Piracy

Evidence continues to mount that Google's management and supervision of its Android operating system is out-of-control when it comes to protecting privacy and security.

• Google's corporate ethos that it is better to "ask for forgiveness than permission" increasingly means Android has no privacy by design and hence less security for users by default.
• Requiring and respecting the need for permission and authorization is a bedrock truism of IT security -- and the evidence below increasingly indicates that Google has a deep aversion to that IT security truism.

Consider the growing pattern of Google's default design and behavior that maximizes collection of private information, which inherently puts users at greater security risk.

First, and profoundly disturbing, is a new TechRepublic revelation in a post by security blogger Donovan Colbert.

In setting up his new Android-based tablet, Mr. Colbert discovered that the Android operating system by default, i.e. without permission, automatically collected and implemented encrytion key passcodes to automatically gain access to private networks without the permission of the user. In Mr. Colbert's own words:

My new op-ed, "Google's Pirate Side" in the Daily Caller, about the Department of Justice's reported criminal investigation of Google's longstanding promotion of rogue pharmacy sales, despite repeated warnings from law enforcement, tells the story of how this Google scofflaw behavior is consistent with Google's pirate escapades in other areas.

• The Daily Caller op-ed is here.

Google's serial disrespect for people, privacy, property, and the rule of law are core themes of my new book: Search & Destroy Why You Can't Trust Google Inc.

• See www.SearchAndDestroyBook.com for the different ways you can buy the book.

The widely reported DOJ criminal investigation into Google for promoting illegal pharmacy sales may be Google's most serious clash with Federal law enforcement to date; (even compared to Google's many previous run-ins with law enforcement chronicled in my recent Forbes op-ed.)

Why is this case is so serious?

First, this is a bonafide criminal probe involving Google promoting illegal drug sales, which could have put hundreds of thousands of U.S. consumers at serious risk of injury or death from counterfeit, harmful, or inappropriate-use drugs.

• This case involves more than fraudulent business behavior, it appears to involve criminal disregard for the health and safety of consumers for monetary gain.

Second, if reports are correct that this case also involved an official Google business decision in 2004 that Google, unlike other online advertisers, would continue to promote Canadian pharmacies that they and others knew sold drugs illegally to U.S. customers, then Google may have made a deliberate business decision to disregard the law.

My new Forbes' op-ed: Google Disregards the Law, tells the sordid story behind today's story of Google apparently agreeing to settle a criminal investigation with the Department of Justice for ~$500m for promoting and accepting advertising from illegal online pharmacies.

• The op-ed sadly chronicles that this latest law-breaking by Google is part of a well-established pattern of disregard for the rule of law.
• If one cannot trust a public Fortune 100 company to obey the law, one cannot trust them overall as I explain in much great detail in my new book "Search & Destroy Why You Can't Trust Google Inc."
  • See: www.SearchAndDestroyBook.com for the different ways you can buy the book.

I've long thought there was a big untold story about Google, essentially a book all about Google, but told from a user's perspective, rather than the well-worn path of Google books told largely from Google's own paternal perspective.

• (You can buy the book, Search & Destroy Why You Can't Trust Google Inc. at www.SearchAndDestroyBook.com, Telescope Books, Amazon, Kindle, Kindle Apps, Barnes & Noble, The Nook, and The Nook Apps.)

Given that Google is the most ubiquitous, powerful and disruptive company in the world, it seemed logical to me that users, and people affected by Google, had a lot of important and fundamental questions about Google that no book had ever tried to answer in a straightforward and well-defended manner.

In a remarkable admission for a senior public company executive, Google Chairman and longtime former CEO Eric Schmidt told Gigaom: "At Google, we give the impression of not managing the company, because we don't really. It sort of has its own borg-like quality if you will. It sort of just moves forward."

If the executives ultimately responsible for "managing the company" to ensure it proactively respects users' privacy, vigilantly guards against security and data breaches or property infringement, is not really "managing the company," it now makes sense why Google has so many privacy scandals, and security and property infringement problems.

Generally protecting privacy, security and property rights are not engineering goals unless company management and managers have internal control and management focus, systems, processes, and procedures to ensure they are a priority to engineering teams.

Google's lack of interest in management execution is evident in Google's:

Three completely different entities, coming from three very different perspectives/motivations, are all making the same charge against Google: that Google forged their work and stole/misused their property in creating its world-leading Android mobile operating system.

See a preview below of Google's likely official public apology for collecting kids' partial Social Security #s and other private information -- without the permission of their parents.

Per Google's Official Blog:

"We are deeply sorry, very very sorry, and even oh-so-sorry for collecting partial social security numbers, date and place of birth on kindergartners and grade schoolers participating in the Doodle-4-Google contest.

Mobile content producers do not have a truly competitive choice between Google's 10% fee One Pass service and Apple's 30% fee subscription service, as much as they have a value system choice between Google's Internet commons model and Apple's property-rights-driven market.

• Google's One Pass offering looks eerily like its Google TV offering, where major video content owners faced the platform choice between dumb content and Content is King."
  • Given that choice, content-is-king-oriented owners broadly rejected Google's property-hostile, dumb-content system/model.
• As mobile content providers and carriers threatened with "dumb content" and bandwidth/spectrum commodification from Google's "free" commons model assess their real long term strategic competitive and value-creation options, they will increasingly look toward, and forward to, the nascent Microsoft-Nokia alliance offering and RIM's offering for content-is-king allies and true competitive choices.

As much as Google tries to fool Little Red Riding Hood content owners that their Grandma always had such big eyes and big teeth, most mobile content providers will spot the Google commons wolf in disguise.

If ever there was a prime example of "regulatory dissonance" it would be:

• An Administration engaging in a high-profile campaign to promote regulatory restraint to avoid and fix "burdensome regulations" (in an Executive Order, in the State of the Union, and in a Presidential Speech at the Chamber of Commerce in the span of two weeks), and
• The recent hiring of FreePress Chairman Tim Wu as a senior policy advisor at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
  • (FreePress is well-known as the single most radical anti-capitalist, anti-property, hyper-regulatory activist group in D.C., and
  • Tim Wu is well known for proposing sweeping preemptive regulation of competitive industries with no proof of a regulatory problem -- in pushing for preemptive net neutrality regulations that culminated in the FCC's Open Internet Order, and for preemptive "Carterfone" wireless regulations of the FCC's 700 MHz auctions.)