Microsoft skewers Google’s Gmail for insensivity to privacy with parody video
Microsoft may not be a privacy watchdog, but somebody inside the company definitely agrees with us that Gmail is creepy:
On July 20 during the MGX opening sessions, the Softies showed off their “Gmail Man” spoof, meant to spur the troops selling Office 365 against Google Apps, and specifically, Gmail. In the video, Gmail man riffles through mail to find keywords for serving up ads. The message: Google cares more about advertising revenues than privacy.
ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley couldn’t get Microsoft to confirm that the video is legit. But it seems to be. It would have more credibility coming from an organization like Consumer Watchdog than a Google rival (in this case, Microsoft, which has its own free, ad-supported email service – Hotmail).
The video itself is well-done, and manages to be funny and sobering at the same time.
Google confirms it will forcibly make all Google Profiles public by the end of the month
Google is adopting another privacy-encroaching, opt-out, Facebook-style policy:
The purpose of Google Profiles is to enable you to manage your online identity. Today, nearly all Google Profiles are public. We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don’t allow this, so we have decided to require all profiles to be public.
Keep in mind that your full name and gender are the only required information that will be displayed on your profile; you’ll be able to edit or remove any other information that you don’t want to share.
If you currently have a private profile but you do not wish to make your profile public, you can delete your profile. Or, you can simply do nothing. All private profiles will be deleted after July 31, 2011.
What they really meant to say was that private profiles – and privacy in general, for that matter – just don’t fit in with their business model of monetizing people.
People who care about their privacy should stay away from Google’s offerings.
Our front page provides a pretty exhaustive guide which explains how users can Leave Google Behind. Many of the alternatives to Google’s products aren’t well known, which is why we’ve gone to the trouble of listing some of them. We encourage you to try them out for yourself. The Web’s a big place… discover how much fun it is to explore it without Google.
Google tries to build a social network again with “Google+”
Well, we knew this was coming.
Today, the Monster of Mountain View finally unveiled its latest effort to create a data-mining Facebook clone: Google+, which appears be an amalgamation of older Google products (Wave, Buzz, Voice) combined with some Facebook-like features and wrapped in a slick interface.
Basically, what Google is trying to do with Google+ is get people to give it all the information they currently provide willingly to Facebook… like activities, interests, relationships, and so forth. Google already has a good guess as to what people who naively use its search engine like or do, but having a user confirm his or her preferences in a Google profile is better.
Google+ will be incorporated into all Google properties through a toolbar, which will encourage people to populate their Google profiles with lots of personal information and identify their friends to Google. A “feature” called Circles supposedly makes it easy to categorize contacts that already exist in Gmail into groups – the examples Google provided were “Family” and “Bike Geeks” and “Friends”. Google wants people to fill out these relationship webs so it can dramatically improve its data-mining abilities. (It doesn’t have access to Facebook’s internal data, which is why it is so desperate to build its own Facebook clone).
There’s also an app which integrates with Android and automatically uploads photos a user shoots with the phone to Google’s servers, and pushes those photos into Google+.
As you might expect, Google+ will not respect the wishes of people who want to have nothing to do with it.
Another twist is that people in your circles don’t have to be members of Google’s social net. If Aunt Mary refuses to opt in, you can include her anyway, and she can still get the pictures you post to the circle via e-mail.
Amusingly, none of the promotional materials we’ve seen for Google+ even attempt to talk about protecting user privacy. That’s because the whole point of Google+ is to help Google do a better job of waging war on people’s privacy. What Google is asking is that people trust it with all the information they currently give to Facebook in addition to what Google can automatically collect from people using its products.
That’s just too much data for one company to have, period.
People concerned about Google opting them in to Google+, as it did with Buzz, should take this opportunity to Leave Google Behind.
Google shuts down Google Health
But don’t think that means Google isn’t interested in people’s medical records:
Now, with a few years of experience, we’ve observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would. There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people. That’s why we’ve made the difficult decision to discontinue the Google Health service. We’ll continue to operate the Google Health site as usual through January 1, 2012, and we’ll provide an ongoing way for people to download their health data for an additional year beyond that, through January 1, 2013. Any data that remains in Google Health after that point will be permanently deleted.
Translation: We couldn’t convince the masses to trust us with their sensitive medical records, so we’re done with this approach. When we figure out a better way to mine medical information, we’ll be back with a new offering.
Google takes Android spying to next level with Google Wallet
When Google launched its Android phone operating system, it gained the ability to track the movements and activities of millions of gullible people who would eventually be persuaded by “Droid Does” advertising that they needed a Google-powered smartphone.
But spying is addictive, and Google is always looking for ways to do more spying. With Google Wallet, the Monster of Mountain View intends to leverage Android to track what people are buying:
Among other things, Google Wallet will be able to store your credit card information (Google’s launch partners include MasterCard and Citi) as well as loyalty rewards, purchase points, and any saved-up Google Offers that might apply. Then, users who have Near Field Communications (NFC) enabled Android phones will be able to simply whip out their devices when shopping and tap them on electronic payment processors in order to get deals and pay for their goods.
