Category: War on Privacy

Since the Monster of Mountain View doesn’t have a fashion sense, it’s turning to a major maker of chic eyewear to make its “Glass” spyware look sleek:

Google has signed on Italian optical wear firm Luxottica to help it design and build future versions of its Glass face-based computing system, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal confirmed by Google to TechCrunch. The news comes from Luxottica itself, which says it will build new versions of Google’s wearable, which could theoretically be branded under Ray-Ban, Oakley, Miu Miu, Armani and many others that Luxottica counts as sub-brands.

The partnership announced today fulfills a prediction made by Mark Hurst and others when “Glass” was made available for purchase and use last year by Google fanboys:

Like every other shiny innovation these days, Google Glass will live or die solely on the experience it creates for people. The immediate, most visible problem in the Glass experience is how dorky the user looks while wearing it. No one wants to be the only person in the bar dressed like a cyborg from a 1992 virtual-reality movie. It’s embarrassing. Early adopters will abandon Google Glass if they don’t sense the social approval they seek while wearing it.

Google seems to have calculated this already and recently announced a partnership with Warby Parker, known for its designer glasses favored by the all-important younger demographic.

Google has shown it’s committed to doing whatever it takes to push this invasive product on people. Never mind that it’s fatally flawed; Google considers its potential future profits more important and more valuable than our privacy.

When the NSA taps the Googleplex, it’s one-stop shopping:

Google assigns a unique PREF cookie anytime someone’s browser makes a connection to any of the company’s Web properties or services. This can occur when consumers directly use Google services such as Search or Maps, or when they visit Web sites that contain embedded “widgets” for the company’s social media platform Google Plus. That cookie contains a code that allows Google to uniquely track users to “personalize ads” and measure how they use other Google products.

Given the widespread use of Google services and widgets, most Web users are likely to have a Google PREF cookie even if they’ve never visited a Google property directly.

That PREF cookie is specifically mentioned in an internal NSA slide, which reference the NSA using GooglePREFID, their shorthand for the unique numeric identifier contained within Google’s PREF cookie. Special Source Operations (SSO) is an NSA division that works with private companies to scoop up data as it flows over the Internet’s backbone and from technology companies’ own systems. The slide indicates that SSO was sharing information containing “logins, cookies, and GooglePREFID” with another NSA division called Tailored Access Operations, which engages in offensive hacking operations. SSO also shares the information with the British intelligence agency GCHQ.

“This shows a link between the sort of tracking that’s done by Web sites for analytics and advertising and NSA exploitation activities,” says Ed Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University. “By allowing themselves to be tracked for analytic or advertising at least some users are making themselves more vulnerable to exploitation.”

The whole report, published in the Washington Post, is worth reading.

We have long suggested that Google’s war on privacy and mass collection of user data offers the National Security Agency “one stop shopping”. We were on the money: The NSA has been taking advantage of Google’s data-mining, co-opting it for their own purposes:

The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.

According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — ranging from “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video.

This is hardly shocking news to us – again, it validates what we have said for years – but it causing a big stir, particularly in the tech blogosphere. It will be interesting to see how Google apologists respond to this one. Google itself claims it is not complicit:

We’re troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers, and we are not aware of this activity. However, we have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we continue to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links.

Increased encryption is not a bad thing, but the fact remains that Google remains a juicy target for governments because of the vast amount of data is collecting and storing (permanently). We urge everyone who values their privacy to immediately begin taking steps to cut ties with Google. It is possible to leave Google behind and switch to providers that have better privacy policies and a healthy respect for users’ privacy. Our list of Google alternatives is long, and we urge people to make full use of it.

The war on privacy continues:

Google (GOOG) is tinkering with the ever-delicate balance between selling advertisements and creeping its users out. On Friday the company said it would begin including recommendations that Google+ users make in advertisements. The new policy kicks in on Nov. 11.

Here’s how it works: You use Google+ to rate some product or service. It turns out the company behind that product wants to advertise on Google. When the company purchases an ad, your friends will see a version that includes your photo along with what you said about the product.

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because critics have been up in arms about a similar advertising scheme from Facebook (FB) called sponsored stories. The ads resulted in a class-action lawsuit, and the social network eventually had to pay a $20 million settlement and clarify its privacy settings. Inevitably, the clarification provoked another round of outrage.

Google’s plans clearly demonstrate what we have been saying for a long time: Google’s offerings are not really free. If you use Google offerings, you are the product. And if you accept Google’s defaults, your privacy gets disregarded whenever Google cooks up a new scheme for making money.

In this case, people who have signed up for Google+ but didn’t uncheck a certain box are going to be automatically enrolled in Google’s new advertising program. It’s opt-out, of course, because if it wasn’t, probably not many people would opt in. Google uses defaults to its advantages to wage its war on user privacy, and has done so remarkably well.

The New York Times has a smart, sassy take on this news… Google to Sell Users’ Endorsements:

Google on Friday announced that it would soon be able to show users’ names, photos, ratings and comments in ads across the Web, endorsing marketers’ products. Facebook already runs similar endorsement ads. But on Thursday it, too, took a step to show personal information more broadly by changing its search settings to make it harder for users to hide from other people trying to find them on the social network.

Those who don’t like the idea of being used as pawns by Google to make Internet advertising even more lucrative should leave Google behind. We’re here to help. Take a look around this site and begin making plans to break up with the Monster of Mountain View.

Maybe it’s because his own company has aspirations to be a privately owned version of the NSA:

If you thought that Google chief Eric Schmidt would take a more strident tone when discussing the National Security Agency spying scandal, think again.

“There’s been spying for years — there’s been surveillance for years, and so forth. I’m not going to pass judgment on that. It’s the nature of our society,” he told New America Foundation President Anne-Marie Slaughter at a public event in New York.

But Schmidt’s biggest concern about the spying wasn’t that the privacy of individuals had been violated, or that companies like Google were being forced to give the government access to their customers’ data, the Guardian reported.

It’s the nature of our society!?

No, it’s not! The United States has this thing called the FOURTH AMENDMENT, which is a part of the Bill of Rights, the first set of amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

The Fourth Amendment states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The NSA, as a government agency, is unquestionably violating the Fourth Amendment rights of pretty much every American with its unchecked, unrestrained spying.

Companies like Google have been complicit in the NSA’s surveillance regime by giving them access to user data. Because Google is so huge and has so many offerings, its datacenters contain a veritable gold mine of user data of enormous proportions. Those who use all of Google’s offerings are especially valuable, because Google knows so much about them. Google can offer the NSA one-stop shopping… and that makes Google very valuable to the federal government.

Years ago, Google fanboys would have dismissed the above as paranoia or conspiracy theories. They can’t do that anymore. Not in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations and not in the wake of Eric Schmidt’s continuing series of revealing comments.