News

This is great:

Google’s in trouble again over the “Safari Workaround”: the iPhone shakedown for personal information from millions of iPhone users.

In 2012, the workaround got the search giant fined by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for $22.5m, fined again a year later for $17m after it got sued by dozens of states, and now has the UK’s Google You Owe Us campaign out for its own pound of flesh.

Make that a few pounds of flesh: The Google You Owe Us campaign has started the process of getting its own comeuppance, and the US fines pale in comparison to what the British group is after.

Monday marked day one in London’s high court, where the collective action is suing the company for what could be as much as £3.2bn (USD $4.3b), according to court filings.

The campaign even has its own beautifully crafted website, which is totally worth checking out.

Bravo to these folks for taking a stand. Bravo!

It’s been nearly three months since many Google employees—and the public—learned about the company’s decision to provide artificial intelligence to a controversial military pilot program known as Project Maven, which aims to speed up analysis of drone footage by automatically classifying images of objects and people. Now, about a dozen Google employees are resigning in protest over the company’s continued involvement in Maven.

The resigning employees’ frustrations range from particular ethical concerns over the use of artificial intelligence in drone warfare to broader worries about Google’s political decisions—and the erosion of user trust that could result from these actions. Many of them have written accounts of their decisions to leave the company, and their stories have been gathered and shared in an internal document, the contents of which multiple sources have described to Gizmodo.

It takes a lot of courage to give up your job in protest of your employer’s business practices. But that is exactly what these twelve people have done. They have refused to compromise on their principles after learning what was going on. They couldn’t go on at Google because they knew Google was doing something immoral.

Facebook may be getting all the attention lately, but the Monster of Mountain View is still, well, a monster:

No one at Google envied Mark Zuckerberg last week as he was being grilled by Congress. But for years, they certainly coveted the personal data that made Facebook Inc. a formidable digital ad player. And the strategies they set to compete have now placed Google squarely in the cross hairs of a privacy backlash against the world’s largest social-media company.

A backlash that has been a long time in coming.

“Google, in every respect, collects more data. Google, in every respect, has a much bigger advertising business,” said David Chavern, president of News Media Alliance, a publisher trade group. Rather than “a Facebook privacy law,” he expects regulation to target the entire industry.

Google’s many brushes with controversy haven’t deterred the company from making its business practices ever more invasive. Mimicry of Facebook has been occurring for years.

In 2015, the search giant unveiled Customer Match, a tool letting advertisers target ads using consumers’ Gmail addresses. That mirrored a popular Facebook offering called Custom Audiences. Google Plus, the company’s social network, failed to catch on with users but did prompt millions of people to log in to Google’s other web properties, catnip for marketers. Those changes helped Google’s display ad business blossom. Morgan Stanley recently pegged its value at $36 billion.

Political advertisers are among those embracing DoubleClick. Last year, the unit touted a case study with i360, a marketing firm affiliated with the conservative power brokers Charles and David Koch. i360 uses its own data to slice online populations into segments, such as those for and against gun control and traditional marriage. A Google blog post explained how DoubleClick’s systems sucked in that information to help i360 boost the number of its ads people saw. i360 didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Google is incapable of regulating itself, so we clearly need an American equivalent of the European General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, as soon as possible.

This journalist’s experience with a Google Home Mini is being called a glitch, or malfunction.

But let’s face it: these “smart home” devices are DESIGNED to perform 24/7 hour audio surveillance. And a user has no way of knowing when the device is “phoning home” without checking the logs. Anyone who installs one of these stupid things is signing up for the possibility of being surveilled, accidentally or intentionally by a hostile party, without knowing it.

The privacy glitch that befell Google’s new £49 ($49) Home Mini speaker last week was small but, critics might suggest, still revealing.

The trouble started when journalist Artem Russakovskii, who had been given a review unit at the launch event on 4 October, noticed that the Mini kept turning itself on even when not commanded to.