Google is also suggesting that makers of other phones and phone systems (Microsoft, Apple, Research in Motion) could integrate Google Wallet into their own offerings.
But that’s probably just wishful thinking on Google’s part.
Still, with Android as pervasive as it is, it won’t take Google too long to deploy its new spying capabilities. The average life of a phone, even a smartphone, is pretty short. Whether Wallet becomes as ubiquitous as Android remains to be seen. MasterCard is not an exclusive Google partner; it has other irons in the fire as far as the future of payment goes. And embedding credit cards into phones may simply be too uncomfortable for many people. Hopefully, it will be.
There is no particularly good reason why credit cards should be embedded in phones. Next, Google will be signing up governments to make driver’s licenses electronic and embedded in its phones.
Where does this end?
The contents of one’s wallet do not need to be in one’s phone. There are very good reasons for keeping both separate. Foremost is privacy and security. For instance, phones are only going to become more attractive to thieves if they contain more identifying information and means of payment.
Google Wallet provides an insignificant benefit to people who might use it. Like so many other Google products, it is primarily designed to benefit Google, and not users.
Google’s “Chromebooks” are the very definition of Treacherous Computing
Some years ago, free software pioneer Richard Stallman penned an essay asking users, “Can You Trust Your Computer?” He wrote:
Who should your computer take its orders from? Most people think their computers should obey them, not obey someone else. With a plan they call “trusted computing”, large media corporations (including the movie companies and record companies), together with computer companies such as Microsoft and Intel, are planning to make your computer obey them instead of you. (Microsoft’s version of this scheme is called Palladium.) Proprietary programs have included malicious features before, but this plan would make it universal.
He added:
In the past, these were isolated incidents. “Trusted computing” would make the practice pervasive. “Treacherous computing” is a more appropriate name, because the plan is designed to make sure your computer will systematically disobey you. In fact, it is designed to stop your computer from functioning as a general-purpose computer. Every operation may require explicit permission.
Emphasis is LGB’s.
Google has now officially joined the league of companies engaged in what Richard justifiably calls treacherous computing schemes. The Monster of Mountain View is planning to debut a device it calls the Chromebook, which is basically a dumbed-down laptop running Google software which obeys Google instead of the user it supposedly belongs to. H-Online notes:
It is currently unclear if the Chromebooks will have a “developer” switch on them as Google’s CR-48 device did; the switch allowed users to install different operating systems or modified versions of Chrome OS on the device. Chromebooks are designed to use the TPM chips on the motherboard to perform a Verified Boot on the device and if it detects tampering, it will replace the installed operating system with a known good instance automatically; the developer switch on the CR-48 prevented that from happening.
In other words, the hardware in the “Chromebooks” has been intentionally designed to prevent hacking. (Hacking, in the traditional sense, refers to a user’s freedom to tinker, it doesn’t mean harming anybody else’s equipment or services). Somebody who buys a Chromebook is thus not free to repurpose the hardware and use it for something else, because Google has programmed the motherboard to obey Google and not the user.
Even if the “Chromebooks” do contain a “developer switch” like the CR-48 prototype did, there’s no justification for putting hardware-based digital restrictions management into a computer.
Of course, the rationale for the restrictions is simple. Google wants to be sure that people who buy “Chromebooks” use them to access Google products and services.
That way, Google can continually spy on their “customers”.
Google’s behavior here is simply more proof that it is no better than Microsoft or Apple, the leading proprietary software companies (or Electronic Arts, which has stopped selling games and now only rents them out). But unlike Apple or Microsoft, Google is using free software to advance the evil of treacherous computing. What they are doing is outrageous and immoral.
It is time for the free software movement to rise up against Google and recognize it as the greedy, freedom-undermining, privacy-destroying corporation that it is.
Google wants its software running your home appliances, not just portable gadgets
Talk about a privacy-less future…
At its I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google showed a sneak preview of its Android@Home project, which will extend the Android platform into household objects. That means some day in the future, you could control home appliances—your dishwasher, the heating system, the lights in your house—using your Android device as a remote control.
“Think of your phone as the nucleus that this all started with,” said Google engineering director Joe Britt in an interview. “We’re opening the platform up to everyone to do whatever they can imagine.”
There’s something to be said for the ability to turn on your parked car’s air conditioning before you get to it. But, practically, what’s the point of having a dishwasher or washing machine that can be wirelessly controlled? Without place settings or clothes to clean, there’s nothing for the devices to do. And the technology doesn’t yet exist for such appliances to load themselves. For that, we’d need human-like robots.
There’s obviously more potential when it comes to heating, cooling, and lighting. But controlling the utilities in a house from somewhere else in the world has serious privacy and security implications. Implications that have not been addressed, will not be easy to address, and don’t actually even make sense for Google to address. If Google took privacy seriously and didn’t capture data for its own use, it wouldn’t be able to profit. It would be moving the goalposts forward technologically, but it wouldn’t be making money. Spying is Google’s business model. It underpins search and advertising (Search/Analytics/Adsense), Gmail, Chrome and Android, and pretty much every other product it offers.
