Archive for the ‘google’ Tag
Do the Right Thing: Google v Morality
OK Google, did the Holocaust happen?
Gee male on Gmail
So as you know, as a Gmail user, Google scan the contents of all your emails, regardless of the confidentiality or sensitivity of the content, in order to target advertising at you – and, it turns out, possibly forward stuff to the US National Security Agency. Google’s lawyers refer to it euphemistically as “automated processing” (DoubleSpeak at its finest). Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, memorably used the C Word in summarising the corporate policy behind this: “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”
In May a class action centred on data-mining was filed against Google claiming that the company “unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people’s private email messages”. Google’s response last month was that Gmail users have no “reasonable expectation” that their emails are confidential.
The Google lawyers use this telling analogy in their defence: “Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient’s ECS [electronic communications service] provider in the course of delivery.” The skewed nature of their world view is given away by the notion that the modern world of work is full of people with personal assistants. And of course the analogy is equally wide of the mark because Google is more like the Post Office where we have no expectation of the deliverer to open the envelope and “acquire” our content or that of our correspondents (and where what interventions there are are the work of the odd rogue low-life at Mount Pleasant rather than a planned mechanised system on an uber-industrial scale).
Beyond the question of whether Gmail users do actually understand what they are signing up for in terms of surrendering their basic privacy, a huge issue here is that anyone corresponding with a Gmail user is likewise having their data pillaged and raped. Which should raise a big question mark over the use of Gmail in business contexts. Some way beyond the creepy line I’d argue and I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be the wrong side of the legal line too.
For FoCs Sake
Juliette Forrest: What does ‘Foc’ mean?
Rigby Reardon: It’s a slang word. When a man and a woman are in love, the man puts his…
Juliette Forrest: No, no. Here: “F. O. C.”
LAST UPDATED: 12.xii.11 (EoC)
In the spirit of the earlier, still in progress 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain – and to avoid, in these troubled times, a ball of anger seasoned with irritation and sprinkled with misanthropy gradually turning into a malignant growth somewhere in this fine body the Big Man was kind enough to lend me – I’ve decided to start a list of the Friends and Enemies of Carlotta. Feel free to suggest candidates for either…
Enemies of Carlotta
- Corporation tax cheats: Google – they set the standards for taking no social responsibility in the territories they exploit, squeezing the most they can out of a morethansemi-monopolistic situation
- Corporation tax cheats/duplicitous businesses: Kraft – manoeuvring to take a progressive, visionary Victorian business out of the tax regime of the country which created it – Cadbury’s secret Swiss move will cost UK exchequer millions in tax
- Duplicitous individuals: Sepp Blatter – robbed £16M in broad Swiss daylight including the cash of hard-pressed city councils (looks like Morrison’s may take FIFA to court on this count in Switzerland)
- Duplicitous individuals: Jack Warner – not the cozy cop from Dock Green but the corrupt cock from Trinidad & Tobago – see Corruption Charges “FIFA’s auditors Ernst & Young estimated Warner’s family made a profit of at least $1 million from reselling 2006 World Cup tickets that Warner had ordered. Minutes of FIFA’s executive committee indicate that a fine of almost $1 million, equal to the expected profiteering, was imposed on the family. Despite numerous reminders from FIFA, only $250,000 has been paid. // After Trinidad and Tobago visited Scotland for the friendly match on 30th May 2004 in Edinburgh, Jack Warner asked SFA President John McBeth for the cheque for the game to be made out to him personally and not to the FA of Trinidad and Tobago. McBeth refused to issue the cheque to Warner.”
- Corporation tax cheats: Vodaphone – Watching the backlash from avoiding £6M of corporation tax #mademesmile – now people need to PAC a punch by moving their accounts away
- Wayne Rooney and the England World Cup 2010 football team – didn’t even look like they gave a damn when they got knocked out, sorry shower
- Rebekah Wade/Brooks – one can only hope she, Murdoch and the Sky deal get dragged down in the emerging News of the World phone hacking scandal to show how if you operate without morality with a bit of luck it eventually catches up with you (I know the world doesn’t work quite like that but we can dream) [22.i.11]
- Caroline Spelman, so called Environment Secretary – someone remind her she’s supposed to be protecting the environment, not selling it alongside her own grandma
- Brian Coleman – fat cat councillor/London Assembly member, mummy’s boy, too grand to walk
- Angela Knight, Chief Executive, British Bankers’ Association – excuses the inexcusable, especially around banking reform. I want my savings insulated from her members’ (in every sense) partially informed gambling.
- Subway franchise – What the fuck is that smell?
