I’ve been using Google Chrome for Linux since it was first made available.  I use Gmail, Google Docs (now Drive), Google Plus, Google Adsense, Google Analytics, Google Music, and many more.  I am the original owner of an original CR-48 Chromebook, having received mine way back in Dec. 2010.  I promote Google services at work and have worked hard to point my business’ compass towards their entire suite of offerings.  I use a Samsung Nexus S with an official build of Android 4.04 and I’m only interested in official devices moving forward.

At the same time, I have been gently treading a fine line between complete faith and trust in Google and fear of the Orwellian future they are capable of realizing for us all.

We lost faith and trust in Google years ago. Virtually every move Google has made since has vindicated our decision to Leave Google Behind. Sounds like Dean is starting to catch on.

I never had any errors loading Slashdot or OMG Ubuntu.  Hacker News, Reddit and all the other sites that I frequent all loaded fine, %100 of the time.  Of course Google Plus, Adsense, Analytics and Google Drive all gave me “Connection Reset”.  So today, while running errands, a really nasty notion came to me.  Is Google using user agent strings to create a poor experience in Firefox?

I decided to test this theory.

Dean’s tests confirmed his suspicions: Google’s offerings work just reliably when the browser identifies itself to Google as Chrome or a Chromium-based browser. But errors were commonplace for Dean when his browser identified itself to Google as Firefox.

How typical.

Read Dean’s post for more.

At the center of the uproar over a Google project that scooped up personal data from potentially millions of unsuspecting people is the company software engineer who wrote the code.

Google has declined to identify the engineer, as has the Federal Communications Commission. The F.C.C. recently closed its 17-month inquiry into the project, Street View, with a finding that Google broke no laws but had obstructed its investigation.

The agency also said it was unable to resolve all the issues it was considering because the engineer — whom it referred to in its report on the inquiry as Engineer Doe — cited his Fifth Amendment right and declined to talk.

Now a former state investigator involved in another inquiry into Street View has identified Engineer Doe. The former investigator said he was Marius Milner, a programmer with a background in telecommunications who is highly regarded in the field of Wi-Fi networking, essential to the project.

Who is Marius Milner? He is a talented engineer who still works for Google (in the YouTube division) and has been referred to by fellow hackers as a god. He developed a Windows-based utility called NetStumbler, popular with wardrivers, which excels at sniffing out wireless access points, including home routers. (A wardriver is a person who searches for wireless networks as a hobby).

Google has been attempting to shield Milner from public exposure, but now that he has been outed by the New York Times, they will no longer be able to do so. Milner has yet to be hit with litigation for his involvement in the Wi-Spy scandal. Google has contended in court that it spying, made possible in part thanks to Milner, was not unlawful and it should not be punished for invading the privacy of millions of people without their knowledge. We urge courts in every jurisdiction to find otherwise.

Google is taking the wraps off a long-anticipated product that it views as one of its most important launches of the year, as the Internet giant continues its push toward a future in which users’ photos, spreadsheets and other data primarily live on the Internet “cloud” instead of a PC or some other device.

The launch of “Google Drive” Tuesday has been a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley, with the name and a rough description of the online storage product widely circulated in recent weeks as Google has worked out the final bugs. Drive will open up to millions of users around the world starting Tuesday, allowing them to sync their files between PCs, smartphones and tablets.

Google’s main intention with its new Drive offering, of course, is to take mining of personal information to a whole new level. With Drive, Google is going beyond its existing Gmail, Docs, YouTube, and Picasa offerings, and inviting users to upload pretty much everything they might normally keep on their desktops and laptops to its datacenters. The problematic user agreement Google created for Drive naturally does not provide adequate protections for the privacy and security of the people who use it:

While private files winding up on Google Drive may not be as privacy-protected as the ones on your hard disk, fact is that Google is not granting itself free rein to use personal data. But you’d be hard-pressed to know that given a “toxic brew” of conflicting claims found in the company’s omnibus privacy policy, according to a legal expert who has closely reviewed Google’s policies.

“The language is not drafted nearly as tightly as we would expect from a company of Google’s size and stature,” says Eric Goldman of the High Tech Law Institute. He describes the covenants as poorly written and likely to confuse users by virtue of Google mashing licensing and privacy statements together.

Several companies and media organizations have already warned their employees that Google Drive’s terms of service are problematic, and the offering should not be used.

We agree. Stay far, far away from Google Drive.

MORE FROM ARS TECHNICA: Google Drive files can end up in ads, even though you still own them

Google’s e-mail service, Gmail, is being reported as offline for many people this morning.

The extent and cause of the outage isn’t known at the moment. It is not a complete outage, but Twitter is abuzz with reports from users unable to access the Web service.

Users seem to be reporting mostly outages in Gmail.com accounts. Users of Google business e-mail accounts (Google Apps) are also reporting issues. Google’s Apps status dashboard reports, “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly.”

Other services, such as Google Docs and Google+, also appear unusable for those who are unable to access Gmail.

Google has tried to encourage the belief that its offerings have rock-solid reliability, but the truth is, they don’t. This isn’t the first Gmail outage, and it won’t be the last. There’s no good reason for anyone to trust the Monster of Mountain View with their email.

It’s tantamount to a slap on the wrist, but at least it’s something.

Google Inc. (GOOG) “impeded” and “delayed” a U.S. inquiry into its data collection, according to the latest in a series of regulatory probes of the company’s privacy practices.