Deciding to search for clues in the device’s logs, he got a shock:

I opened it up, and my jaw dropped. I saw thousands of items, each with a Play button and a timestamp.

The Mini, it seemed had recorded and uploaded to Google every sound detected in its vicinity for a two-day period, which seemed to be every sound no matter how inconsequential. It even activated after a simple knock on the wall.

This behaviour could be disabled and recordings deleted but only at the expense of harming the system’s future voice recognition accuracy.

If you value your privacy, don’t install a so-called smart speaker in your home, whether made by Google, Amazon, Apple, or any other company. It’s not worth it. The fact that microphones and cameras are standard in laptops, tablets, and smartphones and can be remotely hijacked is problematic enough.

Yikes:

Google has just announced Google Clips, a new hands-free camera that takes photos for you. Instead of having to pull yourself out of special moments to shoot photos and videos, Clips will capture moments so you can be in them.

Software is at the core of the camera, meaning Clips can be made smarter and more powerful over time as Google continues to push out new updates.

Clips can capture a 130-degree field of view at 15 frames per second. Each motion photo moment captured by Clips lasts several seconds and is called a “clip,” and they can be browsed using your Pixel phone. No audio is recorded. Each clip can be saved as motion photo, or you can select a single frame from the motion to save as an auto-enhanced, high-resolution photo.

On the front of Clips is a button for capturing photos manually. With a tiny form factor, Clips is designed to be clipped to “almost anything” or set down to document things remotely.

Clips has facial learning features — the more it sees a person, the more it learns to capture more clips of that individual. It also learns to recognize pets like cats and dogs.

Google engineers have laughably attempted to address the privacy implications of their Orwellian creation by giving it an offline mode. In other words, they’re telling potential buyers you don’t need to connect it to the Internet to use it. But of course, you’ll be encouraged to do so — the device has been designed for semi-autonomous recording and the presumption is people will want to share moments they’ve recorded.

There’s also an indicator light — which is a standard feature of webcams.

Commenters at PetaPixel are rightly skeptical. Writes one:

This is not about memories. How many people actually have time to go back and relive the unbelievable amount of memories that would build up? This is about Google’s AI learning and growing. This is about amassing algorithms to make their AI smarter. Simply put, this is getting scary. A record of intimate moments kept on Google servers. But like you, I guess I have already given up freedoms because of my Google phones and tablets. What have I done?

Says another:

As if Google didn’t know enough of our lives yet….

And another:

I don’t like it… We’re getting into some real Orwellian #$%& here. Always listening microphones, bed facing cameras and 24/7 recording body cams… I don’t want any of this stuff, having a phone is bad enough.

Save your $250 and pass on Google Clips, another unnecessary invention the world doesn’t need.

This is a must-read:

Using GPS, Wi-Fi and cell tower data, Google’s Your Timeline can paint a very accurate picture of your daily life. If you’ve got it switched on, it stores every step you take and everywhere you go.

And the thing is, lots of people seem to have it switched on without even realising, including me, and my favourite hats come in tinfoil.

I was surprised it had slipped past me so I started asking other people if they had it switched on too. More often than not, without making a conscious decision to let Google follow them around, they had.

In the end I decided to ask 20 people at random and write down the answers. The result of my short, non-scientific survey? 95% of the people I asked – a mixture of people in technical and non-technical roles – had location history, or its slightly less obnoxious iPhone equivalent Frequent Locations, turned on, tracking their every step, without realising.

Check for yourself. On Android it’s under Settings > Location > Google Location History.

So what exactly is Google Timeline? Google says: “Your timeline in Google Maps helps you find the places you’ve been and the routes you’ve travelled. Your timeline is private, so only you can see it.”

Only you. And Google.

Read the whole thing. The WHOLE THING.

This could be the best post Naked Security has ever published.

Well done, Sophos, and thanks for helping more people understand how to liberate themselves from having their every move tracked by the Monster of Mountain View.