If you’ll recall, back in October, Google announced that it would be shuttering its underused social network Google+ in August of 2019 due to a security breach that left 500,000 user accounts vulnerable. This was after the Wall Street Journal discovered a flaw in the comically underused platform. In a world where Facebook is continually exposing millions of accounts to third parties in an almost regular basis, 500,000 users seemed like a thimble of water in the ocean in comparison. Now, a new breach has put Google in very similar company with Facebook.
During internal testing by Google, it was recently discovered that Google+ had another bug in it that left 100 times the amount of accounts exposed than the last breach. Over 52 million accounts could have been potentially exposed with such information as a user’s name, email address, occupation, and age to third-party developers. Google has stated that there’s no evidence that any of the exposed information was used by bad actors but this latest breach has caused Google to move up the timetable for the demise Google+. Now Google has scheduled the shutdown for April of 2019.
Besides being in amazement that Google+ actually had that many users at one point, this bug could not have come at a worse time. Maybe Google will be able to weather this storm since Google+ was nowhere near as popular as its competitors but when you add it to the multitudes of other security breaches in similar spaces this could invite even more governmental eyes looking to regulate companies like Google and Facebook. And as we’ve mentioned before, in today’s highly partisan climate it might not be the best time for any kind of sweeping legislative change.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A major social network run by a major tech corporation exposes a good size chunk of its user data which the company chooses not to disclose until it’s investigated by the media. Normally, you probably wouldn’t be wrong if you thought that this was another story about Facebook but for once you’d be mistaken. This time it’s Google’s failed attempt at a social network known as Google Plus or Google+ as the search engine behemoth has branded it.
The Wall Street Journal recently uncovered that a flaw in Google+ allowed user data to be exposed for 500,000 users. While this would be a drop in the bucket for Facebook, this is a massive breach for Google+ users. After the Journal report was released, Google almost immediately announced it was shuttering Google+ within the next ten months. So by August of 2019, Google+ will be no more. In a very Facebook-like move. Google reportedly knew of the breach back in Spring of this year but remained silent on it in order to avoid the controversy that Facebook was undergoing after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Now, we can all joke about how barely anyone we know used Google+ but its impending demise shows a greater problem among the tech giants whose services we all use. Whether it’s Facebook, Google, Twitter or whomever, we use their services in exchange for a certain amount of trust that our personal information will be handled with a modicum of responsibility. Many of these companies have betrayed that trust especially in 2018. If these data breaches continue then these companies are just begging for governmental regulation and considering how divisive and partisan the current governmental scene is, it would make it the worst time for any kind of sweeping legislative change.
Not too long ago, tech giants Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, were called to testify before Congress about their alleged roles in foreign meddling of the 2016 Presidential Election. Now those same companies are being asked to return to Washington to testify about their part in the dissemination of extremist propaganda. If you’ll recall, the tech companies did not do themselves any favors in their testimony over the Russian backed ads from the election.
At that time, we asked if the CEOs of each respective company were afraid to appear before Congress themselves. It may appear that the answer to that question is yes, they are scared. Once again, instead of Larry Page, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg testifying before congress about their platforms we’ll instead have the heads of each company’s public policy department. Even though they have the records of the disastrous performance of their companies’ last representatives, I doubt this new crop of underlings will fare any better.
This also comes on the heels of Mark Zuckerberg himself stating that Facebook is ‘broken’ in his pledge to fix the platform. If he’s aware of the problems that have befallen his ubiquitous network then why is he uncomfortable to appear before Congress to make these same promises? As the saying goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Thee companies indeed have absolute power over most of our daily lives. To not be completely transparent shows that they probably have many things to hide.
British media trade magazine Press Gazette recently ran an article where one of the directors of the London School of Economics has called for Facebook and Google to be broken up as virtual monopolies. While the two companies may not be publishers themselves, in today’s digital world these two companies have an enormous influence on what media gets to be shared. While the UK has stricter antitrust laws should Facebook and Google be broken up in the US?
When we think back to monopolies in the US being broken up we think back to companies like Standard Oil, US Steel and AT&T. While Facebook and Google are not similar companies to these ones from history, they do trade in the currency of our modern age, information, which these two companies do seem to have an inordinate amount of control on the flow of information. Even noted consumer advocate Ralph Nader says these companies release products and policies out onto the world without realizing what the consequences will be.
Now, some may say that Facebook and Google aren’t monopolies and that there is competition to these platforms, but is there really? While there may be other social networks and other search engines do any of them even compare to the industry leaders? Facebook has 2 billion users. Can anyone even name what the #2 social network is? Even if it is Twitter, their userbase doesn’t even come close to Facebook’s. What is the #2 search engine? Yahoo? Bing? Google is so large that their name has become a verb for looking things up on the internet.
Due to their undue influence on today’s media, maybe it’s time for Facebook and Google to start thinking smaller before the government does it for them?
