Google: Putting Ads First. Users, Please, Step to the Rear of the Bus
September 9, 2020
DarkCyber spotted this item on the Google Chrome support page: “Can’t disable Chrome Mobile video autoplay. Have set to Blocked in Site Settings; still autoplaying.” The idea is that a person checking out a video on YouTube, for example, will be subjected to a stream of videos that just play. This is a variant of the Energizer Bunny, except that those batteries don’t die. The autoplay bunny is an almost forever thing. There are some amusing and interesting comments from users at the back of the digital bus; for instance:
You need to disable java feature in settings. Chrome forcing user playing videos in background for monetary reasons.
Imagine! Monetary reasons. Is the Google taking steps to get in front of the impending legal tussles looming from states, national governments, and now, maybe, users?
Oh, one more comment from a user who does not matter in the here and now Google context:
I hate that I have also had to leave Chrome but I can’t stand the autoplay videos. I want to be able to choose what I want to read and what I want to listen/watch. Will retire Chrome until it is fixed.
The driver of the chrome Google bus may say, “Pipe down or you will be banned.”
Would Google say that to a user?
Stephen E Arnold, September 9, 2020
Google Decides It Is Time To Play Cards
September 8, 2020
Innovation is part of Google’s mantra. Alphabet Inc. never stops developing ideas, especially when it comes to improving its trademark product: search. Mobile search and having seamless access between mobile and desktop devices is a key selling feature. Google decided to improve its activity cards feature says Engadget in the article, “Google Promises Better Search Results For Recipes, Jobs, And Shopping.”
The activity cards feature allows users to continue searches they started on mobile devices. The feature works like this:
“Let’s say you’re looking for iPad accessories. The shopping card will display products that you’ve been researching, and even some that you haven’t explicitly searched for. If they were featured in a review or a guide, Google might surface them in the card. That could help you to compare all of your options and reach a decision.
The jobs card could make it easier for you to keep on top of new openings in your field. It’ll display relevant job listings that have popped up since you last searched, so you don’t necessarily have to trawl through the same ones over and over.”
The recipe cards work similar by keeping content on searched for recipes updated. The activity cards act like personalized RSS feeds centered on specific topics: jobs, search, shopping, and recipes. They offer a unique and customizable browsing and search option.
However, their subject reach is limited. Dozens of other apps provide the same service, but they are not limited to four topics. The only special thing about Google’s activity cards is the Google name.
How about customizing activity cards so Google users can get the most out of this feature.
Whitney Grace, September 8, 2020
Google: We Are the Web. You Really Did Not Know, Did You?
August 31, 2020
Years ago I wrote three monographs about Google. The publisher, now defunct, sold these books after I recycled research paid for and delivered to several clients. The books explored the technologies was developing to redefine what in 2004 to 2008 was the World Wide Web. I included diagrams of a Google walled garden. I explained how Google’s page reconstruction inventions cobbled together data from different sources to create a Google version of content. Heck, I even included the dossier example from a Google patent.
The figure comes from US20070198481. Note that the machine generated dossier includes nicknames, contact information, ethnicity, and other interesting items of information culled from multiple sources and presented in a police report format. The “Maps and Pictures” label is linked to Google Maps.
The patent drawing presented a photo, key facts, and other information about an entity (in this case a person Michael Jackson, the songster). No one paid much attention. One book was circulated within a government agency, but the “real” journalists who requested review copies did zippo with the information.
I spotted a post on Slashdot titled “Brave Complains Google’s Newly Proposed Web Bundles Standard Would Make URLs Meaningless.” Welcome to the reality of the walled garden concept I explained about 15 years ago. The Slashdot post is here and the Brave post is here.
The hiding of PDF urls was one “enhancement” Google introduced several years ago. Researchers who need to document the location of a source document have to use services like URL Clean in order to identify the source of a document, including documents created by US government agencies like DARPA and the CIA. Hey, that’s helpful, Google.
The url masking was little more than an experiment, and it provided the Google with useful data which allows the next “walled garden” architectural enhancement to be scheduled.
Urls from Google are the source.
Why the time lag of a decade? Despite the perception that Google is a disorganized, chaotic outfit, there are some deeper trends which persist through time. These Brin-Page ideas, like the Elliott wave theory, Google becoming the Web is reaching another crest.
