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20120201

I kid Google




No, but seriously now, who writes that stuff ?
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3 comments:

  1. I Googled this. Zero hits.

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  2. Interesting take on this by Ian Pearson, here:

    "Google surrendered its ‘Do no evil’ principle to commercialism, first in China, now globally. It has since become a Big Brother in its own right, collecting deep data not only for its own megalomania but also for any government department that can make ‘a valid legal claim’ (extracted from their new rules on privacy). I have no real choice but to carry on using their mail and search, and I still like Google in spite of their abuses - no one’s perfect – though I am extremely wary of using Google+ seriously. I barely access my account, just like Facebook, and for the same reasons. Facebook and Apple also both became Big Brothers, collecting far more date than most people realised, wanting their own high-walled garden dictatorships. They have them now, but I keep my distance and only visit them as much as I need to. After a few years of ongoing high-profile collapses and surrenders of principle, now Twitter has surrendered too. So now the web is under government control, pretty much everywhere, and worse still, with a layer of big corporate control underneath. Companies on the web have to do as they are told, follow the rules. But they also impose their own too. It is the worst nightmare for those of us who used to debate whether big companies or governments would end up controlling us, which would have the power? We ended up with the worst of both worlds."

    Yet, I suppose, another evolutionary step in the unfolding of what Glenn Greenwald referred to as a one-way mirror dynamic: it isn’t merely that States and big corporations (or the collusion of both, aka Fascism) know more and more about the private activities of citizens, but worse, "that happens at exactly the same time that citizens know less and less about the activities of the State."

    All of which, as Pearson puts it, would (or certainly ought to) be concerning enough to anyone who cares about freedom and pluralism, EVEN if we were all living in the make-believe land of the Care Bears, "in a world with good leaders of properly democratic governments taking us forwards to a life of freedom and health and prosperity for all," instead of, as the author sees it, a world made of "a global flock of very poor leaders, a sad combination of the greedy, the corrupt and the stupid, with increasing oppression, increasing polarisation, grabbing what they can for themselves in a less fair world, and more attempts to control our thoughts."

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