Free Republic

MRC Free Speech America researchers compiled 41 times Google was caught interfering in U.S. elections, beginning in 2008, intensifying in 2016 and continuing into 2024. MRC researchers found carefully crafted studies and numerous reports (from 2008 through February 2024) that have consistently demonstrated the tech behemoth’s election meddling.

After seeing promising results in Eastern Europe, Google will initiate a new campaign in Germany that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation. The tech giant plans to release a series of short videos highlighting the techniques common to many misleading claims. The videos will appear as advertisements on platforms like Facebook, YouTube or TikTok in Germany. A similar campaign in India is also in the works. It’s an approach called pre-bunking, which involves teaching people how to spot false claims before they encounter them. The strategy is gaining support among researchers and tech...

In 2000, Google began using “don’t be evil” as its unofficial motto. That pledge, shared internally among employees, rightly acknowledged that any company trusted with vast amounts of personal information ought to maintain the trust and confidence of the people the company claims to serve. Google believed that the public could count on it to do the right thing. Two decades later, while Google has gained power beyond anything the company’s founders could have imagined, it has long since departed from its original commitment to ethical behavior. Indeed, Google attempts to de-platform conservative voices, it has helped China oppress vulnerable...

A brute force method to fight misinformation. Google is hiding Play Store search results for both “coronavirus” and “COVID-19,” as first spotted by 9to5Google. Searches for these terms with other keywords like “map” or “tracker” no longer yield any results, either. Google has not made any formal announcement about these search terms being disabled, so we can’t count out the possibility that this is a bug of some sort. Misinformation about the spread of the novel coronavirus can crop up in even the most unlikely of places — so making it harder to access fake information is pivotal in the...

Google’s unofficial motto has long been the simple phrase “don’t be evil.” But that’s over, according to the code of conduct that Google distributes to its employees. The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show. “Don’t be evil” has been part of the company’s corporate code of conduct since 2000. When Google was reorganized under a new parent company, Alphabet, in 2015, Alphabet assumed a slightly adjusted version of the motto, “do the right thing.” However, Google retained its original “don’t be evil” language until the past several weeks. The...

Google has updated its terms of service to reflect that it analyzes user content including emails to provide users tailored advertising, customized search results and other features. The Internet giant’s scanning of users’ email has been controversial with privacy groups describing it as an intrusion into user privacy. Competitor Microsoft claims in its “Don’t Get Scroogled by Gmail” campaign that its Outlook.com email service is superior to Gmail as unlike Google it does not go through email looking for keywords to target users with paid advertisements. In a case in California over Google’s interception of email, District Judge Lucy H....

A new arrangement with the management of Google/YouTube has brightened the chance of YouTube being unblocked in Pakistan. If certain conditions of the Google management are met, YouTube will be accessible as YouTube.com.pk, a local search engine. . . . . . . She explained to the committee that the government had succeeded in convincing the Google management about religious sensitivities of Pakistanis.The local search engine will also make it easier to block any blasphemous or objectionable content, she said. . . . . . . “Instead of installing costly filtration mechanisms, Google will easily be able to block blasphemous...

An employee drives a Google Maps Street View vehicle around Palo Alto, CA. Internet giant Google's Street View project has raised privacy concerns in several countries. Attorneys suing Google for enabling its camera-carrying vehicles to collect emails and Internet passwords while photographing neighborhoods for the search giant's popular "Street View" maps look forward to resuming their case now that a U.S. appeals court has ruled in their favor. The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Tuesday that Google went far beyond listening to accessible radio communication when they drew information from inside people's homes. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)A federal...

Google said Tuesday it will require users to allow the company to follow their activities across e-mail, search, YouTube and other services, a radical shift in strategy that is expected to invite greater scrutiny of its privacy and competitive practices. The information will enable Google to develop a fuller picture of how people use its growing empire of Web sites. Consumers will have no choice but to accept the changes. 247 The policy will take effect March 1 and will also impact Android mobile phone users, who are required to log in to Google accounts when they activate their phones....

Google denied Wednesday that it gave President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign special access to a new advertising program, something a sales representative from the search and advertising giant had claimed in an email to customers.

Google Inc.’s “Don’t Be Evil” slogan is seductive but misleading. It is the lowest business ethics standard ever devised, excusing everything Google does short of evil. Google isn’t evil – but neither is it ethical. While perceptions of the world’s erstwhile No. 1 brand remain exceptionally strong, Google’s ethical blind spots regarding privacy and property rights are beginning to erode the public’s trust and eventually could threaten the company’s market domination. Anyone who follows Google closely knows that the company is a serial scandal machine. One of the world’s most powerful companies, with its vainglorious mission to “organize the world’s...

In an astonishing invasion of privacy, it admitted entire emails, web pages and even passwords were 'mistakenly collected' by antennae on its high-tech Street View cars... The Information Commissioner's Office said it would launch a new investigation. Scotland Yard is already considering whether the company has broken the law. Google executive Alan Eustace issued a grovelling apology and said the company was 'mortified', adding: 'We're acutely aware that we failed badly.' ...Google sent a fleet of specially equipped cars around Britain in 2008, armed with 360-degree cameras to gather photographs for its Street View project... Privacy fears followed when it...

BEIJING — Google Inc.'s threat to walk away from China sent shockwaves through the country's fast-growing Internet industry Wednesday, with users, executives and analysts trying to gauge the potential fallout. The U.S. search giant's announcement that it will stop censoring its Chinese search site, and may withdraw from the country altogether, triggered an outpouring of concern, and some anger, among Chinese Internet users. Students and others gathered at Google's offices in Beijing and Shanghai Wednesday with flowers in an emotional show of support for the company, which analysts say has an audience of more than 40 million loyal users in...

A recruiter who left Google last year says that the company had maintained a "do not touch" list of companies including Genentech and Yahoo, whose employees were not to be wooed to the Internet search giant. That revelation could be significant in light of this week's disclosure that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether Google, Yahoo, Apple, Genentech and other tech companies conspired to keep others from stealing their top talent. Although Google declined to comment on the list or other aspects of the investigation, Palo Alto attorney Gary Reback, who has been involved in a number of high-profile...

In 2006, Thailand announced it was blocking access to YouTube for anyone with a Thai I.P address, and then identified 20 offensive videos for Google to remove as a condition of unblocking the site. ‘If your whole game is to increase market share,’ says Lawrence Lessig, speaking of Google, ‘it’s hard to . . . gather data in ways that don’t raise privacy concerns or in ways that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.’ In March of last year, Nicole Wong, the deputy general counsel of Google, was notified that there had been a precipitous drop in activity...

Turns out Google already had another cartographic controversy on its hands. Earlier this week we learned of an Israeli city's slander lawsuit against the search giant based upon Google's refusal to remove a user-generated Google Earth notation that identifies the community of Kiryat Yam as Arab Ghawarina. A Google spokesperson told me that the notation violated no aspect of the company's terms of use agreement, no matter how much it violated the sensibilities of Kiryat Yam officials. In this second controversy, however, Google does not have the "We didn't do it" card at its disposal. That's because Google itself has...