Is it too late? Gentle reader, it was too late a decade ago. A lack of meaningful regulation and the emergence of an information monoculture has ceded provenance to Google and a handful of other companies. One does not live in a country. One lives in a dataverse owned, shaped, and controlled by a commercial enterprise.
That’s why it makes zero difference what government officials try to do, the Google is in place and simply enhancing its walled garden, its revenue capability, and its control. Since few online consumers know how to vet sources and validate information, why not trust Google?
And where do the regulators get their information? Why from Google, of course. Logical. And logic is right.
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2020
Xoogler Awakes to a Reality: How about That?
August 30, 2020
Navigate to “Eric Schmidt: China Could Be AI’s Superpower If We Don’t Act Now.” The point of the write up seems to be to overlook the obvious. Mr. Schmidt was the “adult” at Google. He is now the technical advisor to the board of Alphabet where he was formerly the executive chairman. As executive chairman, he was responsible for the external matters of all of the holding company’s businesses, including Google Inc., advising their CEOs and leadership on business and policy issues.
Based on the information in the article, he seems to be going into full pundit mode.
Google and China. Advisor to Alphabet’s Board. Yep, telling the US China could be a leader in artificial intelligence. Perfect for 2020, a year of novelties.
I want to point out that an AI hot spot in China is Tsinghua University. This means that if the information in “Tsinghua University Plans to Open AI Research Center in China, Names Google’s AI Chief as Advisor” is accurate, Mr. Schmidt may want to focus on sending his message directly to Google.
The interview is just about as 2020 as Palantir’s insistence that it is not a Silicon Valley type outfit.
Yes, 2020. A good year for insights and interesting information.
Oh, Jeff Dean? He’s one of the serious engineers at the Google. BigTable, Chubby, and more, particularly in the smart software realm. Perhaps he is advising Tsinghua University on recipes, once an interest of the person who may be the smartest Googler in the collection of wizards.
This AI thing. Is Google helping out China in its AI efforts? Good question. Maybe a Sillycon Valley journalist will do some investigative reporting? Nah, it’s 2020. Redefine reality.
Stephen E Arnold, August 30, 2020
Google: High School Science Club Management Method Disclosed
August 28, 2020
Navigate to “Unredacted Suit Shows Google’s Own Engineers Confused by Privacy Settings.” I remember my high school science club in 1958. Quite a group of bright, entitled, arrogant, and clueless individuals. Of course, I was a member, and I had zero idea why the seniors wanted to set off stink bombs in the chemistry lab, splice into the loud speaker system to play rock and roll at 7:45 am, and rig the auditorium microphones to generate chuckle inducing feedback. Ho, ho, ho.
If the information in the referenced article is accurate, a similar approach is operative at the Google. I suppose one could view the statements about confusing interfaces, words that mean one thing to a normal human and something else to a wizard, and the panic which sets in when the Science Club is caught in a dark pattern.
I’m not amused. The article documents how running a company which controls information behaves… just like a high school science club. Ho ho ho. Isn’t this amusing? Actually. No. The Twitter clown car may be pulling into the drive in front of the Google dinosaur skeleton right now.
Stephen E Arnold, August 28, 2020
Google: A Money Diet Beats Keto
August 24, 2020
Google promised not to do any evil when it formed its company culture, but some consider a monopoly to be a capitalist evil because it limited the economy and hampers economic growth. Bloomberg explains that, “Google Search Upgrades Make It Harder for Websites Win Traffic.” Google’s search results have been plagued with ads since they added a fourth spot for ads at the top the results page. Employees opposed it, but Google had to please the investors.
Google has altered its search results page in efforts to organize the world’s information or so it claims, but the search giant’s monopoly is part of a bigger and growing gear of a complete monopoly:
“Debate over Google’s influence is gathering intensity as U.S. regulators prepare an antitrust case against the company in what will be one of the biggest legal clashes between the government and a corporation since the U.S. sued Microsoft Corp. in 1998. Google controls about 85% of the U.S. search market, and the changes it’s made have piled pressure on businesses to pay more to appear at the top of search results. That’s already a focus of regulators. Last year, David Cicilline, head of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, asked Google if a 2004 statement from co-founder Larry Page that the company wants to get users “out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible,” still described its approach. In a written response, Google simply skipped the question.”
