Google Chrome: the new "surveillance software"

Geoffrey Fowler has some pretty scary info on how Google's Chrome spies on you.

Over a recent week of web surfing, I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the web. 

This was made possible by the web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software. . . . 

My tests of Chrome versus Firefox unearthed a personal data caper of absurd proportions. In a week of web surfing on my desktop, I discovered 11,189 requests for tracker “cookies” that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer, but were automatically blocked by Firefox. These little files are the hooks that data firms, including Google itself, use to follow what websites you visit so they can build profiles of your interests, income and personality. . . . 

Chrome is even sneakier on your phone. If you use Android, Chrome sends Google your location every time you conduct a search. (If you turn off location sharing it still sends your coordinates out, just with less accuracy.) . . .

Why Google's self-driving car is not ready for prime time, and may not be for a while

MIT Technological Review has a pretty devastating discussion on the problems that the Google car team has yet to solve.

Weather: "Among other unsolved problems, Google has yet to drive in snow, and Urmson says safety concerns preclude testing during heavy rains."

Road obstacles: "The car’s sensors can’t tell if a road obstacle is a rock or a crumpled piece of paper, so the car will try to drive around either. Urmson also says the car can’t detect potholes or spot an uncovered manhole if it isn’t coned off."

Unmapped areas: "Google says that its cars can identify almost all unmapped stop signs, and would remain safe if they miss a sign because the vehicles are always looking out for traffic, pedestrians and other obstacles.Alberto Broggi, a professor studying autonomous driving at Italy’s Università di Parma, says he worries about how a map-dependent system like Google’s will respond if a route has seen changes. . . .  Urmson said his team is still working to prevent them from being blinded when the sun is directly behind a light."

Construction: "Despite progress handling road crews, “I could construct a construction zone that could befuddle the car,” Urmson says."

Pedestrians: "Pedestrians are detected simply as moving, column-shaped blurs of pixels—meaning, Urmson agrees, that the car wouldn’t be able to spot a police officer at the side of the road frantically waving for traffic to stop."

Google is talking about solving these problems within five years, but many don't believe these problems will be solved anytime soon: "But researchers say the unsolved problems will become increasingly difficult. For example, John Leonard, an MIT expert on autonomous driving, says he wonders about scenarios that may be beyond the capabilities of current sensors, such as making a left turn into a high-speed stream of oncoming traffic."

Google wants to know everything about even iPhone users: “What Google really wants is for everybody to be signed in to their Google accounts all the time.”

Quartz has a very interest article available here about how Google is constantly acquiring detailed personal information about people whether they realize it or not.  Google plans on making it so that iPhone users are signed into Google at all times.

Regulators—who Google said in that post had ”been calling for shorter, simpler privacy policies”—quickly realized what the changes meant. European authorities opened an investigation into the new policy, calling it a breach of EU law. More than two years later, many cases remain unresolved. France and Spain have both slapped fines on Google, though the combined €1.05 million ($1.45 million today) is roughly as much as the revenue Google will make in the time it takes you read this article. The investigation is ongoing in another four countries, including Germany. . . .  

Keeping you signed in on all apps fills this gap in Google’s knowledge. But just as importantly, it makes a big difference to how the company measures whether ads—the lion’s share of its business—are working.
For example, you may have seen an ad for something on YouTube on your phone, looked it up using the Amazon app on your tablet, and eventually bought it on your computer. Unless you were logged into YouTube when you first saw the ad, Google can’t tell if the sale was a result of the ad, and can’t prove to advertisers—who spend half their mobile budgets with Google—that the money was well spent. It also can’t tell if it’s shown you the same ad over and over again to no effect—information it could use to target ads better. . . .

Privacy and Apple Computer: The cost that Apple bears to protect consumers' privacy

Google sells all sorts of detailed information about their users.  People may remember how Google has gotten in trouble for forcibly planting cookies on people's computers.  Here is an article about what Apple is giving up by safeguarding their customers' privacy.  From Ad Age:

. . . The lack of data both companies deliver is frustrating for marketers because these notoriously opaque giants sit atop incredible troves of information about what consumers actually buy and like, as well as who they are and where they live. One person familiar with the situation exec said Apple's refusal to share data makes it the best-looking girl at the party, forced to wear a bag over her head. . . .

