Tag: google

Privacy Groups Revolt Against Google’s Demand to Register Every Android Developer

Android’s defining advantage over iOS has always been openness. You could build an app, distribute it yourself, and never touch Google’s systems. That era is about to end unless the open-source community can force Google to back down.

Starting September 2026, any app installed on a certified Android device must be registered by a Google-verified developer. No registration, no installation. The verification demands government-issued identification, agreement to Google’s terms and conditions, and a $25 fee.

Developers who skip Google’s approval process will find their apps blocked, even when distributed entirely outside Google Play, through stores like F-Droid, the Amazon Appstore, or Samsung’s Galaxy Store.

Organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, F-Droid, Article 19, Fastmail, and Vivaldi, signed an open letter calling on Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and app ecosystem chief Vijaya Kaza to kill the policy. Their message is simple: Google is reaching into distribution channels it doesn’t own, doesn’t operate, and has no legitimate authority over.

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Iranian Spies Busted: Three Silicon Valley Engineers Charged with Stealing Google Trade Secrets and Funneling Data to Tehran

A federal grand jury has indicted three engineers for stealing hundreds of confidential files from Google and other tech giants, then smuggling the sensitive data to Iran.

The defendants, Samaneh Ghandali, 41, a U.S. citizen; her sister Soroor Ghandali, 32, an Iranian national on a student visa; and Samaneh’s husband Mohammadjavad Khosravi, 40, an Iranian national and legal permanent resident, were all residents of San Jose at the time of the theft.

Samaneh and Soroor previously worked at Google before joining another unnamed tech firm, while Khosravi, a former member of the Iranian army, was employed at a developer of system-on-chip (SoC) platforms, such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon series used in high-end Android phones and Apple’s iPhones.

Charged with conspiracy to commit trade secret theft, theft, and attempted theft of trade secrets, and obstruction of justice, the trio allegedly exploited their insider access to steal processor security, cryptography materials, and Snapdragon SoC hardware architecture secrets that serve as valuable intel not readily available to competitors.

The trio routed the files through third-party platforms like Telegram, copied them to personal devices, and even photographed computer screens to dodge digital monitoring.

In a particularly brazen move, just before Samaneh and Khosravi jetted off to Iran in December 2023, she snapped photos of his work screen displaying company secrets.

While in Iran, devices linked to them accessed this pilfered info.

Google caught wind of the scheme in August 2023 when internal security flagged Samaneh’s suspicious activity, leading to her access being revoked.

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Amazon’s Ring and Google’s Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State

That the U.S. Surveillance State is rapidly growing to the point of ubiquity has been demonstrated over the past week by seemingly benign events. While the picture that emerges is grim, to put it mildly, at least Americans are again confronted with crystal clarity over how severe this has become.

The latest round of valid panic over privacy began during the Super Bowl held on Sunday. During the game, Amazon ran a commercial for its Ring camera security system. The ad manipulatively exploited people’s love of dogs to induce them to ignore the consequences of what Amazon was touting. It seems that trick did not work.

The ad highlighted what the company calls its “Search Party” feature, whereby one can upload a picture, for example, of a lost dog. Doing so will activate multiple other Amazon Ring cameras in the neighborhood, which will, in turn, use AI programs to scan all dogs, it seems, and identify the one that is lost. The 30-second commercial was full of heart-tugging scenes of young children and elderly people being reunited with their lost dogs.

But the graphic Amazon used seems to have unwittingly depicted how invasive this technology can be. That this capability now exists in a product that has long been pitched as nothing more than a simple tool for homeowners to monitor their own homes created, it seems, an unavoidable contract between public understanding of Ring and what Amazon was now boasting it could do.

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Google agrees to $68m settlement over claims it recorded private conversations

Google is facing a class action after its users claimed the company was spying on them.

The company has agreed to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit as users accuse the company of violating their personal privacy.

Google’s virtual assistant, an AI powered software available on android phones and tablets, has been accused of recording private conversations.

The software activates when users use “wake words”, a verbal cue prompting the device to actively listen to commands, like “Hey Google” or “Okay Google”.

The assistant is designed to only switch from passive monitoring to active listening when it hears wake words.

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Democrats Demand Apple and Google Ban X From App Stores

Apple and Google are under mounting political pressure from Democrats over X’s AI chatbot, Grok, after lawmakers accused the platform of producing images of women and allegedly minors in bikinis.

While the outrage targets X specifically, the ability to generate such material is not unique to one platform. Similar image manipulation and synthetic content creation can be found across nearly every major AI system available today.

Yet, the letter sent to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai by Senators Ron Wyden, Ben Ray Luján, and Ed Markey only asked the tech giants only about X and demanded that the companies remove X from their app stores entirely.

X is used by around 557 million users.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

The lawmakers wrote that “X’s generation of these harmful and likely illegal depictions of women and children has shown complete disregard for your stores’ distribution terms.”

They pointed to Google’s developer rules, which prohibit apps that facilitate “the exploitation or abuse of children,” and Apple’s policy against apps that are “offensive” or “just plain creepy.”

Ignoring the First Amendment completely, “Apple and Google must remove these apps from the app stores until X’s policy violations are addressed,” the letter states.