Google’s search results used to be unpolluted and it drove people to Web sites. These Web sites were and are owned by small businesses. Google, however, is trying to keep more people on its own Web site. Google is posting information gleaned and copied from the trillions of data sources its algorithms crawl in search results. Users read this information, then are exposed to ads. Google is becoming more like Facebook and Amazon; it does not want people to leave.
Most of this information comes from Wikipedia. Wikipedia spokespeople say they have worked with Google for years so that Wikipedia’s information is correctly cited. If Google copies information from sources without proper credit it devalues the information quality, not to mention false information could be taken as fact. Google does pay for some of the information it copies, but not the majority of it.
Google is into money. Facilitating research, helping small businesses harmed by Rona, organizing the world’s information, and offering accurate search results are not priorities.
Whitney Grace, August 24, 2020
Alphabet Spells Out Actions for YouTubers to Take
August 20, 2020
Coercion is interesting because it can take many forms. An online publication called Digital Journal published “Google Rallies YouTubers Against Australian News Payment Plan.” Let’s assume the information in the write up is accurate. The pivot point for the article is:
Google has urged YouTubers around the world to complain to Australian authorities as it ratchets up its campaign against a plan to force digital giants to pay for news content. Alongside pop-ups warning “the way Aussies use Google is at risk”, which began appearing for Australian Google users on Monday, the tech titan also urged YouTube creators worldwide to complain to the nation’s consumer watchdog.
The idea, viewed from a company’s point of view, seems to be that users can voice their concern about an Australian government decision. The company believes that email grousing will alter a government decision. The assumption is that protest equals an increased likelihood of change. Is this coercion? Let’s assume that encouraging consumer push back against a government is.
The action, viewed from a government’s point of view, may be that email supporting a US company’s desire to index content and provide it to whomever, is harming the information sector in a country.
The point of friction is that Alphabet Google is a company which operates as if it were a country. The only major difference is that Alphabet Google does not have its own military force, and it operates in a fascinating dimension in which its actions are important, maybe vital, to some government agencies and, therefore, its corporate actions are endorsed or somehow made more important in other spheres of activity.
DarkCyber is interested in monitoring these issues:
- How will YouTube data consumers and enablers of Google ad revenue react to their corporate-directed coercive role?
- How will the Australian government react to and then accommodate such coercion if it becomes significant?
- How will other countries — for example, France, Germany, and the UK — learn from the YouTube coercion initiative?
- How will Alphabet Google mutate its coercive tactics to make them more effective?
Of course, the Google letter referenced in the Digital Journal may be a hoax or a bit of adolescent humor. Who pays attention to a super bright person’s high school antics? These can be explained away or deflected with “Gee, I am sorry.”
The real issue is a collision of corporatism and government. The coercion angle, if the write up is accurate, draws attention to a gap between what’s good for the company and what’s good for a country.
The issue may be the responsibility of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, but the implications reach to other Australian government entities and to other countries as well. The US regulatory entities have allowed a handful of companies to dominate the digital environment. Coercion may the an upgrade to these monopolies’ toolkits.
But the whole matter may be high school humor, easily dismissed with “it’s a joke” and “we’re sorry. Really, really sorry.”
Stephen E Arnold, August 20, 2020
Surprising Google Data
August 20, 2020
DarkCyber is not sure if these data are accurate. We have had some interesting interactions with NordVPN, and we are skeptical about this outfit. Nevertheless, let’s look beyond a dicey transaction with the NordVPN outfit and focus on the data in “When Looking for a VPN, Chinese Citizens Search for Google.”
The article asserts:
New research by NordVPN reveals that when looking for VPN services on Baidu, the local equivalent of Google, the Chinese are mostly trying to get access to Google – in fact, 40,35% of all VPN service-related searches have to do with Google. YouTube comes second on the list, accounting for 31,58% of all searches. Other research by NordVPN has shown that YouTube holds the most desired restricted content, with 82,7% of Internet users worldwide searching for how to unblock this video sharing platform.
If valid, these data suggest that Google’s market magnetism is powerful. Perhaps a type of quantum search entanglement?