Apple knows names and addresses, geographic locations and app and music-purchase histories, and can show ad buyers that a group with specific characteristics also likes certain types of apps or music. However, its user tracking and ad targeting are not cookie-based, meaning agencies can't do automated buys via their cookie-centric trading desks, which allow them to mesh lots of data from different sources. Instead, they have to go to Apple, ask to reach a given audience and, well, trust Apple that it will deliver it. 

Apple might come out ahead of its competitors on data, if it would share. "It's one of the best in terms of data quality and accuracy … but I think Google is a little more open," said Dan Grigorovici, co-founder of mobile-ad firm AdMobius, who was a software manager at Apple until 2012 and a principal developer of iAd's measurement and analytics capabilities. . . . .

Google misleads on why it is preventing Android users from stopping Apps from taking private information

This is an amazing story.  Finally, Google gave Android users a chance to determine whether they want their Apps to share all sorts of users' private information.  But less than a week later they drop this and according to this report their explanations don't make much sense.  From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Yesterday, we published a blog post lauding an extremely important app privacy feature that was added in Android 4.3. That feature allows users to install apps while preventing the app from collecting sensitive data like the user's location or address book. 

After we published the post, several people contacted us to say that the feature had actually been removed in Android 4.4.2, which was released earlier this week. Today, we installed that update to our test device, and can confirm that the App Ops privacy feature that we were excited about yesterday is in fact now gone. 

When asked for comment, Google told us that the feature had only ever been released by accident — that it was experimental, and that it could break some of the apps policed by it. We are suspicious of this explanation, and do not think that it in any way justifies removing the feature rather than improving it.Many instances of apps "breaking" when they are denied the ability to collect data like a location or an address book or an IMEI number can easily be fixed by, for instance, giving them back a fake location, an empty address book, or an IMEI number of all zeroes. Alternatively, Google could document for developers that these API calls may fail for privacy reasons. A good hybrid would be to use fake data for old versions of the Android API and cleanly defined Java exceptions in the next API level. As with many other changes that occur across Android devices and Android versions, some app developers might have to do minor updates to keep up. . . . .

Are Android Tablets really cheaper?

Doug Drinkwater has a very interesting article over at the TabTimes.  He points out that while the initial prices of Android devices are lower, the real question is what is the price per month of use and the quality of that use.

1) Unlike Apple, Android devices don't have their operating systems updated when new versions of Android come out.  The problem then is that many of the newest Apps may only run on the newest versions of Android.  Android devices thus become obsolete much faster.

2)  Androids generally just aren't as useful as iPads.  "iPad continues to dominate for mobile browsing and mobile commerce.  There are three possible interpretations of this: These tablets are being bought in emerging markets (but not China, since Chinese devices generally aren't activated and so won't be in these numbers) and not using western sites. They're being bought in developed markets and being used much less, or not at all.  They're being bought and not used for the internet - they're cheap kids' tablets, baby monitors, points of sale devices..."  

Google manipulating news searches for left wing political ends?: A case study

Google has previously been accused of "purging Conservative news sites."  There are other accusations that Google has manipulated search to harm Rick Santorum (more here).  Al Gore has been a Senior Advisor to Google. Well, I decided to do a test by searching on my own name.  Here is what I get on my name for Google and Bing for "best match" news search.

The first screen shot shows what happens with Bing and the second with Google.  Notice how under Google the lead searches are for a couple Media Matters pieces and other attacks on me.  But for Bing the first search findings are for Fox News; for John Lott, the sports writer who writes about the Toronto Blue Jays; and then outdoor life.com and the Daily Caller and Breitbart.  The Media Matters links come in at number 9.  Click on the screen shots to make them bigger.

I then tried doing the search using the "most recent" option for both searches.  With Bing, You get a lot stories from Outdoorlife and Shooting Sports News to Fox News and the Daily Caller.  For Google, two of the first three hits are attacks on me.  Three of the first six are attacks.  And Media Matters shows up in two of the first six hits.

So why does Google put so much more weight on pieces in Media Matters?  Interestingly, there were other "Opposing Views" columns that were favorable to me, but Google only seems to pick up the critical columns.

This bias in Google searches is something that I have seen over the years, but it isn't just important to me, it is Google's way of impacting the political debate and giving it a decidedly leftward tilt.

