Online Safety

The big problem with Google Glass is that it disrespects others’ privacy in the real world.

In creating an innovative form-factor for Google users to use most all of Google’s services in the real-world on-the-go and hands-free, Google Glass would fundamentally change how Google users socially interact and affect others in society.

In the virtual world, Google is a champion of users having the freedom to do most whatever they want online. In the real physical world, people’s freedoms begin to end when they begin to seriously infringe upon the freedoms of others – like the freedom of reasonable privacy.  

The greatest Google privacy outcries have been when Google products disregarded and disrespected non-Google users’ or others’ privacy. Gmail users may have assented to Google scanning their emails to target personal ads to get free email, but the billion or so non-Gmail users that happen to trade emails with Gmail never agreed to Google’s privacy-invading deal.

I have repeatedly warned that the so-called copyright “reform” movement is deceptive because it masks its true purposes. It knows that the real change it seeks -- to neuter anti-piracy enforcement – is an out-of-the-mainstream idea and a political loser. 

So the copyright-neutering movement uses an elaborate Trojan-Horse deception – a politically-contrived “cell-phone unlocking” problem -- as its political entrée into the copyright legislative process to forward its real goal of gutting DMCA digital-locks enforcement.

To understand why Google owns the single worst privacy record over the last decade of any Global 2000 corporation, listen to what Google’s leadership says about privacy-related matters in their own words. Then compare what Google Says about privacy below, with Google’s Privacy Rap Sheet – current up to June 4, 2012.  

Please don't miss my latest Daily Caller Op-ed: "Obsolete Privacy Law" -- here.

It is part 1 of a new "Privacy Theft" research series.

Now we know the real reason why there has been such strong opposition by FreePress and other net neutrality proponents to the common sense economic notion of broadband usage pricing. The newly launched Open Wireless Movement now wants to turn everyone's home WiFi routers into interconnected, free, public-community, "open WiFi" hotspots.

Google's Global Privacy Counsel, Peter Fleischer, cheered Singapore in his blog for passing a "modern privacy law" as a way of denouncing the EU's "out of date" privacy law and its recent threat to enforce it against Google.

Fully exhibiting a couple of the most common Google PR traits, a lack of self-awareness and an instinct for political polarization, Mr. Fleischer effectively lectured the world that it should emulate the privacy lawmaking of a hybrid-authoritarian regime, Singapore, as he denounced and belittled the privacy lawmaking of European democracies. How Orwellian this is, to praise the politically authoritarian treatment of the Singaporean people as "modern," and to denounce the democratic concern for the individual liberties of EU citizens as "bizarre" and "out of date."

Google remains its own worst enemy in trying to resolve EU antitrust charges.

In early 2012, when Google was trying to convince EU antitrust authorities that enforcement action against Google's search practices -- preferring its own content in search ranking over competitors -- would only harm consumers and was unnecessary because competition was but "a click away" for consumers, Google announced it would consolidate 60 privacy policies without user permission or user choice to opt-out, and then did it a month later, over the EU's strong objections.

This was a flagrant strategic mistake because: first the EU prides itself for strong consumer privacy laws and privacy protections; second the EU fully-understands that consumers' privacy is the de facto currency that Google uses to propel its monopoly; and third Google's primary antitrust defense is that they are the ones that are best looking out for consumers interests and that consumers have plenty of choice.

It's timely to review Google's public attitude towards privacy, given reports that the EU officially has found legal fault with Google's big change in its privacy policy last March, in which Google forced integration of sixty previously-separate privacy policies on users without explicit user consent.

Google: in its own words:

We learn about Google's culture-of-unaccountability from Google itself. Google's leaders have repeatedly indicated their hostility to accountability of most any type.

Listen to Google's own words to learn about their unique and unabashed corporate culture-of-unaccountability.

"New investors will fully share in Google's long-term economic future but will have little ability to influence its strategic decisions through their voting rights." Google's 2004 IPO letter to prospective shareholders from co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Google has no shame. This week Google sponsored a two-day summit in Los Angeles entitled: "Illicit Networks: Forces in Opposition" and trumpeted Google's leadership in combating illicit networks, with no acknowledgement of Google's own uniquely atrocious track record of illicit network activity, and even worse, with no public acceptance of responsibility or remorse for Google's illicit behavior.

There is no question that Google's professed public goals of combating "narco-trafficking, human trafficking, organ harvesting and arms dealing" are noble, needed and welcome. However, the serious problem here is Google's extreme cynicism and deceptive PR that they can burnish their global brand without having to practice what they preach.

Let's have the evidence speak for itself, because it proves that Google is its own worst enemy, in not doing what they say.