Stephen E Arnold, August 20, 2020
Aussie Agency Accuses Google of Misleading Consumers
August 19, 2020
Our beloved Google misleading consumers? Say it isn’t so! The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) announces: “ACCC Alleges Google Misled Consumers About Expanded Use of Personal Data.” The commission has begun federal court proceedings against the company, saying it failed to adequately notify users about a change made to its privacy policy in 2016. Basically, it swapped out the promise, “We will not combine DoubleClick cookie information with personally identifiable information unless we have your opt in consent,” for the sentence, “Depending on your account settings, your activity on other sites and apps may be associated with your personal information in order to improve Google’s services and the ads delivered by Google.” To those who do not follow developments in the world of data, that sounds like a neutral thing at worst, perhaps even helpful. However, the post explains:
“Before June 2016, Google only collected and used, for advertising purposes, personally identifiable information about Google account users’ activities on Google owned services and apps like Google Search and YouTube. After June 2016, when consumers clicked on the ‘I agree’ notification, Google began to collect and store a much wider range of personally identifiable information about the online activities of Google account holders, including their use of third-party sites and apps not owned by Google. Previously, this additional data had been stored separately from a user’s Google account. Combined with the personal data stored in Google accounts, this provided Google with valuable information with which to sell even more targeted advertising, including through its Google Ad Manager and Google Marketing Platform brands. The ACCC alleges that the ‘I agree’ notification was misleading, because consumers could not have properly understood the changes Google was making nor how their data would be used, and so did not – and could not – give informed consent.”
As ACCC Chair Rod Sims points out, these third-party sites can include some “very sensitive and private information.” He also takes an interesting perspective—since Google is raking in more ad revenue from this personal data, and users essentially pay for its services with their data, the policy change amounted to an inadequately announced price hike. See the article for details on how Google implemented these changes in 2016.
We’re reminded Google acquired ad-serving firm DoubleClick in 2008, but it has since referred to the system as simply “Google technology” in its privacy policy. The technology tracks users all over the web to provide more personalized, and lucrative, advertising. With some imagination, though, one can think of many more uses for this information. Users should certainly be aware of the implications.
Cynthia Murrell, August 18, 2020
A Former Science Club Member Critiques Google, THE Science Club
August 17, 2020
I truly enjoy posts from former insiders at giant technology monopolies. Each of them hires from the other. The meta-revolving door spin is fascinating to watch. Some get tossed out of the mechanism because of some career negative factor: Family, health, mental orientation, or some other exogenous, non-technical event. Others go through a Scientological reformation and realize that the world of the high-technology nation-states is a weird place: Language, food customs, expectations of non-conformist “norm” behavior, and other cultural suckerfish. What gives me a chuckle are revelations like Tim Bray’s or Steve Yegge’s “Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You.” In my opinion, Mr. Yegge’s thoughtful, calm, and “in the moment” essay about the GOOG is more intriguing than the Financial Times’ story that reports Google has predicted the end of the world as we know it in Australia. What? Australia? Yep, for those receiving this warning from the Oracle at Mountain View their life amidst the kangaroos will mean no “free search” and — gasp! — curtains for “a dramatically worse” YouTube. Search can’t get much worse, so the YouTube threat means angry kids. Yikes! YouTube. Will Australia, a mere country, at the wrong end of a Google phaser strike?
Back to Mr. Yegge: In his essay, the phrase “deprecation treadmill” appears. This is the key insight. Googlers have to have something to do it seems. The bright science club members interact via an acceptable online service and make decisions informed by data. As Mr. Yegge points out, the data fueling insights may not be comprehensive or processed by some master intelligence. He notes that a Bigtable storage technology had been running for many years before any smart science club member or smart Google software noticed. (So much for attention to detail.)
Mr. Yegge points out that
One is that running a Bigtable was so inconsequential to Google’s scale that it took 2 years before anyone even noticed it, and even then, only because the version was old. As a point of comparison, I considered using Google Cloud Bigtable for my online game, but it cost (at the time) an estimated $16,000/year for an empty Bigtable on GCP. I’m not saying they’re gouging you, but in my own personal opinion, that feels like a lot of money for an empty [censored] database.
