Online Privacy

Please see Google’s new and updated Privacy Rap Sheet here.

Google’s uniquely awful privacy record makes it wish Google had its own “right to be forgotten.”

And Google clearly wants the EC to forget its digital and data dominance, and its many abuses of dominance of Europe’s digital and data economy, because Google knows a core enabler of its market dominance is Google’s willingness to disregard privacy and data protection laws for anti-competitive first-mover advantage.

Google knows data protection rules, and requirements of consumer consent are impediments to gaining dominance -- so it simply ignores them while publicly proclaiming to respect them. Google has learned that its willingness to do what other competitors will not is an unbeatable competition advantage in the marketplace.   

Google’s Privacy Rap Sheet

Dear School Administrators, School Boards, and Parent Associations,

If you assume Google is careful to protect your students when they use Google Apps for Education, you are sadly mistaken.

Too many assume that someone else must have done the due diligence necessary to ensure that Google Apps for Education adequately protects students’ privacy and safety, because they unfortunately did not. If they had, they would have been alarmed at Google’s shocking history of knowing disregard for the privacy and safety of their users including students.

This open letter will spotlight student privacy/safety concerns with Google that responsible parents and educators would want to know, given that Google Apps for Education, and Google’s other services, pervasively insinuate themselves into so many aspects of their students’ education and private lives.

It also will provide an important jumpstart to long-overdue, better due diligence of Google’s impact on student privacy and safety. Better late than never, the old adage says.

Is Google saying one thing and doing another – yet again?

Given how many times we know Google has misled everyone about the implications of its activities, we should be highly-skeptical of Google’s public claims about what it will do with its nascent Titan drone surveillance capability.  

This week Google said it bought Titan Aerospace, which makes solar-powered, high-flying drones, ostensibly because they “could help bring Internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation.”  

Please read my latest Daily Caller op-ed: “Google’s Glass House.”

• It shows how Google Glass brings attention to problems Google would rather conceal.  

It is Part 40 of my Google Disrespect for Privacy series.

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Google's Disrespect for Privacy Series

Part 1: Why Google is the Biggest Threat to Americans' Privacy; House Testimony [7-18-08]

Please don’t miss my latest Daily Caller op-ed: “Accelerating the De-Americanization of the Internet.”

It explains the broad implications for the Internet of:

• America handing over the master key of the Internet to ICANN; and
• the European Parliament updating privacy law for the first time since 1995 nearly unanimously. 

This is Part 5 of my “World Changing the Internet” research series.

World Changing the Internet.

Part 1: Seven Ways the World is Changing the Internet [1-11-12]

How come the company whose success depends entirely on the public being open, transparent and trusting towards Google, is so closed, secretive and distrusting toward the public?

How come the company with a mission to make the world’s information universally accessible, goes to such extraordinary lengths to cover up evidence in legal documents in public proceedings?

European media could learn an important lesson from their American media brethren about confronting Google’s extensive cover up of the evidence of their wrongdoing in legal proceedings.

In Europe, there was surprisingly little media pushback initially when Google and EC Vice President Joaquin Almunia first proclaimed a secret settlement of charges of Google’s abuse of its search dominance.

New evidence continues to contradict Google’s public representations of outrage over, and non-involvement in, NSA spying revealed by the Snowden leaks.

As Google’s pervasively-invasive, track-to-target, advertising-ambitions continue to metastasize throughout people’s lives and physical space -- via contact lens monitoring, Google Glass recording, Nest home sensors, self-driving car tracking, Internet of things listening devices, etc. -- Google’s privacy promises simply don’t have credibility.

Google Glass’ easy eavesdropping on people may be illegal wiretapping.

Two courts already have ruled in different class actions that Google can be sued for illegal wiretapping for “interceptions” of personal information without meaningful consent -- in circumstances analogous to how Google Glass operates.

First, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that wiretap law prohibits the type of transmission “interception” that Google StreetView cars’ did in secretly collecting personal information from unencrypted home WiFi networks.

Please don’t miss my latest Daily Caller op-ed: “The De-Americanization of the Internet” -- here.  

America's dominance of the Internet has peaked. Read why and what it means. 

• It is Part 3 of my “World Changing Internet” research series.

World Changing Internet Series

Part 1: Seven Ways the World is Changing the Internet

Part 2: Twitter’s Realpolitik & the Sovereign-ization of the Internet