Category: Menacing Monopoly

Some of the people working for the Monster of Mountain View still have a conscience, even if their bosses don’t. Via The New York Times:

Hundreds of Google employees, upset at the company’s decision to secretly build a censored version of its search engine for China, have signed a letter demanding more transparency to understand the ethical consequences of their work.

In the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times, employees wrote that the project and Google’s apparent willingness to abide by China’s censorship requirements “raise urgent moral and ethical issues.” They added, “Currently we do not have the information required to make ethically-informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment.”

The letter is circulating on Google’s internal communication systems and is signed by about 1,400 employees, according to three people familiar with the document, who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Props to these brave souls for speaking up and letting management know they’re not comfortable doing secret work on a project that could result in Google collaborating with Xi’s authoritarian regime.

“The tech giant is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps,” reports The New York Times’ Natasha Singer. “But schools may be giving Google more than they are getting.”

Key excerpt:

Schools may be giving Google more than they are getting: generations of future customers.

Google makes $30 per device by selling management services for the millions of Chromebooks that ship to schools. But by habituating students to its offerings at a young age, Google obtains something much more valuable.

Every year, several million American students graduate from high school. And not only does Google make it easy for those who have school Google accounts to upload their trove of school Gmail, Docs and other files to regular Google consumer accounts — but schools encourage them to do so. This month, for instance, Chatfield Senior High School in Littleton, Colo., sent out a notice urging seniors to “make sure” they convert their school account “to a personal Gmail account.”

That doesn’t sit well with some parents. They warn that Google could profit by using personal details from their children’s school email to build more powerful marketing profiles of them as young adults.

“My concern is that they are working on developing a profile of this child that, when they hit maturity, they are able to create a better profile,” said David Barsotti, an information technology project manager in the Chicago area whose daughter uses Google tools in elementary school. “That is a problem, in my opinion.”

Barostti is right. It’s a problem… a very big problem.

When it comes to hardware and software, there’s pretty much no device category or software segment the Monster of Mountain View doesn’t want to play in:

Google is making a Wi-Fi router as part of its ambition to provide better Internet connections that make it easier for people to access its digital services and see more of its online advertising.

Pre-orders for the $199 wireless router, called OnHub, can be made beginning Tuesday at Google’s online store, Amazon.com and Walmart.com. The device will go on sale in stores in the U.S. and Canada in late August or early September.

Google is touting the cylinder-shaped OnHub as a leap ahead in a neglected part of technology.

The Mountain View, California, company is promising its wireless router will be sleeker, more reliable, more secure and easier to use than other long-established alternatives made by the Arris Group, Netgear, Apple and other hardware specialists. Google teamed up with networking device maker TP-Link to build OnHub.

This is supposed to be an Associated Press news article? It reads more like a press release!

This being a Google product, it comes with spyware built right in.

Google is pledging not to monitor any of the information transmitted over OnHub except for visits to its search engine or other services, such as YouTube or Gmail, with the user’s online privacy controls set to permit the data collection.

That’s a worthless pledge. Google predictably exempts itself from its own privacy promise, then says, don’t worry, we won’t spy on you when you visit non-Google websites.

We here at LGB prefer not to be spied on by Google at all, and that’s why we don’t use any Google hardware or any of Google’s online offerings.

Good software already exists for upgrading routers, like DD-WRT, for those unsatisfied by what’s provided by the manufacturers of their networking hardware. Most Internet users get their router from their Internet service provider and won’t have any desire to pay Google for the privilege of having a new router that phones home to Mountain View. Tech-savvy users are the only conceivable market for OnHub, and they already have better options right now.

POSTSCRIPT: Ars Technica has a brutal review of the OnHub, which it calls a “mystery box”.

The Monster of Mountain View has entered another market. Now it wants to be your wireless carrier:

Google has just launched the site for “Project Fi,” its heavily rumored MVNO service. The service combines Sprint and T-Mobile along with Wi-Fi and will seamlessly switch between the networks. Google has an interactive coverage map here.

The up-front pricing seems pretty standard. It requires a “Fi Basics” plan, which is $20 a month for unlimited talk and texting, plus taxes. Data is an additional $10 per gigabyte a month. So a $20 basics plan plus 3GB a month would be $50, $5 more than Straight Talk charges for the same thing—but that’s only if you actually use the data. The unique aspect of the billing is that you “never pay for unused data.” Your account gets credited, in money, for data you don’t use. The example shows an unused 0.6GB of data gets you $6 back, so credits aren’t limited to 1GB increments; overages work the same way, with no extra fees. Google also allows Wi-Fi tethering.

For the time being, the “service” is only available to people who buy a Nexus 6 device through Google. And it’s worth noting that Google did not build its own network infrastructure to become a wireless carrier – it’s piggybacking on T-Mobile and Sprint,  the two smaller national carriers, with both companies receiving financial compensation in return. But, as with past Google experiments, it’s the beginning of something Google wants to make bigger.

It’s not enough for Google to be dominant in search and mobile advertising. It wants to dominate in every area that it can. Google wants to be the provider of your browser, desktop operating system, mobile operating system, Internet service, DNS service, email, and everything else.

Jackdaw’s founder has some observations on what Google may trying to accomplish in the near term with Project Fi.