One final point, Bing seems to find a lot of stories that Google doesn't find.

A computer science professor that I know who specializes in these search questions wrote me:

this is the kind of thing we have seen for years, and seems to be a classic example in point. Google's secret sauce is flavored with larger doses of some sites than others, which is to say, their computation of page rank places more credibility on sites which emphasized one rather than the other set of sources. There are lots of benign reasons why this could be true in any one point example (and I can explain them in detail if you like), but to see this as a pattern over time tells us something about their algorithms. . . .

Is your Android phone listening to you?

Well, of course, just as politicians would never be tempted to use the IRS to harm their political opponents, they would never use this power to improperly gather political information.  From the WSJ:

Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links—techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.

People familiar with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's programs say that the use of hacking tools under court orders has grown as agents seek to keep up with suspects who use new communications technology, including some types of online chat and encryption tools. The use of such communications, which can't be wiretapped like a phone, is called "going dark" among law enforcement. . . .

The FBI develops some hacking tools internally and purchases others from the private sector. With such technology, the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc.'s Android software to record conversations, one former U.S. official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing, the person said. Google declined to comment. . . .

The new etiquette with Google's wearable computers

Great, people wearing Google Glass into the restrooms.  Nice to know that everything is able to be filmed.  From the New York Times:

Mr. Starner said privacy protections would have to be built into these computers. “The way Glass is designed, it has a transparent display so everyone can see what you’re doing.” He also said that in deference to social expectations, he puts his wearable glasses around his neck, rather than on his head, when he enters private places like a restroom. 

But not everyone is so thoughtful, as I learned this month at the Google I/O developer conference when people lurked around every corner, including the bathroom, wearing their glasses that could take a picture with a wink. . . .

Very liberal, pro-Democrat Google charged by Whistleblower with massive tax avoidance scheme

Google execs are among the biggest supporters of Obama and other Democrats who are constantly pushing for higher tax rates, but they have no problem break the law to avoid paying taxes themselves.  Google execs have also benefited greatly from Obama's stimulus dollars.  From the London Sunday Times:

A FORMER Google executive has blown the whistle on a massive and “immoral” tax avoidance scheme that has “cheated” British taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of pounds over the past decade. 

Barney Jones, 34, who worked for the internet search giant between 2002 and 2006, has lifted the lid on an elaborate structure which diverts British profits through Ireland to the Bermuda tax haven. 

Although Google’s London sales staff would negotiate and sign contracts with British customers, and cash was paid into a UK bank account, deals were technically booked through its Dublin office to minimise its liabilities here. Jones, a devout Christian and father of four, is ready to hand over a cache of more than 100,000 emails and documents to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), detailing the “concocted scheme”. . . .

Good Democrat Firm Google Uses Shell Company in Bermuda to dodge $2 billion in taxes

From USA Today:

By funneling nearly $10 billion in revenue into a Bermuda shell company last year, Google dodged about $2 billion in income taxes worldwide, Bloomberg News reports, citing financial records. 

The off-shore tax shelter — legal in the United States and elsewhere — cut Google's tax rate nearly in half, Bloomberg says. Bermuda has no corporate income tax. Bloomberg says the amount saved was about 80% of the company's pre-tax profit. . . .

So how quickly does the stock market react to new information?

According to this news note in this case "almost instantly."

Close to midday on Thursday, Google’s financial printing partner, RR Donnelly, published the search giant’s earnings release draft hours before it was supposed to. The result: Shares of Google dropped sharply and almost instantly by nearly 75 points, with the unexpected gaffe only compounding the fact that Google missed its quarterly expectations. . . .

Google hypocrisy on property rights: It is fine for it to "fork" others programing, but not for others to do it to Google

No one really denies that Google forked the Sun's Java when it designed the Android operating system.  What concerned Oracle, which had bought Java from Sun, was that Android use of Java was incompatible with Java.  Google's successful legal defense largely rested on Tim Bray who had designed Java and Google had hired Bray to work for them a couple of years ago.  Here is a statement from Bray:

But I think there’ll be lots of forks, and I approve. I suspect that basement hackers and university CompSci departments and other unexpected parties will take the Java source, hack groovy improvements into it, compile it, and want to give it to the world. They’ll discover that getting their creation blessed as “Java” requires running the TCK/trademark gauntlet, which isn’t groovy at all. So they’ll think of a clever name for it and publish anyhow.

