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== How Google & Co are a threat to Democracy ==
<blockquote>Google was caught red-handed participating in NSA’s surveillance, which is both illegal under the U.S. constitutional framework(*), and conducive to a totalitarian world where self-censorship under one all-seeing eye prevents alternative futures from flourishing from collaborative creative efforts of individuals.
Google’s business model of collecting all data and profiling everyone has set the trend towards generalized practices of mass-surveillance, normalized such practices, and punished those who try to evade constant surveillance (by sinking their time in training Google's AI on Google Scholar, for example).
Our behaviors, our intimate connections, actions and emotions Google is commodifying and profiting from. We are reduced to a resource and stunted in development as persons and communities capable of meaningful choice, in exchange for colorful convenient toys.
</blockquote>
(*) Constitutions of democracies worldwide are affected by this general attack on secrecy of correspondence and freedom of assembly in the digital age. In theory, your local government is in charge of protecting your population from outside forces threatening your constitutional democratic order, but our system of jurisprudence is such that you can only punish a government for doing something unlawful, you cannot easily punish it for not doing anything. So it depends on us to take to the streets, make a campaign, start a movement that demands the introduction of laws that technically impede surveillance -- for example by making end-to-end encryption and metadata protection *mandatory* for all digital communications, thus forbidding Google & friends from having access to them.
Related, also see socialcooling.com.[http://www.socialcooling.com/]
== NSA Prism PRISM program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others - The Guardian (2013/06/06) ===
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data* http://hbpub.vo.llnwd.net/o16/video/olmk/holt/greenwald/NoPlaceToHide-Documents-Uncompressed.pdf* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29 Prism - Wikipedia* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore
[[File:PRISM-collection-details.jpg]]
== Google collects Android users’ locations even when location services are disabled ==
<blockquote>
Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers—even when location services are disabled—and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals’ locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy.
</blockquote>
https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locations-even-when-location-services-are-disabled/
== Google's Software is Malware - Free Software Foundation ==
(Most of the behavior described here is completely incompatible with EU data protection legislation)
https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-google
== Google pioneered the privatization of our personal data ==
From the Wikipedia page[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism]:
<blockquote>Surveillance capitalism is a term used and popularized by academic Shoshana Zuboff that denotes a new genus of capitalism that monetizes data acquired through surveillance. According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism emerged due to the "coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism of the financial capitalism and its neoliberal vision that have dominated commerce for at least three decades, especially in the Anglo economies" and depends on the global architecture of computer mediation which produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power she calls 'Big Other'. '''She states it was first discovered and consolidated at Google''', being to surveillance capitalism what Ford and General Motors were to mass-production and managerial capitalism a century ago, and later adopted by Facebook and others and that it uses illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control of behavior to produce new markets of behavioral prediction and modification.</blockquote>
Check out the full paper titled [https://cryptome.org/2015/07/big-other.pdf 'Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization'].
