Online Privacy

Every system has a most vulnerable point, an Achilles heel. The overwhelming evidence below indicates that Google is America’s cybersecurity Achilles heel.

While America faces a plethora of serious cybersecurity vulnerabilities, Google’s unique scale, scope, tracking, and centralization puts Google alone at the pinnacle of America’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities, in a class all by itself.

Simply, hackers understand Google is by far the world’s single most-comprehensive source of intimate surveillance information on people and their behaviors, while also being the major entity that is least-committed culturally to protecting people’s security, privacy, and property.

In advance of the Senate Antitrust oversight hearing for the DOJ and FTC Tuesday, please see my Daily Caller op-ed "DOJ & FTC Antitrust Report Cards" -- here -- to learn two of the big oversight questions for the hearing.

This is Part 20 in the Google Unaccountability Research Series.

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Google Unaccountability Research Series:

Part 0: Google's Poor and Defiant Settlement Record

Part 1: Why Google Thinks It Is Above the Law

Part 2: Top Ten Untrue Google Stories

Part 3: Google's Growing Record of Obstruction of Justice

More evidence continues to surface that Big Internet companies expect and seek exceptional special treatment from Government that other companies simply do not expect or seek.

Ironically six of the original European colonial powers of yesteryear, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands, have aligned  to resist the new virtual-colonial-power -- Google’s hegemony over online private data.

These six leading EU members, which comprise 75% of the EU economy, have jointly launched national investigations of Google’s privacy actions. That’s because Google has paternalistically rebuffed and ignored the EU belief that Google’s 2012 unification of its sixty privacy policies is a serious violation of European data protection law, because it does not allow any meaningful use transparency or user choice to opt-out of Google’s private data collection.

Google is notifying 8,000 people that they can now buy and use a prototype of Google Glass as part of a real-world Google marketing experiment of this controversial new product.

To learn why I think Google Glass will encounter big privacy problems over time, see my video explanation here -- thanks to Mike Wendy of MediaFreedom.org for the video.

Expect this first wave of Google Glass-arazzi and storm-snoopers to run into significant privacy problems to the extent they film/record people's private conversations/activities without their knowledge or permission.

What we don't know yet is if Google will:

“Google and the World Brain” -- Presented by Polar Star Films; Directed by Ben Lewis; An Official Selection of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. See the movie's website here, and facebook page here. To view the two minute trailer – click here.

Review: Four stars out of four. 

In telling the important untold story of Google’s Herculean and controversial efforts to digitize all the world’s books, Director Ben Lewis’ genius insight was unearthing the fascinating “why?” behind it all – which is Google CEO Larry Page’s deep passion for Artificial Intelligence or “AI.”

Google’s many innovations are well known. What has not been appreciated until the debut of this outstanding documentary film is how Google’s frenetic innovation machine fits together. Ben Lewis effectively offers us a new organizing principle to understand why Google alone has a mission to organize the world’s information – Larry Page’s quest to create an Artificial Intelligence.

The big problem with Google Glass is that it disrespects others’ privacy in the real world.

In creating an innovative form-factor for Google users to use most all of Google’s services in the real-world on-the-go and hands-free, Google Glass would fundamentally change how Google users socially interact and affect others in society.

In the virtual world, Google is a champion of users having the freedom to do most whatever they want online. In the real physical world, people’s freedoms begin to end when they begin to seriously infringe upon the freedoms of others – like the freedom of reasonable privacy.  

The greatest Google privacy outcries have been when Google products disregarded and disrespected non-Google users’ or others’ privacy. Gmail users may have assented to Google scanning their emails to target personal ads to get free email, but the billion or so non-Gmail users that happen to trade emails with Gmail never agreed to Google’s privacy-invading deal.

(The updated Google Privacy Rap Sheet is here.)

In response to Google getting sanctioned $7m for privacy violations by 38 State Attorneys General for its unauthorized collection” of private WiFi data nationwide between 2008 and 2010, Google’s public relations mantra is: “we work hard to get privacy right at Google, but in this case we didn’t, which is why we quickly tightened up our systems to address the issue.”

I have repeatedly warned that the so-called copyright “reform” movement is deceptive because it masks its true purposes. It knows that the real change it seeks -- to neuter anti-piracy enforcement – is an out-of-the-mainstream idea and a political loser. 

So the copyright-neutering movement uses an elaborate Trojan-Horse deception – a politically-contrived “cell-phone unlocking” problem -- as its political entrée into the copyright legislative process to forward its real goal of gutting DMCA digital-locks enforcement.

To understand why Google owns the single worst privacy record over the last decade of any Global 2000 corporation, listen to what Google’s leadership says about privacy-related matters in their own words. Then compare what Google Says about privacy below, with Google’s Privacy Rap Sheet – current up to June 4, 2012.