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Google Diversity Head Said Jews Have ‘Insatiable Appetite for War’

Google’s head of diversity strategy said in a 2007 blog post that Jews have an “insatiable appetite for war” and an “insensitivity to the suffering [of] others.” The comments were part of a longer meditation from Kamau Bobb, now head of diversity strategy at Google, that also slammed Israel’s military actions in Gaza and Lebanon that same year.

Bobb was at the time a research associate in technology at Georgia Tech, according to his LinkedIn. The post, titled “If I Were A Jew,” described how he believed Jewish people should view the Middle East conflict.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Diversity", Anti-Semitism and the Left, Google, Google is Evil, Israel bashing, Israeli - Islam Conflict

Google Employees Demand Company Cut Ties With Israel

A group of “Jewish and allied” Google employees on Wednesday called on the tech giant to terminate its contracts with the Israel Defense Forces and formally condemn Israel.

In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, 250 members of the Jewish Diaspora in Tech group called on the company to “heed the requests framed by Palestinian Googlers and center their voices going forward.” The letter also asks Google to fund Palestinian relief organizations, “recognize the pain” of Palestinians in a formal statement, and “reject any definition of antisemitism that holds that criticism of Israel or Zionism is antisemitic.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inGoogle, Google is Evil, Israeli - Islam Conflict

Google is testing its controversial new ad targeting tech in millions of browsers. Here’s what we know.

Today, Google launched an “origin trial” of Federated Learning of Cohorts (aka FLoC), its experimental new technology for targeting ads. A switch has silently been flipped in millions of instances of Google Chrome: those browsers will begin sorting their users into groups based on behavior, then sharing group labels with third-party trackers and advertisers around the web. A random set of users have been selected for the trial, and they can currently only opt out by disabling third-party cookies.

Although Google announced this was coming, the company has been sparse with details about the trial until now. We’ve pored over blog posts, mailing lists, draft web standards, and Chromium’s source code to figure out exactly what’s going on.

Download Brave

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by Sarcasticat••0•Posted inBig Tech, Google, Google is Evil, Surveillance

Google and Urban Dictionary censor ‘Blue Anon’ following widespread mockery of left-wing conspiracy theories

The life of new term “Blue Anon” in the online Urban Dictionary was short-lived. After emerging on social media and landing in a spot in the slang-term glossary on Saturday, it was quickly purged. A Google search brings up nothing on the term other than brand name ski gear.

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by Sarcasticat••0•Posted in"Cancel Culture", Censorship, Google, Google is Evil

Secret Alphabet Project “Wolverine” Aims To Give People Superhuman Hearing

X, a company focused on moonshot ideas that’s owned and operated by the Google parent Alphabet, is now working on a project named “Wolverine” after the X-Men superhero due to his heightened senses, Business Insider reports. The ultimate goal is to develop tech that lets people filter out a specific source of noise, perhaps granting abilities like being able to focus on just one speaker out of a noisy crowd.

One way or another, this will be used against ordinary citizens.

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by Sarcasticat••0•Posted inGoogle, Google is Evil, technology, The Future

Google promises to stop spying on users, saying 3rd-party for-profit tracking model to be phased out

Alphabet subsidiary Google has pledged it will ditch the third-party cookie-based model of online advertising – and promised not to invent something similar that would allow it to keep slurping up the same kind of data.

Google is serious about moving away from privacy-invading micro-targeted ads, Director of Product Management David Temkin insisted in a Wednesday blog post, acknowledging that users are sick of being spied on and feel it puts them at risk.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inGoogle, Google is Evil

Judge in Google case disturbed that ‘incognito’ users are tracked

At a hearing Thursday in San Jose, California, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh said she’s “disturbed” by Google’s data collection practices in a class-action lawsuit that describes the company’s private browsing promises as a “ruse” and seeks US$5,000 in damages for each of the millions of people whose privacy has been compromised since June of 2016.

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by Sarcasticat••0•Posted inGoogle, Google is Evil, Privacy Concerns, Surveillance

Google, Facebook tell SCOTUS it should be harder for you to sue them

Suing technology firms when they mess up is already hard, especially when it’s over privacy violations. Now, Facebook, Google, and the trade groups representing all the big tech firms are asking the Supreme Court to make it even harder for class actions to pursue cases against them.

Facebook, Google, and all the others submitted a filing (PDF) to the Supreme Court this week essentially arguing that if you cannot prove the specific extent to which their screwup injured you, you should not have any grounds to be part of a lawsuit against them.

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by Sarcasticat••0•Posted inBig Tech, facebook, facebook is evil, Google, Google is Evil

Google Deletes over 150,000 Negative Reviews of Robinhood App From Angry Users

Google removed at least 100,000 negative reviews of the stock trading app Robinhood from the Google Play app store after angry users sent a flood of critical reviews that caused the app’s rating to plummet on Thursday. The app’s rating went from roughly four stars out of five on Wednesday to just one star on Thursday. Robinhood users were understandably upset after the company halted purchases of GameStop’s stock and other stocks promoted by Reddit’s WallStreetBets community.

*150,000 was from an updated article: https://notthebee.com/article/google-play-magically-removed-100000-negative-reviews-of-the-robinhood-app

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by Sarcasticat••0•Posted inGoogle, Google is Evil

Australia Hits Back At Google, Facebook: It’s “Inevitable” You’ll Soon Pay For Hosting Australian News

Neither side is backing down after weeks of standoff between the Australian government and Google over proposed legislation aimed at better compensating and rewarding local news publishers, while bringing greater transparency to the way algorithms employed by Google, Facebook, and YouTube work.

Canberra is now finalizing the bill which will require Google to obtained licenses for all content published by Australian news companies. Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. oversees an estimated at least 94% of all search traffic in Australia, similar to many other countries globally, at a time it’s coming under increased accusations of using its monopoly power to bully content providers and smaller competitors.

I hope Google gets smashed.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inAustralia, Google, Google is Evil

Google Threatens Shut Down In Australia Over Bill Designed To Better Compensate Content Providers

A huge controversy erupted last summer between major US social media platforms and the Australian government over a bill designed to better compensate and reward local news publishers, while bringing greater transparency to the way algorithms employed by Google, Facebook, and YouTube work.

Months after failed attempts to come to an agreement with the government of Australia, Google is now threatening the dramatic step of shutting down its search engine in the country altogether.

Is that really such a bad thing?

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inAustralia, Google, Google is Evil

What did Canadians search on Google in 2020?

Canadians had many questions in 2020 and they turned to search engines to make sense of what they were seeing and hearing.

With the year ending, the analytics data from Google provides a unique insight to what Canadians were reading about throughout the year.

Certain events occupied Canadians’ attention for long enough to dominate the trending data and others events reached so many people, so quickly, they would own a top spot for the entire year.

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by Sarcasticat••0•Posted inCanada, Google