- Alain Rolland – What the fuck is that smell? The man who ruined the Rugby World Cup 2011 single-handedly (15.x.11)
- Thierry Henry – he got a statue outside the Emirates last week (w/e 9/xii/11) but he should be remembered above all as a tricheur, the man who robbed Ireland of their place at the World Cup Finals in South Africa (even though it was one of the worst World Cups ever)
- Colin Barrow, Leader of Westminster Council, who is pretending the proposed weekend and evening parking charges in the borough are not motivated by revenue generation – perhaps he could start his money raising by paying back the money his hedge fund owes the council & Councillor Lee Rowley, cabinet member for parking and transport, some kind of moron with no experience worth talking of
Friends of Carlotta
- Voina artists co-operative in Russia – taking on the KGB and corrupt police with Art
- David Beckham – worthy (emotional and dignified) winner of BBC Sports Personality of 2010 Lifetime Achievement award – I was there when he was sent off against Argentina at St Etienne and how he came back not just as an even better footballer but as a very fine human-being
- Gareth Bale – bringing long lost joy back to White Hart Lane (or White Hard Lane as I saw on a West End ticket booth yesterday)
- Alastair Cook, cricketer/batsman – hero of the 2010-11 Ashes series in Oz with 766 runs to his name (with another innings still to play) and 189 today (5.1.11) to pretty much secure the victory
- Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, founder of Mary’s Meals, a Scottish charity which feeds and educates 460,000 children in developing countries every day.
- Rolf Harris – what a lovely man – soon to feature as the Art Teacher in Jamie’s Dream School
- more to follow
4 things that are bothering me about Google
‘My Google Team’ sent me (and zillions of other punters like me) this message over the holidays [to which I’ve added my own thoughts in square brackets]:
“Merry Christmas from Google
Hello,
As we near the end of the year, we wanted to take a moment to thank you for the time, energy, commitment, and trust [and personal information] you’ve shared with us in 2009.
With sharing in mind, this year we’ve decided to do something a little different. We hope you’ll find it fits the spirit of the Christmas season.
We’re looking forward to working with [working on?] you to build lasting success [for our corporation/international quasi-monopoly] in 2010.
With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year,
Your Google Team”
Call me a cynic if you like but international near-monopolies bother me for this kind of reason…
1.
According to the recently published accounts for Google UK for 2008 on £1.6 Billion of ad revenue from this country Google UK paid £141,519 in corporation tax. Our Google Team avoided £450M of UK corporation tax by channeling all its advertising earnings from UK customers through its Irish subsidiary. Now Ireland’s got problems of its own of course but all signs are that Google doesn’t give a monkey’s about them either – Google’s Dublin operation’s latest accounts show that only €7.5m of tax was paid in the Emerald Isle in 2008, even though the lion’s share of Google’s €6.7 billion European earnings went through Ireland.
2.
In that same year of £1.6 Billion UK revenue Google UK donated £5,662 to charity.
3.
The fact Google can’t spell “reggae” has been bothering me all Christmas. (It makes this link from the above message feel rather thrown together, and it already felt as calculated and American-centric as the corporation itself.)
4.
Google is putting back graphic design by years with its second-rate illustrations, not least over these holidays.
I’m being a bit silly of course but there is a fundamental issue here – it’s a fundamentally parasitical entity, sucking ad revenue off to the US (some 13% of Google’s global revenues now come from the UK) without putting much back into this country and not really caring about it. Which is why a message like the above rings so hollow, more balls than (jingle) bells. And on that metallic theme, why I won’t be embracing Chrome at the expense of much less evil Firefox.
Polling Day (Stand up and be counted)
China evidently blocked access to Twitter two days ago, two days before the sensitive 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Other Internet services that seem to have become inaccessible include Hotmail, Flickr and search engine Bing.
In recent years, access to YouTube, Western media outlets and many other websites has also been blocked, often before or after ‘sensitive’ events. And now’s a good moment to remember those who blocked themselves.
A few days after the blog of artist and government critic Ai Weiwei was shut down, he simply opened a new one (which you can see here, in Chinese). Ai also uses Twitter.
******
Only 22% of eligible British voters have declared their intention to vote in the European and county council elections today. In 2004 the turnout in Britain for the European parliamentary elections was 38.9%.
******
Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.
The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression … learn more
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Got a blog or website?
Undermine censorship by publishing fragments of censored material on your site
Porn to be Wild update
Sexperience making good Google impact – on Day 1 of new series ranking #1 of 532,000,000 on searching “sex education” (where it has resided since the last series in Sept 08) and #2 of 731,000,000 on searching “sex”!
Update 7.iv.09:
Nice piece in Broadcast about this today
Paranoia Twitter-style – part 2
First a Russian idiot and now the blank generation… No followers, no updates, just me in his/her/its sights. Why me?
I tried calling the Paranoia Helpline but they asked me to ‘please hold while your call is traced’.
Eventually I calmed down a bit about the whole thing, and then got this funny feeling I was being Googled…