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Is Google Evil?


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2012 Oct 12, 9:13am   3,451 views  7 comments

by Patrick   ➕follow (55)   💰tip   ignore  

When Google started censoring search results in China to please the Chinese government, I lost respect for them.

Then I heard that they cooperate with the NSA, FBI, etc to report specific user searches. They don't have to -- they could simply not track IP addresses or keep any record of what any one particular user searched for.

Lastly, when I worked at A9.com in Palo Alto, which was Amazon's attempt to compete with Google search, they killed it with money by hiring away the CEO of A9, Udi Manber. The rumor was that they just wrote him a check for a million dollars. Sounds like anti-competitive monopolistic behavior to me.

But I guess that's all just normal American corporate-level evil, nothing special. Anyone heard that they're more evil than that?

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1   Raw   2012 Oct 12, 9:20am  


But I guess that's all just normal American corporate-level evil, nothing special. Anyone heard that they're more evil than that?

Silicon Valley is nothing but a "Serengeti" in the strictest sense. You survive by ensuring your enemies don't get off the ground.

2   Biff Baxter   2012 Oct 12, 9:27am  

Google has a record of every search ever made on Google.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/09/opinion/ghitis-google-privacy/index.html

Article quote:

"Google has every e-mail you ever sent or received on Gmail. It has every search you ever made, the contents of every chat you ever had over Google Talk. It holds a record of every telephone conversation you had using Google Voice, it knows every Google Alert you've set up. It has your Google Calendar with all content going back as far as you've used it, including everything you've done every day since then. It knows your contact list with all the information you may have included about yourself and the people you know. It has your Picasa pictures, your news page configuration, indicating what topics you're most interested in. And so on.

If you ever used Google while logged in to your account to search for a person, a symptom, a medical side effect, a political idea; if you ever gossiped using one of Google's services, all of this is on Google's servers. And thanks to the magic of Google's algorithms, it is easy to sift through the information because Google search works like a charm. Google can even track searches on your computer when you're not logged in for up to six months."

That actually doesn't bother me. Even severely competitive or anti-competitive behavior doesn't bother me. If you are in business, you are supposed to kill your competition.

What pisses me off about them is the fact that they ritualistically fuck over their customers (purchasers of advertising) because they are a monopoly and their in your face hypocrisy that makes me hope that Eric Schmidt and the other two get butt raped, a lot.

Biff

3   Biff Baxter   2012 Oct 12, 10:08am  

Ask and you shall receive. This was just published:

F.T.C. Staff Prepares Antitrust Case Against Google

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/13/technology/ftc-staff-prepares-antitrust-case-against-google-over-search.html

Mark my words, at most they will get a slap on the wrist.

Biff

4   Patrick   2012 Oct 12, 10:26am  

Biff Baxter says

Mark my words, at most they will get a slap on the wrist.

Sure, they're pretty much part of the surveillance state at this point. Why would the government really want to harm their own ability to spy on the public?

Kind of reminds me of The Onion's "Operation Facebook" article:

http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/

Also, I remember rumors that Microsoft was pretty much exempted from anti-trust law in the US because they help the government spy on every computer with Windows installed -- and even better, they help the government spy on Windows computers in China. (Even the pirated copies, teehee!)

5   cc0   2012 Oct 13, 4:15am  


they killed it with money by hiring away the CEO of A9

IIRC, they tried to set up a "non-poaching" agreement with all the SV firms, and were shut down by the courts for collusion. If so, they're practically forced to do that sort of thing...

6   freak80   2012 Oct 15, 1:43am  

Wasn't it Ted Kaczynski who warned that technology/computers would be the end of human freedom?

7   cc0   2012 Oct 15, 3:05am  

freak80 says

Wasn't it Ted Kaczynski who warned that technology/computers would be the end of human freedom?

I haven't read the manifesto, but not quite.

This is interesting:

http://www.radiolab.org/2010/jun/28/

Starting around 4 minutes in, but the whole show is pretty good.

Here's a better synopsis:

"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences," Kaczynski's manifesto begins, "have been a disaster for the human race." They have led, it contends, to the growth of a technological system dependent on a social, economic, and political order that suppresses individual freedom and destroys nature. "The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system."

By forcing people to conform to machines rather than vice versa, the manifesto states, technology creates a sick society hostile to human potential. Because technology demands constant change, it destroys local, human-scale communities. Because it requires a high degree of social and economic organization, it encourages the growth of crowded and unlivable cities and of mega-states indifferent to the needs of citizens.

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/06/chase.htm

Given the recent financial crisis, it may also be interesting to point to these quotes from Wikipedia article's summary of it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Industrial_Society_and_Its_Future

He claims that revolution, unlike reform, is possible, and calls on sympathetic readers to initiate such revolution using two strategies: to "heighten the social stresses within the system so as to increase the likelihood that it will break down" and to "develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology". He gives various tactical recommendations, including avoiding the assumption of political power, avoiding all collaboration with leftists, and supporting free trade agreements in order to bind the world economy into a more fragile, unified whole.

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