Google: Difference between revisions

* In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of [[w:Washington, D.C.|Washington]]. We had been locking horns with senior US officials for years by that point. The mystique had worn off. But the power centers growing up in [[Silicon Valley]] were still opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth.

* If the future of the [[internet]] is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world—in [[Latin America]], East and Southeast Asia, the [[South Asia|Indian subcontinent]], the [[Middle East]], sub-Saharan Africa, the former [[Soviet Union]], and even in Europe—for[[Europe]]—for whom the internet embodies the promise of an alternative to US cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony.

* We're agreed that [[Child pornography|child sexual imagery]] is a case apart, it's illegal everywhere in the world, there's a consensus on that. It's absolutely right that we identify this stuff, we remove it and we report it to the authorities.

* '''I use Google all the time, I’m happy it’s there. But just as when I read [[The New York Times]] or the [[w:The_Washington_Post|Washington Post]], or the [[The Wall Street Journal|Wall Street Journal]] knowing that they have ways of selecting and shaping the material that reaches you, you have to compensate for it. With Google, and others of course, there is an immense amount of [[surveillance]] to try to obtain personal [[data]] about individuals and their habits and interactions and so on, to shape the way information is presented to them. They do more [surveillance] than the [[National Security Agency|NSA]].'''

* About 650 Google workers have signed a petition asking the company to protect users' abortion-related location data and search history. <br> The move comes over concerns that law enforcement agencies will seek such data from Google to prosecute abortion seekers. <br> Workers sent the petition Wednesday to Google-parent Alphabet's top executives, including CEO [[w:Sundar_Pichai|Sundar Pichai]]. Most of the workers belong to the Alphabet Workers' Union, according to Bambi Okugawa, a spokesperson for the group. <br> "If Google or [[Facebook]] or any tech company wants to present the face of being a compassionate company and an ally for people that need reproductive health care or gender affirming health care, then they need to back that up in their actions by protecting [[privacy]]," said Okugawa, who works at a data center in Tennessee, where a law is going into effect this month that will outlaw abortion.

* [[Elizabeth Warren]] is saying we should break up '''Google'''. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next [[Donald Trump|Trump]] situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that.<br>..<br>We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again.<br>..<br>We’re also training our [[algorithms]], like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?<br>The reason we launched our [[Artificial intelligence|A.I.]] principles is because people were not putting that line in the sand, that they were not saying what’s fair and what’s equitable so we’re like, well we are a big company, we’re going to say it.<br>..<br>We have gotten accusations of around fairness is that we’re unfair to conservatives because we’re choosing what we find as credible news sources and those sources don’t necessarily overlap with [[Conservatism|conservative]] sources

* [[Vaccine]] misinformation]] appears globally, it appears in all countries and cultures.

* This is an exciting development for preventive [[Health care|healthcare]] industry. It is likely to spur a range of other innovations towards miniaturizing [[technology]] and using it in wearable devices to help people monitor their bodies better.

* Google's vision of the future is pure atom-age [[1960s]] [[The Jetsons|Jetsons]] [[fantasy]], bubble-dwelling spiritless [[Sexism|sexists]] above a ruined earth.

* The destiny of Google's search engine is to become that [[Star Trek]] [[Computers|computer]], and that's what we are building.

* When people are looking for [[abortion]] services, they often turn to Google, searching a phrase like "abortion clinic near me" or "planned parenthood." <br> Yet the ads they'll see at the top of the Google search results are often not abortion providers at all, but instead misleading ads for anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy centers" — facilities that use various tactics to dissuade or delay pregnant people from getting an abortion. <br> Any delay or confusion can have serious consequences: Strict bans in much of the country mean people seeking surgical abortions may have to travel hundreds of miles, and ordering abortion pills by mail can be legally thorny. <br> These ads on Google are no small business, according to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a [[U.S.]]- and [[U.K.]]-based nonprofit focused on research, campaigns and policy to counteract hate and disinformation. The group finds that anti-abortion pregnancy centers in the U.S. spent an estimated $10.2 million on Google Search ads over a two-year period, and those ads were clicked on an estimated 13 million times. <br> The group's researchers began by identifying 976 websites for anti-abortion pregnancy centers. Using the enterprise analytics tool Semrush, they found that 188 of the centers had actively run Google search ads between March 2021 and February 2023. They assessed those centers' ads, websites and the keywords for which they bought paid [[advertising]]. <br> Among the organization's findings: 38% of the centers that advertised on Google in this period had no homepage disclaimer stating that they don't provide abortions. That appears to violate a Google policy prohibiting ads or destinations concealing or misstating information about the advertiser's business, product or service. <br> Researchers found that the anti-abortion pregnancy centers targeted more than 15,000 queries related to abortion, including phrases like "telehealth abortion pill texas" and "how much is an abortion in california."

* No [[law]] requires Google to collect and keep records of its customers’ every movement. [[Apple Inc.|Apple]] has shown that it is not necessary for smartphone companies to retain invasive tracking databases of their customers’ locations. Google’s intentional choice to do so is creating a new digital divide, in which [[privacy]] and [[security]] are made a [[luxury]]. Americans who can afford an iPhone have greater [[privacy]] from government surveillance of their movements than the tens of millions Americans using Android devices.