We've been sitting on this link for going on two weeks, this seems an appropriate time to post.And if it's the former does that mean gmail is reading my email?— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) May 24, 2017
From CounterPunch, May 12:
In June 2007, Privacy International, a U.K.-based privacy rights watchdog, cited Google as the worst privacy offender among 23 online companies, ranking the “Don’t Be Evil” people below Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, Facebook and AOL. According to the report, no other company was “coming close to achieving [Google’s] status as an endemic threat to privacy.” What most disturbed the authors was Google’s “increasing ability to deep-drill into the minutiae of a user’s life and lifestyle choices.” The result: “the most onerous privacy environment on the Internet.” Indeed, Google now controls an estimated 70 per cent of the online search engine market, but its deep-drilling of user information – where we surf, whom we e-mail, what blogs we post, what pictures we share, what maps we look at, what news we read – extends far beyond the search feature to encompass the kind of “total information awareness” that privacy activists feared at the hands of the Bush Jr. administration’s much-maligned Total Information Awareness program....MUCH MORE
Kevin Bankston, a privacy expert and attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group engaged in questions of privacy, free speech, and intellectual property in the digital age, warns of the possibilities. “In all of human history,” he says, “few if any single entities, other than the National Security Agency, have ever possessed such a hoard of sensitive data about so many people.” This is the sort of thing that should make the intelligence agencies, says Bankston, “drool with anticipation.” And drooling they are. Stephen Arnold, an IT expert who formerly worked at the defense and intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. and who once consulted for Google, addressed this in a speech before a conference of current and former intelligence officials in Washington, D.C., in January 2006. According to an audio recording in our possession, he reported Google was increasingly sought out by the U.S. intelligence services because click-stream data – and everything else Google archives – “is a tremendous opportunity for the intelligence community.” Google, he said, “has figured out everything there is to know about data-collection.” The relationship with the government had become intimate enough, Arnold said, that at least three officers from “an unnamed intelligence agency” had been posted at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
What they are doing there, Arnold did not reveal.
“We don’t comment on rumor or speculation,” said Google spokesperson Christine Chen. When asked separately how many former intelligence agency officials work at Google, she responded, “We don’t release personnel information.”
The conference, under the aegis of the Open Source Solutions Network, was hosted and organized by Robert David Steele, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who left the agency 20 years ago and is now the founder and CEO of Open Source Solutions Network Inc., otherwise known as OSS.Net, an educational corporation that has worked with more than 50 governments to “advance the use of open source intelligence.” Steele considered Arnold’s item to be a bombshell. U.S. intel was now seated in the heart of the “Googleplex,” learning all it could from the masters in the private sector. Among Google’s critics, Steele who, since leaving the CIA, has spent 20 years promoting the digital commons, is about as fierce as they come. “Google would have been an absolutely precious gift to humanity,” he says. “But Google is positioning itself to take over the digital commons. I personally have resolved that unless Google comes clean with the public, the company is now evil.” The question today is whether Google, in fact, will be forced to change its ways – and whether Congress and the intelligence agencies want it to.
Google’s powers of data-collection depend on consumer choice – how much of your computing you put in Google’s hands. The more you choose Google applications, the more Google can know about you. At the extreme end of the spectrum, your every move can be tracked by some feature of Google. When you use the Google search box, as tens of millions of people do daily (with Google handling roughly 11,000 searches per second), the company can track all your search queries and the websites you visit as a result of those queries. If you use Google toolbar, the company can watch the amount of time you surf a website – the three minutes or three hours you spend on every page of that website. With Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006, viewing habits can be tracked. Google’s FriendConnect and Orkut archive your social networks. Google News, Books, Feedburner or Blogger log your reading habits. The writing you produce is stored on Google Docs, and your purchase habits and credit card numbers are captured by Google Checkout. Also gathered are voiceprint and call habits, through Google Voice; travel interests, patterns and place associations, through Google Maps, Google Earth and Google StreetView; medical conditions, medical history and prescription drug use, through Google Health; photos of friends and family, through Google’s Picassa images; and general activities, through Google Calendar. Then, there’s Google Desktop, which, at one point, offered what appeared to be an innocuous feature called “Search Across Computers.” This allowed Google to scan your computer to archive copies of text documents. In other words, just about everything on your PC – love letters, tax returns, business records, bad poetry – was duplicated on a remote Google server. (This function was discontinued on all platforms in January of this year.)
Taken alone, the Google search box is an exquisitely intimate repository of user information. “People treat the search box like their most trusted advisors,” says Kevin Bankston, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) attorney. “They tell the Google search box what they wouldn’t tell their own mother, spouse, shrink or priest.” Think about your most recent queries, say, about your “anal warts” or “inability to love in marriage,” or “self-hatred,” or your interest in the mechanics of “making a pipe bomb.” The search box is as good a place as any to understand how the Googleplex keeps tabs on its users. When you do a search, “cookies” installed on your computer record your IP address (a series of unique numbers that may be used to identify your computer), so Google can, in many contexts, identify a user. And it can do so with any of its applications.
All this, one would think, ceases once your PC is shut down and you leave home. However, Google released a “geo-location” application in 2008, Gears Geolocation API, that can “obtain the user’s current position,” “watch the user’s position as it changes over time,” and “quickly and cheaply obtain the user’s last known position.” According to a Google tech blog, the Gears application “can determine your location using nearby cell-towers or GPS for your mobile device or your computer’s IP address for your laptop.” A 2006 Technology Review article reports that Google’s director of research, Peter Norvig, even proposed the use of built-in microphones on PCs to identify television shows playing in the room, in order to display related advertising. Such data, it seems, could be processed as an audio fingerprint, which might aid in geolocation and profiling of users. (“Google had no plans to develop this,” Google spokesperson Christine Chen responded by e-mail. “And we haven’t.”)
Google’s data-mining interests go even deeper, to the core of our physical and mental being. Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his biotech specialist wife, Anne Wojcicki, according to The Economist, have “brainstormed” with at least one prominent human genome researcher and approach genetics as a “database and computing problem.” This would tie in nicely with Google Health, launched in 2008 to take advantage of the growing trend of storing health records online, for easier access among diverse health care providers. Google has invested $3.9 million in Wojcicki’s biotech firm, 23andMe, whose “mission is to be the world’s trusted source of personal genetic information,” and which offers a basket of genetic tests to allow its customers to uncover ancestry, disease risks, and drug responses. Speaking before a Google “Zeitgeist” conference in 2008, Brin revealed that he carried a Parkinson’s gene and then advocated the recording of individual genetic codes to enhance health maintenance and medical research. Taken to its logical conclusion, this suggests the prospect of your body’s blueprint registered with an eventual “Google Genome,” perhaps with the help of the databases gathered at 23andMe. To drill further into the mind, Google has teamed up with marketing giant WPP to fund $4.6 million for research into online advertising, including one grant in the emerging field of “neuromarketing”: tracking everything from online navigation behavior to biofeedback metrics like heart rate, eye movement and brain wave activity in response to advertising stimuli. Google’s Chen points out that the results of this research will be available to industry as a whole and that “Google has no special right over, nor plans to use, any of the research funded by these grants.”...