Google’s practice of collecting data and never deleting it is becoming a bigger and bigger problem that governments are not addressing. There’s been some action taken in the European Union, but almost none in the United States, where Google is based. It’s time for that to change before Google becomes any more powerful than it already is.
Class action lawsuit filed against Google over Android tracking
Following a class-action suit brought by two Tampa men targeting Apple over alleged user tracking, Google is facing a similar class action lawsuit filed in Detroit on Wednesday.
The plaintiffs in the Detroit suit evidently have a case of buyer’s remorse.
Last week developers also revealed that Android devices keep a similar cache of cell tower and WiFi data, though Android limits the amount of data to 50 recently accessed cell towers and 200 recently accessed WiFi networks. Like iOS devices, a person would need to “root” (similar to “jailbreaking”) an Android device to get the data, but in contrast to iPhones this data isn’t synced to a computer.
More disconcerting, however, is the fact that Android devices collect “its location every few seconds and transmitted the data to Google at least several times an hour,” according to research by security expert Samy Kamkar. Google said it uses this data for a variety of uses, but unlike Apple, Android attaches a unique ID number to the data. While that ID number is effectively random and can’t be directly linked to a particular device or user, it is possible to analyze such data and correlate it to particular individuals using increasingly advanced “deanonymization” techniques.
Variety of uses, ha. That’s basically Google’s polite way of saying, we’re invading your privacy to monetize you because that’s the business model we think will make us billions.
Google is correct in one sense: People who are using Android are effectively “opting in” to Google’s surveillance regime. But the thing is, Google is not being upfront with people who are purchasing Android phones about the existence of the regime. Furthermore, what goes on inside of Google’s datacenters is a secret, so it’s hard to expose what Google is really up to.
Google claims to love open source. The reality is, Google only loves open source to the extent it can subjugate free software to expand its empire. Android and Chromium are just means to an end – the end being the ability to track millions of people.
Google does have several initiatives aimed at supporting open source projects, like Google Summer of Code. But Google’s business practices and policies are anything but open source. Google is a proprietary software company just like Apple or Microsoft.
The only difference is that Google is much, much better at being disarming towards people who support free software. (Microsoft has noticed this; it’s starting to copy Google’s tactics).
Just like Google Chrome, Android phones are loaded with proprietary spyware that phones home to Big Brother. Big surprise? Not to LGB, but not everyone scrutinizes Google as we do. Not everyone has the healthy skepticism that they should.
As of today, two concerned women from Detroit have joined the ranks of the skeptics. Good for them.
The initial pleadings are available from Archive.org in PDF format: Brown et al v. Google, Case #2:11-cv-11867.
Google CFO: “Everybody that uses Chrome is a guaranteed locked-in user, in terms of having access to Google”
Another week, another Freudian slip from a Google executive:
Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette noted that Chrome was being heavily invested in by the company because each user is a “locked-in”. “Everybody that uses Chrome is a guaranteed locked-in user, in terms of having access to Google,” was the actual quote.
LGB has said for years that the whole reason Google distributes Chrome is so it can more effectively spy on people. Google puts a lot of resources into constructing an appealing browser, based on open source software that they borrowed from KDE and other free software communities.
Then they put in their payload of spyware… which is proprietary (because if we could see how it works, we’d be able to see the extent of Google’s surveillance).
“Chrome OS” is all about taking the Chrome browser to the next level. If Google’s software is running the whole computer, everything a user does can be monitored by the Monster of Mountain View, and users can be quickly and easily exposed to new Google “services”. Pretty scary.
Towards the end of the call, a couple questions wondered if Google would be using Chrome as a way to alter search results or to introduce new products? This is a bit of a touchy subject since Google has been playing up Chrome as an “open” browser for the web (though technically it’s Chromium that is the open source version). None of the Google executives shot down these ideas and in fact, they played up these possibilities.
In other words, yes, Chrome could eventually be yet another way Google is following your movements online and using it to their advantage. Again, probably not the best way to answer those questions.
Not the best way to answer those questions? So they should be obfuscating their true plans and schemes? How can a tech journalist think that’s a good idea?
It’s good that they’re starting to be honest about their intentions, even if it’s for the wrong reasons. (Google’s execs seem to think the debate about privacy and security is over, despite the increasing attention they’re getting from governments and consumer watchdog groups).
France fines Google over Wi-Spy scandal
Google must pay a fine of €100,000 (US$142,000) for the unauthorized collection of information about the location of Wi-Fi hotspots in France by its Street View cars, France’s National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL) has ordered.
The cars, tasked with taking panoramic photos and 3D scans of buildings, and associating them with precise GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates for Google’s Street View service, also eavesdropped on Wi-Fi networks, recording their SSIDs (Service Set Identifiers) and MAC (Media Access Control) addresses, Google said last April, following an investigation by the data protection authority in Hamburg, Germany.
For too long now, the Monster of Mountain View and other big companies have faced no consequences or repercussions for their infringement of users’ privacy. Even people who don’t want to use Google products or services must take extra steps to prevent data about their activities from being collected by Google. That’s wrong. People shouldn’t have to spend hours figuring out how to “opt-out” of Google’s surveillance net. Surveillance should be prohibited without the explicit consent of the user.