Which is terrific. I see no downside, and I see huge upside in that the Java mainstream can watch this kind of stuff and (because of the GPL) adopt it if it’s good, and make things better for everybody.

So Google's argument was that when it was doing the forking, it was fine, even good.  Obviously, both Sun and Oracle didn't see it the same way and were worried that the incompatibilities would hurt programing for their version of Java.

Well, what a difference a few months makes.  Now Google is forcing Acer to drop the release of a new operating system to compete with Android that involves forking of Android.  Google of course is now making the same argument against Acer that Oracle made against Google.

In a blog post today, Rubin called out Alibaba's Aliyun platform as a forked version of Android that's modified to the extent that it's incompatible with other Android devices. As a member of the Open Handset Alliance, Acer is forbidden from using such an operating system, he said.
"Compatibility is at the heart of the Android ecosystem and ensures a consistent experience for developers, manufacturers, and consumers," the company said in an e-mailed statement. "Non-compatible version of Android, like Aliyun, weaken the ecosystem." . . .

The irony of this is not lost on Alibaba:

"Aliyun OS is not part of the Android ecosystem so of course Aliyun OS is not and does not have to be compatible with Android," said John Spelich, vice president of international corporate affairs for Alibaba. "It is ironic that a company that talks freely about openness is espousing a closed ecosystem." . . .

Google said that while it built its own operating system, Alibaba took elements of Android to build Aliyun. . . .

So didn't Google take parts of Java in building its own operating system?  Could someone please tell me what I am missing here?  Thank you.

UPDATE: The two examples are becoming even more closely linked.  Alibaba claims that its new Aliyun operating system is not a "forked" version of Android, just as Google claimed that Android had not "forked" Java.  Google obviously had to eventually concede that it had forked Java, but their defense was that it was great to have a lot of innovation.  Will it become clear that not only is Google making the same argument that it railed against before but that Alibaba hasn't forked anything?  From CNET:

Chinese search giant Alibaba is disputing Google's claim that Alibaba's new Aliyun operating system is a forked and incompatible version of Android and thus can't be used by phone maker Acer.

In a blog post yesterday, Google's Andy Rubin said "the Aliyun OS incorporates the Android runtime and was apparently derived from Android."

CNET asked Alibaba's John Spelich about Rubin's/Google's claims and about whether there are elements of Android in Aliyun, and here's what we got in response: "They have no idea and are just speculating. Aliyun is different." . . .

But Spelich told CNET in an e-mail that Aliyun is "not a fork. Ours is built on open-source Linux." And he added that Aliyun "has our own applications. [It's] designed to run cloud apps designed in our own ecosystem. [It] can run some but not all Android apps."

More evidence of how Google copied Apple for its ideas

Ever wondered why Google was able to so quickly provide a copy of the iPhone but took so long to copy the iPad.  If Google was able to come up with the idea of their phone on their own, why was it so difficult for them to come up with a Tablet.  It might be that Google has to see what some one else is doing on a lot of ideas before they do it themselves.  The Cult of Mac has this discussion:

When Motorola announced its latest Android-powered smartphones earlier this month, Schmidt publicly admitted that Google was “late to tablets.” He also revealed that only 70,000 of the 1.3 million Android activations each day are for tablets. So why was his company, which was so quick to follow the iPhone just three years earlier, so far behind the iPad?

Because despite the fact that Schmidt was still on Apple’s board during 2008-2009, he didn’t get so much as a peek at the iPad. He didn’t even know it existed, because Steve Jobs made sure he was kept in the dark about its development. We all know how Apple’s co-founder felt about Google’s answer to the iPhone, and he didn’t want a repeat of that for the iPad.

Google wasn’t “late” to the smartphone party, because Schmidt knew exactly how to crash it. But without any knowledge of the iPad before its launch, it took him and Google a whole lot longer to come up with a competitor. . . .

