Amazon undoubtedly benefited from google attracting the bulk of regulatory scrutiny which is in large part because they have the same business model as newspapers and they didn't much appreciate it.
That's because it's matching "African American Inventors".
I guess it's understandable how this became a rallying cry for racists but if you were to search for "US inventors" you'll find all the white faces you crave: https://www.google.com/search?q=us+inventors
The NY Times is alleging "Bias at Google" and cherry picking examples that support that allegation while ignoring evidence that would refute that allegation.
I'm sure all of these examples, both positive and negative, have technical explanations. Further refutation of the claim that Google is biased.
It used to be that this author had a column that pushed back against the tech blaming but due to either weak demand or editorial decisions he pivoted to the mainstream of blaming internet companies for world's ails, and eventually he pulled a stunt and was caught in a lie:
At any rate I yearn for the day when Google's provided comment is something like: "It's our damn site and we don't owe anyone visibly or traffic so stop wasting our time".
Before he was president or even running for office he'd call into a fox news show and say something stupid and other news outlets would pick it up and I remember being annoyed and thinking "why is this news?!" now he's president and everything he says is news and it hurts my soul.
Anyway we live in a free country and the government can't dictate what kind of news a search engine should surface.
It's ironic though that newspapers are actually entertaining this nonsense and not outright debunking the notion and highlighting how dangerous it is.
We live in such a country now but that could change at any time. If the government starts dictating search results then we will not be a free country. Unfortunately causality doesn't go the other way.
As a republic, governed by the US Constitution, the 1st Amendment is clearly written to prevent such stupidity. I can't believe this is even being entertained on HN.
The first amendment is just a piece of paper unless someone enforces it. When the head of the executive branch of government starts talking openly about violating it, it's (past) time to take the threat seriously.
The constitutions of the USSR and Nazi Germany had similar provisions. The constitution of China still does. These things aren’t magic, and authoritarians find ways around them.
When a company has a near-monopoly market position and is using it to harm the public and restrain trade, the government absolutely can dictate a number of things to a business, according to antitrust law.
Yes, by failing to act against the block of monopolies that entirely control social media, search, etc.
So long as the government fails to act, they're supporting the monopolies in question. So long as those monopolies exist, what they're doing is called censorship. As monopolies they have the direct sanction of the state.
It matters because the manner in which any "findings" are presented has a big role in shaping public opinion and in this case the opinion shapers are purpofuly distorting finding to attack an advesary.
See the WSJ's false report that google let's developers read user emails, it's technically true but that only happens after the user allows it via an explicit permission screen.
Or the AP's claim that google keeps track of user location ever after location history is turned off, which again is technically true but that is because location history is just a location feature and not the master switch for all location features.
In both cases other media outlets repeated the claims without further commentery of research and this cartel might be the reason.
Wasn't the entire point of this location privacy redesign Google did a few years ago that they wanted to have a single master switch, for internal and consumer clarity?
Because that's the line they sold us inside the company when we complained that it was now asking for broad permissions too often. "It's broad, but it's all controlled in one place now."
If they're now claiming that users are confused and that's not what it means, well, fuck Google management. They don't give a damn. They'll lie to their employees, and they'll lie to their users.
Even that seems to get periodically re-enabled on my Galaxy S7 without my permission. I reasonably expect that if I launch an app that requires location to get asked for it, but in my experience the system level software is collecting it anyway, perhaps traffic mapping?
Given Samsung, I wouldn't be surprised if that issue was related to their software. There's just so much going on in Android, and so much third party software, that you really can't assume much anymore.
I do and the only time you'll get a straight word from leadership is when Sergey appears on stage drunk (which is often. dude has a problem). The rest are consistently awful.
There’s nothing that makes the location history issue only ‘technically true’. It is simply true.
If you present a switch saying don’t record location history, and still record the history, you are not respecting the switch.
Saying “That switch is just to turn off tracking the location history for the end user to use. We’re still going to track them for our own purposes.” is fine, but it’s a lie to say that the switch turns off location history. The switch should make it clear that all it’s doing is turning off the user facing version and that Google is going to keep tracking you whether you like it or not.
That would be honest, but presumably people wouldn’t like it if they knew, so Google wasn’t truthful about it.
The reporting is true, and Google deserves the consternation they are getting for misleading users.
Ok, since you claim that "the opinion shapers are purpofuly distorting finding to attack an advesary", name one false claim from the PDF document's executive summary. Should be quite easy, right?
You're letting Google really easy of the hook regarding the location history PR disaster. Google uses dark UX patterns to trick their customers into sharing more data, and this is one more instance of that. The fact that "technically" location history is not a master switch is just a flimsy excuse.
Can I name some tautological claims instead? The last three bullet points are all basically conjecture. "Google could do this" or "Google has the capacity to do that".
The article uses dark patterns to make you think they're making strong claims when they're just saying things that might be the case, or that the researchers don't have the ability to rule out. And it doesn't help that this article goes to great lengths to word things in more nefarious ways than the underlying research paper.
Most if not all research that are widely pitched to the media have some sort of agenda driving them.
In this case we have invasive surveillance from Chrome and Android which is not a secret and cause of growing concern.
As is deceptive communication about 'improving user experience' which is meaningless without specifics and is intentionally used to mislead, and downright fraud with 'location buttons' that do not turn off location.
The fact that you didn't seek to engage these points and immediately sought to question motives betrays an agenda.
Unfortunately these are unethical actions whoever does the research and this kind apologism seeks to derail discussion and distract from the creepy behavior of bad actors.
I don't think it should matter who simple falsifiable statements of facts come from. 'Adversarial forces' would be the ones most motivated to discover these bits of information, and they're incredibly valuable. I mean this is an experiment anybody with a couple of phones and a dash of technical ability could carry out themselves.
I would contrast this against the sort of macro-level research that involves modeling and other more subjective components subject to extensive 'tuning.' For instance the 'Uber drivers earn $3/hour' piece that ran a while back. The extensive modeling and obscured assumptions make it much easier to create fake conclusions that are very difficult to falsify.
Tech companies are only an issue for the newspaper business model they are a boon for the economy as a whole.