Not pictured: Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Page
This week, Congress continued its probe into alleged Russian influencers purchasing ads on the internet’s three top platforms, Facebook, Google and Twitter. Rather than appearing themselves, the CEOs of each company sent their legal counsel in their stead. Yes, that’s not unheard of for businesses to send their legal representatives to Congress, but we’re talking about these companies taking money from foreign entities that might have influenced the outcome of the 2016 election.
While Congress by and large can be tech-illiterate, at least one Senator seemed to hammer the point home that these companies probably knew who they were taking money from. Minnesota Senator Al Franken showed everyone just how unwilling these companies are to divulge the truth.
“People are buying ads on your platform with roubles. They’re political ads. You put billions of data points together all the time. That’s what I hear that these platforms do: they’re the most sophisticated things invented by man, ever. Google has all knowledge that man has ever developed. You can’t put together roubles with a political ad and go hmm, those two data points spell out something bad?”
Stretch replied: “Senator, it’s a signal we should have been alert to and in hindsight–”
But Franken cut him off, asking whether Facebook would pledge not to publish a political ad paid for in North Korean won. As Stretch demurred, Franken interjected fiercely: “Please answer yes or no, sir. You’re sophisticated. You’re the chief legal counsel for Facebook. Please answer yes or no.”
Of course, Senator Franken did not get a straight answer out of Stretch. Instead the counselor hemmed and hawed his way through a non-committal answer.
However, the question remains, why weren’t the CEOs there to answer questions directly? What exactly are they afraid of? Perjury perhaps? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t comment on the hearings until the day after Stretch’s testimony on an earnings call.
“I’m dead serious,” Zuckerberg said. “I’ve directed our team to invest so much in security on top of the other investments we’re making it will significantly impact our profitability going forward.” That investment will include hiring at least 10,000 new employees to focus on security and enforcement. CFO David Wehner later clarified that many of those new jobs won’t be full time but rather contract positions at partner companies.
“Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits,” Zuckerberg said.
Which doesn’t address the problem at hand at all. Zuckerberg was then said to have handed off the remainder of the call to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Facebook was the biggest offender in this story having served up alleged Russian ads to at least 125 million American users. Considering the entire population of the US is 323 million, that’s not a small percentage of potential voters who saw these misleading ads. That’s more than enough people to sway an election one way or the other. If protecting the community is more important than profits, why take the foreign money at all for American political ads? Facebook can claim hindsight is 20/20 all they want, but there were accusations of Russian political meddling even before these ads appeared on Facebook. So how could accepting Russian currency for American political ads not throw up a red flag?
If you don’t think the CEOs of this company aren’t cowards, please think of this for a moment. Even Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer eventually appeared before Congress. So when the CEO of a company that reportedly makes money from the sexual slave trade in this country appears before Congress and these other CEOs don’t, it goes a long way in showing just how scared of Congress they probably are.
Recently, Google announced the public release of their parenting app for android devices called Family Link. For a family of Android phone and tablet users this is a welcome announcement as Android has had no built-in child safety apps until now. Unfortunately, there are still some major kinks in the system which could make the app pointless.
In theory, once you install the Family Link app on yours and your children’s Android devices you’ll be able to see what apps they’re using, restrict control to some apps and even set a time when the device is to be shut off at night. You’re able to basically monitor your children’s devices from your own device. However, that comes with several caveats.
The first hurdle is your children’s devices will need to be running Android Nought (7.0) or higher. That’s fairly recent and many budget Android devices are not currently running Nougat. The second and most glaring problem is that Family Link can only be set up on new Google accounts and not preexisting ones. Depending on the age of your child, this could be a deal breaker considering the email address they’ve been using for a while may be tied into that account.
Google has valiantly tried to bring parental control to Android with this app, unfortunately it’s fallen short of its goal.
Nicholas Kristof, of the New York Times, is one of the few nationally known journalists who has continually reported on the transgressions of Backpage when it comes to Backpage’s part in the sex trade. In one of his recent columns, Kristoff goes after an even bigger fish in the polluted waters of internet sex trafficking, Google. The Mountain View, California, search king opposes the proposed amendments to the Communications Decency Act that would remove the protections from prosecution that sites like Backpage have been hiding behind, otherwise known as the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act.
Kristoff claims that Google has an unfounded fear when it comes to their argument of a slippery slope with Google claiming the new amendment to the CDA could open them up to frivolous lawsuits. However, a spokesperson for the National Center for Missing and Exploited children points out the new legislation is crafted in such a way that it only applies to those sites which are directly receiving money from traffickers.
“This bill only impacts bad-actor websites,” notes Yiota Souras, general counsel at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “You don’t inadvertently traffic a child.”
Yet the majority of Silicon Valley is opposing the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act mostly out of fear that it will somehow affect their right to free speech, which couldn’t be further from the truth. There is no slippery slope here. There is no downside. I think what the mostly insular tech community forgets is there are actual people being trafficked and sold into sexual slavery on sites like Backpage and aren’t just faceless pixels.