This paragraph underscores the lack of internal controls which operate in real time, although every two years could be considered near real time if one worked in a data center at Dialog Information Services in the mid 1980s. Today? Two years means a number of TikToks can come and go along with IPOs, unicorns, and Congressional hearings live streamed.
Mr. Yegge also uses a phrase I find delicious: “Deprecation treadmill.” The Google science club members use data (some old, some new, and some selected to support a lateral arabesque to a hotter team) to make changes. Examples range from the Dodgeball wackiness to change in cloud APIs which Mr. Yegge mentions in his essay. He notes:
Google engineers pride themselves on their software engineering discipline, and that’s actually what gets them into trouble. Pride is a trap for the unwary, and it has ensnared many a Google team into thinking that their decisions are always right, and that correctness (by some vague fuzzy definition) is more important than customer focus.
I wish to point out that Mr. Yegge is overlooking the key tenet of high school science club management methods: The science club is ALWAYS right. Since Mr. Yegge no longer works at the Google, Mr. Yegge is WRONG. Anyone who is not a right-now Googler is WRONG. A failure to understand the core of this mindset cannot work at the Google. Therefore, that individual is mentally unable to understand that Mother Google’s right-now brood is RIGHT. Australia and the European Union, for example, do not understand the logic of the Google. And they are obviously WRONG.
How simple this is.
Mr. Yegge points out how some activities are supposed to be carrier out in the “real world” as opposed to the cultural norms of the techno-monopolies. He writes:
Successful long-lived open systems owe their success to building decades-long micro-communities around extensions/plugins, also known as a marketplace.
This is indeed amusing. Google delivers advertising, and that is a game within a casino hotel. I think the online advertising game run by the Google blends the best of a 1950s Las Vegas outfit on the Strip and the mythical Hotel California of the Eagles’ song. Compare my metaphor with Mr. Yegge’s. Which is more accurate?
Google’s pride in their software engineering hygiene is what gets them into trouble here. They don’t like it when there are lots of different ways to do the same thing, with older, less-desirable ways sitting alongside newer fancier ways. It increases the learning curve for newcomers to the system, it increases the burden of supporting the legacy APIs, it slows down new feature velocity, and the worst sin of all: it’s ugly. Google is like Lady Ascot in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland:
Lady Ascot: Alice, do you know what I fear most?
Alice Kingsley: The decline of the aristocracy?
Lady Ascot: Ugly grandchildren.
Mr. Yegge’s point is a brilliant one: The Google wants its customers to operate like “here and now” Googlers. But customers do not understand and they are WRONG.
The disconnect between the Google and mere customers is nailed in this statement by Mr. Yegge:
But after all these years, Google Cloud is still #3
Yes, Google does make decisions based on data. Those decisions are RIGHT. If this seems like a paradox, it is obvious that the customer is once again proving that he or she is not capable of working for Google. Achieving third prize in the cloud race is RIGHT, at least to some real Googlers. For Mr. Yegge, the crummy third place ranking is evidence of the mismatch between the techno-monopoly and cloud users and, I might add, Australia and the EU.
Mr. Yegge points out what may be a hint of the tension between the Google science club and its “wanna be” members. He writes about a Percona-centric, ready-to-use solution. He calmly points out:
Go ahead, I dare you. Follow the link and click the button. Choose “yes” to get all the default parameters and deploy the cluster to your Google Cloud project. Haha, joke’s on you; it doesn’t work. None of that [censored] works. It’s never tested, starts bit-rotting the minute they roll it out, and it wouldn’t surprise me if over half the click-to-deploy “solutions” (now we understand the air quotes) don’t work at all. It’s a completely embarrassing dark alley that you don’t want to wander down. But Google is straight-up encouraging you to use it. They want you to buy it. It’s transactional for them. They don’t want to support anything.
DarkCyber looks forward to Mr. Yegge’s next essay about the Google. Perhaps he will tackle the logic of reporting an offensive advertisement to the online monopoly. That process helps one understand a non-deprecation method in use at the A Number One science club. The management method is breathtaking.
As Eugène Ionesco noted:
“Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.”
The “our” is Google’s reality. If you are not a “here and now” Googler, you cannot understand.
Stephen E Arnold, August 17, 2020
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