part of their own, non-Google hosted website, but use a hosted service to maintain the blog from the backend. Google has decided to end support for that option:

FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

It turns out that that point five percent are a vocal, savvy bunch... and they're mad. Originally, Google was going to shut down FTP publishing on March 26th, but it has backed off and given users an extra month to make the "all or nothing" choice: Either migrate a Blogger blog to Google's servers, or leave Blogger. Not surprisingly, many people are choosing to leave.

Writes one user:

Cut sleazy "migration" buzzword.

We don't want to move our content to your servers, since you like to shut down services the moment you decide it's 'outdated' or hurts your bottom line.

I'm done with Blogger forever unless you keep FTP for people who like me who have been using it for years.

Another says:

Putting in my two cents again about the disappointment that Blogger is shutting down the FTP updating. I had spent a lot of time and effort getting my sites working with Blogger, and for me, it was the ideal situation because I could update all of them from one location online.

Since the initial announcement, I tried both Thingamablog and b2evolution. TAMB is based on your computer, b2evo is installed on your server. I wanted to throw both of those out there for the any that are migrating away from Blogger because of this changeover. I tried both of them, and with some configuring, I was able to import all of my posts, with correct dates.

And another:

Unfortunately, I have to take my blog elsewhere - thank you for the free service over the past 6 years. One of the things that would help with my migration is knowing the algorithm you use to generate the URL of a blog post please.

Still another:

FTP is time tested software.

Hard to believe the mighty Google is afraid of FILE TRANFER PROTOCOL.

Still not too late to come to your senses. Not only will I de-Google my Blog but I'll de-Google everthing -- except Gmail I suppose, since that would be too onerous even for me.

And I'll urge others to do the same.

Because if you screw us once, you're bound to screw us again and anytime you feel like it.

Michael observes:

So you're solving problems I might have on my end (i.e. my ISP & FTP) by just eliminating what could cause the problem despite the problem not being on your end. Yeah, thanks.

I've moved to WordPress.

Finally, foobarmus points out:

The tragedy of this imminent move is that many blogs currently accessible to readers in China no longer will be.

The great firewall does IP based blocking as well as many other kinds, has been blocking blogspot for years, but they can't block all the ftp bloggers in one fell swoop, because it simply isn't technically feasible.

Those blogs are now going to end up on google servers, which means it will be much simpler to block them all - and this will happen in due course, as certainly as our sun will turn into a black dwarf. This means that less information unprocessed by the central government will be available to your average Chinese person, which is basically a bad thing for humanity.

Please rethink this strategy, for the sake of Chinese people who are trying to live informed lives.

All of these comments come from the blog Google set up to focus on the "migration" or "transition".

FTP publishing users have until May 1st to find a new platform. We recommend WordPress. Other possibilities are Serendipity and Movable Type.

Tech writer Kirk McElhearn has announced this week that he's made the noble and informed decision to Leave Google Behind:

For a company whose unofficial slogan is “Don’t Be Evil,” Google has been ignoring its so-called core value with alarming frequency as of late. And because of that, I decided to delete my Gmail account, along with all other Google services that I am able to do without. I have also deleted as much personal information as possible from my Google profile.

He goes on to recite the many ways that Google can collect data about its users, which are noted on LGB's front page:

But not only does Google dominate the search (and, hence, advertising) market, it also knows a lot about you. By adding more and more “free” services—free in exchange for the annoyance of ads, and for users’ giving up their privacy — Google accumulates a wealth of information about your interests, your browsing habits, your contacts, the blogs you visit (using your Google profile), pictures of your home, and much more.

He concludes:

Google knows more about you than the NSA, and has recently shown that it doesn’t give a hoot about your privacy. The company has gotten too big, and has turned into just another corporation trying to maximize its assets—and those assets are you.

Well said. Welcome to the LGB movement, Kirk!

