Google is the biggest corporate lobbyist in America now, says new Public Citizen report
This morning, a new Public Citizen report, “Mission Creep-y: Google is Quietly Becoming One of the Nation’s Most Powerful Political Forces While Expanding Its Information-Collecting Empire” came across my desk. It doesn’t break news. But it is an exhausting catalog of Google’s powerful information gathering apparatus, its missteps, and its massive social ambition.
When you put the isolated pieces together, it can kind of make you choke on your breakfast.
At a consumer level, Google is all over you. Its search algorithm takes in 200 different variables about you, pulling in information it gleans from your use of all of its products: Maps, YouTube, Gmail, and more. These are services you use, like, all of the time that can reveal very personal things. Since 2012, Google has made it its stated policy to track you as one user across all of its services, no matter what device you’re using. (This “comingling” of information, e.g. search history with chat transcripts, resulted in several lawsuits from privacy groups.)
Through its acquisition of DoubleClick Google knows what websites you were on when you saw a certain ad. Like all companies, it tracks your web history by placing a cookie in your browser. But because of the prevalence of Google Analytics and DoubleClick across the web now, once Google has identified you, it’s really, really difficult for you to ever be out of the company’s sight. The value of DoubleClick to Google cannot be underestimated. Google paid twice as much for DoubleClick in 2007 as it did for YouTube in 2006. The company is determined to not be any less efficient in tracking you on mobile either, linking tablet and smartphone use by giving every phone that uses the Google store an individual identifier.
Chillingly, none of the privacy experts could map the full entirety of just how much Google knows about consumers. But given its willingness to put together different pieces of data about you from different services, along with its new products and acquisitions — Google Now, Emu, Hangouts, Wallet, Next, Dropcam, Skybox, Google Glass and so on — the granularity of what it can discern is accelerating quickly.
http://pando.com/2014/11/13/google-is-the-biggest-corporate-lobbyist-in-america-now-says-new-public-citizen-report/
Strange to see so little discussion about this...
= new reply since forum marked as read