Google caught in massive acquisition of private info in the UK

With headlines noting "Web giant deliberately stole information but executives 'covered it up' for years" and "Emails, texts, photos and documents taken from wi-fi networks," it seems that the UK may finally be moving to punish Google for misleading countries on its eavesdropping on private citizens. From the UK Daily Mail:

Google is facing an inquiry into claims that it deliberately harvested information from millions of UK home computers. The Information Commissioner data protection watchdog is expected to examine the work of the internet giant’s Street View cars. They downloaded emails, text messages, photographs and documents from wi-fi networks as they photographed virtually every British road. It is two years since Google first admitted stealing fragments of personal data, but claimed it was a ‘mistake’. Now the full scale of its activities has emerged amid accusations of a cover-up after US regulators found a senior manager was warned as early as 2007 that the information was being captured as its cars trawled the country but did nothing. . . . Last month a report by the US media regulator the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revealed that the Google programmer who wrote the Street View software repeatedly warned that it collected personal data, and called for a legal and privacy review. . . . The report by the FCC attacked Google for inadequate oversight of Street View, and claimed it was planning to use the data collected for other internal projects. . . . .

Google Street View cars collected information on an extra-marital affair

The Obama administration let Google off the hook for this?  From the Washington Post:

A Google engineer knowingly created software that would collect sensitive personal information about people without their knowledge, according to an un-redacted version of a federal investigative report.
In a full version of a Federal Communications Commission report, an engineer shared e-mails with other Google officials indicating the company could collect “payload data,” including e-mail addresses and text messages through a program to collect location-based software from residential and business Wi-Fi networks. The company released the full contents of the report, which was heavily redacted by the FCC, except for the names of its employees.
The report, supplied by Google, concluded that the company’s actions do not violate FCC or federal eavesdropping rules. The agency recently fined the company $25,000, however, for being uncooperative in a two-years-long investigation. A separate investigation by the FTC resulted in no fines and was closed in 2010. . . .
In the report, the FCC cited an analysis by French regulators over a sample of Google’s data collection: 72 e-mail passwords, 774 distinct e-mail addresses and, for example, “an exchange of e-mails between a married woman and man, both seeking an extra-marital relationship with first names, e-mail addresses and physical addresses.” . . .

Over a sample?  I would like to know how large of a sample that involved.  It is pretty clear that the entire amount of collected information is much larger.  It would like to know how big it is.

What thrills Google

Google still has some way to go to match Facebook’s 850 million users, of course, but Page is thrilled the network is giving the company more information about its users. . . .

Google develops code to bypass Apple's privacy safeguards

This is "do no evil"? Google develops code so that it can track "the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked." That isn't wrong? Apparently one lesson is to stay away from the New York Times website. From the WSJ:

The Google code was spotted by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer and independently confirmed by a technical adviser to the Journal, Ashkan Soltani, who found that ads on 22 of the top 100 websites installed the Google tracking code on a test computer, and ads on 23 sites installed it on an iPhone browser.

The technique reaches far beyond those websites, however, because once the coding was activated, it could enable Google tracking across the vast majority of websites. Three other online-ad companies were found using similar techniques: Vibrant Media Inc., WPP PLC's Media Innovation Group LLC and Gannett Co.'s PointRoll Inc.

In Google's case, the findings appeared to contradict some of Google's own instructions to Safari users on how to avoid tracking. Until recently, one Google site told Safari users they could rely on Safari's privacy settings to prevent tracking by Google. Google removed that language from the site Tuesday night. . . .

UPDATE: Amazing, Google apparently did the same thing to Microsoft.

More evidence how Google searches can be distorted

This is pretty scary. From Fox News:

A new website with a very off-color description of Mitt Romney could create a serious image problem for the Republican presidential candidate. Reputation management experts call it “image-jacking” -- and Google says it's out of the company's hands.
Rick Santorum was the first to suffer from a “Google-bomb”: the SpreadingSantorum.com website created by sex columnist Dan Savage that offers a repulsive description of the candidate. Romney may be the latest to suffer from such repugnant manipulation of the Internet, but he won’t be last, said Reputation Management expert Kenneth Wisnefski.
“The more attention such sideshow distractions receive only takes away from politicians' ability to get their message out,” Wisnefski said. The spreading problem could affect candidates’ ability to connect with new voters.
A Google bomb is the intentional manipulation of a search engine to return a specific result, thanks to large numbers of relevant links or related searches. One recently uncovered by FoxNews.com connected the search string define: to certain swear words. And whether officially a “bomb” or merely an explosion in popularity, such image-jacking is clearly on the rise. . . .

Google and privacy

This is actually a pretty effective ad.