<story><title>Don&apos;t Trust Google (2002)</title><url>http://idlewords.com/2002/12/don_t_trust_google.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>And 14 years later there still &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;is no evidence or even reason to suspect that Google is not being an honest broker. The searches give good results, the rankings seem fair, the service remains free, and we haven’t heard of anyone being arrested for running a dodgy query.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;So while the author is right about potential dangers mentioned in the penultimate paragraph, it&amp;#x27;s been more than a decade and those fears haven&amp;#x27;t really materialized. The article sounds exactly like things that are being said in anti-Google threads in 2014.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>angularfan</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s a few ways the post became true:&lt;p&gt;Tracking Google Apps for Education students and even paid Google Apps for Business emails to build ad profiles, making misleading statement to the public that they&amp;#x27;re not doing so, and then when it finally came to statements to federal court, lacking the dare to continue lying and finally confessing the truth and then claiming the consumer Gmail policy applied to Apps for Education data.
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.edweek.org&amp;#x2F;ew&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;13&amp;#x2F;26google.h33.ht...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conspiring to kill SkyHook just with its outsized influence like Microsoft used to.
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-motorola-Samsung&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theverge.com&amp;#x2F;2011&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;google-android-skyhook-la...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tracking the physical location of Android phones for ad purposes without properly informing users and disabling things like Google Now if you disable the tracking.
&lt;a href=&quot;http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;digiday.com&amp;#x2F;platforms&amp;#x2F;google-tracking&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google employee access personal information of others. Google says it has fixed the issue, but how do we even know? Is there any legal safeguard against someone at Google reading your email?
&lt;a href=&quot;http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gawker.com&amp;#x2F;5637234&amp;#x2F;gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Paid inclusion for shopping search results
&lt;a href=&quot;http://marketingland.com/once-deemed-evil-google-now-embraces-paid-inclusion-13138&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;marketingland.com&amp;#x2F;once-deemed-evil-google-now-embrace...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ranking Google+ reviews over Yelp results even if the user explicitly searches for Yelp
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yelp-complains-outranked-google-local-listings/111539/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.searchenginejournal.com&amp;#x2F;yelp-complains-outranked-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Decreasing contrast in the background of ads, this especially hurts older people as ability to see contrast decreases with age, and the FTC found that almost half the people fail to notice that there are ads on the page, thus forcing products that are first in the organic results to pay Google for ads.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentionally-trying-to-minimize-the-fact-that-these-are-ads/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blumenthals.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;01&amp;#x2F;31&amp;#x2F;is-google-intentional...&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/ftc-googles-ad-practice-is-deceptive.html/?a=viewall&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;wallstcheatsheet.com&amp;#x2F;stocks&amp;#x2F;ftc-googles-ad-practice-i...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Don&apos;t Trust Google (2002)</title><url>http://idlewords.com/2002/12/don_t_trust_google.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>And 14 years later there still &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;is no evidence or even reason to suspect that Google is not being an honest broker. The searches give good results, the rankings seem fair, the service remains free, and we haven’t heard of anyone being arrested for running a dodgy query.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;So while the author is right about potential dangers mentioned in the penultimate paragraph, it&amp;#x27;s been more than a decade and those fears haven&amp;#x27;t really materialized. The article sounds exactly like things that are being said in anti-Google threads in 2014.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>renlo</author><text>Uhmmm, nearly everything he described became a reality.  Personalized search results, mass data gathering, filtering &amp;#x2F; censorship of results, the growth of Google to megalithic proportions (&amp;#x27;next Microsoft&amp;#x27;), etc.</text></comment>