Instead of worrying about Backpage’s ‘freedom of speech’ these tech companies should be more worried about the fact that many of the women and girls being trafficked on Backpage have no freedom at all in a country that prides itself on liberty.
Google has become a victim of its own success. Its name is so synonymous with web search that its brand has become a verb. When someone has a question you don’t say “Why don’t you Bing that?”. Just on search alone, Google possesses close to 80% of the global search engine market share. Google also boasts the most popular webmail client on the internet with their GMail. It has four times as many users as its next closest competitor, Yahoo Mail. While Google has some minor competition to its popular services, for all intents and purposes it is a virtual monopoly. So when the European Union handed down a $2.7 billion fine for violating EU antitrust regulations, you might think it was just because Google is so much bigger than everyone else and that’s sort of true. What lies deeper than that is it appears Google wants to remain the size they are, at the expense of anyone who may get in their way, no matter how small that anyone might be.
Google is often chided for having the corporate motto of “Don’t be evil” as it has gobbled up competitive services and shut them down. Now, the EU says Google has committed another evil in trying to favor their own services over the services of other companies. Since its inception the EU has had a hardline stance against large corporations that engage in antitrust practices. They famously fined Microsoft for not offering a competing browser and media player with the Windows platform. At the heart of the matter is the belief Google gave top priority to Google Shopping in search results over competitors offering a similar price comparing service. Yet while promoting its own services Google would also allegedly remove the links of competing services claiming they violated Google’s SEO rules, the same SEO rules that are often vague and can change at a whim. Some might even say they change to however it suits Google and not the sites it indexes.
While the EU has a reputation of combating antitrust practices, the US does not have the same viewpoint that the EU does. In the US Google is in the catbird’s seat. The US hasn’t broken up a major monopoly since it broke up AT&T into the ‘Baby Bells’ back in the 1980s. Since then the Baby Bells have all since merged back into two separate companies in Verizon and AT&T. Cable companies and Internet service providers, which are often one and the same, often have regional monopolies with no real choice for consumers, yet nothing is ever done about that. While the Federal Trade Commission has prevented some mergers from taking place in order to avoid one company having too much of the market, it hasn’t done much in the way of promoting competition, while a company like Google has basically muscled their way into a monopoly.
We’re not saying Google doesn’t have a right to do business, it should just do business equitably. Think about it for a moment. If Google came up with a version of your business and promoted their version over your business, how long would it be before your business started feeling the pinch? With the vast resources at Google’s command, that could happen to any number of businesses and industries. Just like the banks in the 2008 financial crisis were deemed ‘too big to fail’, Google is too big to succeed without sacrificing a large number of worthy competitors.
Google recently announced they have opened a data center in Cuba, being the first American company to do so. Cuba’s internet is incredibly slow compared to other Western nations. Cuba receives its internet through an underground cable provided by the government of Venezuela. The distance between the countries is roughly 1300 miles. This would roughly be the equivalent of someone living in New York having an internet service provider whose only servers were in Dallas. While Google’s new data center won’t speed up current Cuban internet, it will make some content easier to access.
Google’s servers in Cuba will fetch information through the existing Venezuelan cable but will then store it on their servers. This will make it much easier and a little faster for Cuban internet users to access popular or viral content.
What hasn’t been discussed is how Google is going to get along with the Cuban government. While advances in freedom have been made in Cuba in recent years, it’s still not the most democratic country in the world. Cuba’s internet is still heavily regulated by the government. Google pulled out of China after the Chinese government made incessant censorship demands. Will the Cuban government ask the same of Google and if so, will Google abandon their Cuban project if the Cuban government pressures them into acting against the people?
Whether you want to admit it or not, the internet runs on advertising. Most of the sites we use that we consider free are actually built on advertising revenue from Facebook all the way down to your local news site. That’s why even an internet mammoth like Google stands up and takes notice when it loses major advertisers. In the wake of YouTube’s recent hate speech controversy where advertisers complained about their ads showing up on or near hate speech videos, both Verizon and AT&T have pulled their advertising dollars away from Google.
While this move will cost Google hundreds of millions of dollars, AT&T and Verizon’s decision to withdraw their advertising dollars may have less to do with hate speech and may have more to do with business. Many tech insiders have speculated that this move may mean that Verizon and AT&T are looking to launch their own YouTube competitors. One could also assume that each company would give traffic priority to their own respective platforms over YouTube.
While there are many video streaming sites and apps out there, none have captured the global imagination more than YouTube. They were the first and have remained the king of the mountain since. However, not every king stays king forever and while YouTube has shown some major flaws in recent days are Verizon and AT&T big enough names to take on YouTube as they’re basically two Davids against YouTube’s Goliath? Probably not, so even with all their flaws expect YouTube to continue to thrive.
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