The Federal Communications Commission is seeking a $25,000 fine after examining how Google gathered personal e-mails, text messages and other materials through its Street View location service, the agency said in an April 13 filing. That is the maximum penalty for failure to cooperate with an investigation, Tammy Sun, an FCC spokeswoman, said in an interview yesterday.

If only the FCC could tack on more zeros to the amount of the fine… maybe then Google would start to take the agency’s investigation seriously.

Previous versions of our application used Google Maps for the nearby view. This has now been replaced with OpenStreetMap - an open and free source of Map Data that has been referred to as ‘Wikipedia for Maps.’ This closely aligns with our goal of making knowledge available in a free and open manner to everyone. This also means we no longer have to use proprietary Google APIs in our code, which helps it run on the millions of cheap Android handsets that are purely open source and do not have the proprietary Google applications.

OpenStreetMap is used in both iOS and Android, thanks to the amazing Leaflet.js library. We are currently using Mapquest’s map tiles for our application, but plan on switching to our own tile servers in the near future.

Foursquare and Apple have also recently ditched Google Maps in favor of OpenStreetMap.

Even though Americans like search engines and they really like Google, they don’t like targeted ads or personalized search results.

Nearly three-quarters of search engine users surveyed say they don’t want search engines to mine their personal information to tailor results to their interests, something Google has been doing since January.

More than two-thirds say they don’t want to be tracked on the Web or have ads targeted to them.

Google, of course, is betting that people will still continue to use its offerings despite whatever misgivings they may have about the company’s policies. That’s why it has continued waging its war on user privacy.

But increasingly, there is pushback. It used to be that Google could get away with a lot. But these days, when the company makes a move, it gets noticed and reported. And consumer protection groups register their concerns or opposition. That’s progress. That’s a good thing. European regulators have already concluded that Google’s new unified privacy policy violates European laws, and they’re initiating a probe which could be the precursor to litigation. A group of state attorney generals has also condemned Google’s consolidation of privacy policies from its different products into one as “an invasion of privacy”.

Google often confuses me. The company, with its thousands of genius employees, often makes the most brain-dead decisions. Just earlier today Google rolled out their latest twist on the Android Market — but it’s not called Android Market anymore. Instead of simply redesigning the e-store, Google also re-branded the whole thing to Google Play.

The reasoning is sound: the company wanted to better describe their offerings since it’s not just apps. The Play name is multifaceted, evoking thoughts of playing a game or pressing play on a media file. Cool. But most markets also sell more than one sort of good. The old name worked just as well.

The problem (from the perspective of Google executives) was that the old name was not directly tied into the Google brand. The new one is, just like Google Plus, Google Wallet, Google Chrome, Gmail, Google Apps, and most of the company’s other offerings.

Perhaps the name change is a good thing. At least now it’s more evident that Google owns and operates the online store that is preloaded onto Android (soon to be known as Google Mobile) spyphones.

Last week I shut down the last of my three Gmail accounts. From 2007, to a greater or lesser extent, these three accounts were used for various purposes, initially enthusiastically, later reluctantly.

Why get away from Gmail altogether? The company has always been snooping on email and feeding through advertisements based on keywords in the mail. But from March 1, the spying will become over-arching, ostensibly to provide a better customer experience.

I want no part of it.

He adds, eloquently:

The internet existed long before Google did. It is built on free and open source software, with protocols that are open as well. Genuine geeks and nerds did the building without any thought of making money.

Now we have advertising and marketing companies masquerading as technology companies and trying to squeeze every stray dollar, rouble, pound, euro and dirham out of people. And doing it under the guise of “improving the customer experience”.

No one company should be allowed to monopolise the services on the net and milk user data to sell its ads or any other service or product. There’s a time to wake up and for me that time is now.

If more people came to this conclusion every day, Google would find it much harder to wage its war on privacy. We need more people to wake up and realize what’s happening. Everyone should care about user privacy and what companies like Google do with their data. Everyone should be cognizant of the consequences of oversharing.

Scroogle, the search engine operated by privacy militant and self-appointed Wikipedia watchdog Daniel Brandt, has folded for real. After enduring DDOS attacks “around the clock” that sent a flood of unsustainable traffic to his servers, Mr. Brandt took down the search engine along with his other four domains, namebase.org, google-watch.org, cia-on-campus.org, and book-grab.com. His theory is that he was being attacked by hackers with a personal vendetta.

“These four domains had also been on the web for a long time — NameBase first went online in 1997, and before that had been available on telnet since 1995. I spent 27 years developing NameBase,” he said in an email, and referred to the Wikipedia page.

“I no longer have any domains online,” Mr. Brandt wrote. “I also took all my domains out of DNS because I want to signal to the criminal element that I have no more servers to trash. This hopefully will ward off further attacks on my previous providers.”

Unfortunately, since Brandt has deliberately excluded all of his sites from the Internet Archive (which can be done using a robots.txt file directive), there isn’t a copy of his site out there that we can link to for archival purposes. Which means all of Brandt’s criticism of Google is effectively gone, except for what may remain in search engine caches and privately-created mirrors.

While we can respect Daniel’s wish to go dark, it would be nice if he would be willing to donate his collection of web pages to a university, consumer watchdog group, or other appropriate steward that they remain available to people who want to learn about Google’s war on privacy.

Google Watch was one of the first sites established devoted principally to criticism of Google. It ceased receiving substantive and regular updates several years ago, but it was still a valuable resource. Unfortunately, it has now disappeared.

With Google Watch gone, LGB’s existence has arguably become more important. Leave Google Behind isn’t going anywhere, either. This site will remain online and accessible indefinitely so that those who wish to part ways with Google and find alternatives to its spyware-laden offerings can continue to do so.