In the futuristic digital world that Google wants to create - the Googlenet - there is no such thing as user privacy. So naturally, Google didn't bother to build meaningful privacy safeguards into its latest offering, Google Buzz, which is basically an attempt to further monetize and exploit the people that Google has lured into signing up for Gmail:

When Google introduced Buzz — its answer to Facebook and Twitter — it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically selected by the company based on the people that each user communicated with most frequently through Google’s e-mail and chat services.

But what Google viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of angry critics. Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion of privacy, and they faulted the company for failing to ask permission before sharing a person’s Buzz contacts with a broad audience. For the last three days, Google has faced a firestorm of criticism on blogs and Web sites, and it has already been forced to alter some features of the service.

Whoops.

Normally, when Google rolls out a new product that lacks privacy safeguards, it faces some criticism, but the Monster of Mountain View always brushes it off. Refreshingly, it looks like that might be harder to do in this case.

[C]ritics said that Google’s decision to use e-mail and chat correspondence as the basis of a social network was fundamentally misguided. While it is common for social networks to make public a person’s list of friends and followers, those lists are not typically created from e-mail conversations.

“People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. “E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to be private.”

Yeah, but Gmail's not private... it never has been. It's a product offered by Google, which inherently means there is no guarantee of privacy whatsoever. People who want their email to be secure and deletable should use a service like Hushmail that actually respects their privacy.

Of course, Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan had to make this dumb comment:

I don’t think people expected that Google would show the world who you are connected with.

Well, we Google skeptics did. This is par for the course.

If there is a silver lining to Google's continuing onslaught against privacy, it's that more people are starting to take Google skeptics (like those of us here at LGB) seriously. Google is still growing like a dangerous cancer, but the number of people who are developing a healthy suspicion of Google is also growing. Hopefully, the growth of the latter will soon outpace the growth of the former.

As Google gets bigger... and bigger... and bigger... and continues to subvert free software, the Mozilla Foundation seems to be increasingly thinking about severing ties with the monster. Or so CNET's Matt Asay muses:

There have been rumblings that Mozilla would look to Google alternatives for the default search engine within Firefox, despite Mozilla pulling in 91 percent of its revenues from its Google partnership. Mozilla employee Asa Dotzler, though not speaking for the foundation, says that he'd welcome a switch from Google given its rising dominance over the Web.

BusinessWeek ran a story almost a year ago about the increasingly tense relationship between Google and Mozilla. Things have gotten worse since then, as Google continues to promote Chrome. The Monster of Mountain View is now encouraging developers of extensions for Firefox to develop the same extensions for Chrome, so that it can more easily poach Firefox's market share.

Mozilla should stop dithering and unhitch its wagon from Google's.

Lots of commentators are saying this is taking a page out of Mozilla's playbook (Mozilla has a deal with Google). But Mozilla wasn't the first to strike such a deal, and as Canonical has shown, it won't be the last:

The next release of Ubuntu will scrap Google as the default search engine on its Firefox browser in favor of Yahoo!, thanks to a new revenue-sharing deal between Yahoo! and commercial Ubuntu backer Canonical.

With regulators set to approve Yahoo!'s search pact with Microsoft, this means that Redmond will power the future of Firefox on Ubuntu, a combination with decidedly anti-Redmond connotations. The ultimate irony is that Microsoft will essentially be paying people to build a Linux distro.

Canonical's Rick Spencer announced the Yahoo! revenue deal on Tuesday, with a post to the Ubuntu developer mailing list.

Microsoft has likewise struck deals to make Bing the default search engine on certain devices (Verizon smartphones come to mind) and applications. Bing is also featured in a recurring segment on the soon-to-be-retired Jay Leno Show.

It's a bit odd that Canonical is doing a deal with Yahoo, which is basically turning over its search R&D to Microsoft and allowing Bing to power its search engine. But maybe Canonical's folks felt that dealing directly with Microsoft (which also makes Windows) just wasn't an option. Whatever. At least they're ditching Google. Next step: Quit collaborating with the Monster of Mountain View on its forthcoming Chrome operating system Big Brother portal.