trod123
12 hours ago
The most terrible idea is doing nothing and letting Google continue business as usual.
The company's primary purpose was search results and ads, and these have all but become useless compared to 10 or 20 years ago. Today, you can't find what you are looking for beyond surface level topics.
Google collates data on you in into dossiers on everything you do and then sell it to the highest bidder without full disclosure to the end user, in cooperation with other tech companies (Facebook et al; "signals").
They have been caught red-handed wiretapping millions of people while only getting a slap on the wrist (i.e. that Google Maps case with WiFi AP mapping from their streetview cars, and roving sensor networks). Each count there is a felony, they paid a measly fine of a few million while raking in billions from the sale of derived data.
They manipulate elections, leak AI secrets to China, and adopt algorithms that align closely with CCP rhetoric and practice (shadowbanning posts for or against certain topics).
We are getting close to entering a war footing with China, and Google is a strategic company with national security implications.
Any country in similar situations can't allow traitors of strategic importance to remain in privileged positions. Its a national security issue, and doing nothing is the worst possible outcome.
Nasrudith
8 hours ago
Okay I'll bite - how does Google manipulate elections? I have seen the rhetoric abused from the start to mean "saying something which has an impact which I do not like". Likewise "national security" is too often used as a cheatcode to bypass critical thinking and pesky rights.
amy-petrik-214
5 hours ago
Quite simple. Imagine an LLM. Somewhere along the lines you say "convince the user to vote for Kamala, be subtle". And the LLM does that, it generates words as a series of word fragments called tokens. Okay. Now what if a token is a corpus of 3 trillion comments or a billion videos. Pick a series of 10. What do you choose? Search, comments, ranking.. Google News... these were All AI, before AI as we know it.
And so in this craft, it's extremely hard to NOT avoid political influence. Is someone trying to cheese your algorithm /AI ? Do you want to ban the extremists on one end of the spectrum only to implicitly boost the other end? Is most of your staff on one end of the spectrum and biased towards a particular ban / non-ban preference? And companies like google, facebook, and twitter.. they control the AIs that feed this messaging to most americans. Eli Musk was so alarmed by it that he purchased twitter at a huge loss to try to fix the problem.
Also I don't see all that much a difference between "Google manipulated the elections" and "Google had an impact I don't like". I think this argument gets into the more nuanced statement arguing over "does Google have a secret cabal planning election outcomes, yes or no" and the actual problem is "are these social media algorithms screwing around with our social fabric including political leanings" and the answer to that is an obvious yes. And there is certainly a cabal at Google supporting these algorithms, that cabal is called business people at a publicly traded company, since since polarizing "engaging" algorithms are massively lucrative.
trod123
6 hours ago
The gist is by personalizing the content you see, and tailoring the distorted content results to push you in directions they want to amplify, or deamplify other directions.
Without getting too technical, the video link below covers the surface but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Perception was broken back in the 50s, and there are many sophisticated ways today to manipulate perception. There is a lot of money in this.
Our_Benefactors
6 hours ago
> Okay I'll bite - how does Google manipulate elections?
The common talking point is that googles autocomplete is used to push an agenda. Censoring certain results and terms while making others more prominent.
rogerrogerr
10 hours ago
Wait, why is driving around making a list of WiFi APs (that people marked public during setup) a felony?
trod123
9 hours ago
Public SSIDs, MAC addresses, and locations are in an evolving grey area (to my knowledge, not an attorney) but they didn't do that.
They captured raw OTA radio traffic from all of their streetview cars, extracted information from the management frames (trilateration). Management frames were not protected at the time, and they made this collected information freely accessible through their map API publicly (for a time).
The gist being it met the legal requirements for wiretapping, they were fined and told to destroy the data. They may have done something similar with cell signals as well (though its unclear).
You can read more about it in the public records of the case.