Dozens of generative systems, including open-source image models that can’t be controlled or limited by anyone, can produce the same kinds of bikini images with minimal prompting.

The senators cited prior examples of Apple and Google removing apps such as ICEBlock and Red Dot under government pressure.

“Unlike Grok’s sickening content generation, these apps were not creating or hosting harmful or illegal content, and yet, based entirely on the Administration’s claims that they posed a risk to immigration enforcers, you removed them from your stores,” the letter stated.

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What’s He Got to Hide? — Eric Swalwell Blurs Out his ‘Mortgage Fraud’ Home in Washington D.C. on Google Maps

Does Eric Swalwell really think that blurring out his house on Google Maps can wipe out the facts?

Ironically, Swalwell had previously enjoyed showing off his home at 209 S Street NE in Washington, D.C. to the world. Variety Magazine featured Swalwell’s home when he purchased it in 2020.

On his Instagram account, Swalwell has repeatedly posted photos inside and outside of his home, his dog sleeping on the living room floor, looking out at his backyard, and even a birthday video with his children.

Now, Eric Swalwell has blurred out his home on Google Maps so it cannot be viewed online.

Google Maps allows homeowners to blur their homes as part of Google’s broader privacy and safety policy. To request blurring, a homeowner uses the “Report a Problem” feature directly within Google Maps Street View.

The user just navigates to their address, clicks the reporting link, then selects the option to blur their home. Once a home is blurred, the blur is permanent for that location in Street View, even if ownership changes.

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Pennsylvania High Court Rules Police Can Access Google Searches Without Warrant

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has a new definition of “reasonable expectation.” According to the justices, it’s no longer reasonable to assume that what you type into Google is yours to keep.

In a decision that reads like a love letter to the surveillance economy, the court ruled that police were within their rights to access a convicted rapist’s search history without a warrant. The reasoning is that everyone knows they’re being watched anyway.

The opinion, issued Tuesday, leaned on the idea that the public has already surrendered its privacy to Silicon Valley.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

“It is common knowledge that websites, internet-based applications, and internet service providers collect, and then sell, user data,” the court said, as if mass exploitation of personal information had become a civic tradition.

Because that practice is so widely known, the court concluded, users cannot reasonably expect privacy. In other words, if corporations do it first, the government gets a free pass.

The case traces back to a rape and home invasion investigation that had gone cold. In a final effort, police asked Google to identify anyone who searched for the victim’s address the week before the crime. Google obliged. The search came from an IP address linked to John Edward Kurtz, later convicted in the case.

It’s hard to argue with the result; no one’s defending a rapist, but the method drew a line through an already fading concept: digital privacy.

Investigators didn’t start with a suspect; they started with everyone. That’s the quiet power of a “reverse keyword search,” a dragnet that scoops up the thoughts of every user who happens to type a particular phrase.

The justices pointed to Google’s own privacy policy as a kind of consent form. “In the case before us, Google went beyond subtle indicators,” they wrote. “Google expressly informed its users that one should not expect any privacy when using its services.”

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Google and Substack Warn Britain Is Building a Censorship Machine

Major American companies and commentators, including Google and Substack CEO Chris Best, have condemned the United Kingdom’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act (OSA), describing it as a measure that risks censoring lawful speech while failing to make the internet safer for children.

They argue that the law normalizes digital surveillance, restricts open debate, and complicates how global platforms operate in the UK.

Their objections surfaced through The Telegraph, which published essays from Best and from Heritage Foundation researchers John Peluso and Miles Pollard, alongside new reporting on Google’s formal response to an Ofcom consultation.

That consultation, focused on how tech firms should prevent “potentially illegal” material from spreading online, closed in October, with Ofcom releasing the submissions in December.

Google’s filing accused the regulator of promoting rules that would “undermine users’ rights to freedom of expression” by encouraging pre-emptive content suppression.

Ofcom rejected this view, insisting that “nothing in our proposals would require sites and apps to take down legal content.” Yet Google was hardly alone in raising alarms: other American companies and trade groups submitted responses voicing comparable fears about the Act’s scope and implications.

Chris Best wrote that his company initially set out to comply with the new law but quickly discovered it to be far more intrusive than expected. “What I’ve learned is that, in practice, it pushes toward something much darker: a system of mass political censorship unlike anywhere else in the western world,” he said.

Best describes how the OSA effectively forces platforms to classify and filter speech on a constant basis, anticipating what regulators might later deem harmful.

Compliance, he explained, requires “armies of human moderators or AI” to scan journalism, commentary, and even satire for potential risk.

The process, he continued, doesn’t simply remove content but “gates it” behind identity checks or age-verification hurdles that often involve facial scans or ID uploads.

“These measures don’t technically block the content,” Best said, “but they gate it behind steps that prove a hassle at best, and an invasion of privacy at worst.” He warned that this structure discourages readers, reduces visibility for writers, and weakens open cultural exchange.

Best, who emphasized Substack’s commitment to press freedom, said the OSA misdiagnoses the problem of online harm by targeting speech rather than prosecuting actual abuse or criminal behavior.

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Irony Alert: Google Suddenly Champions Free Speech As UK Crushes Online Expression

In a stunning reversal, Google has slammed the UK for threatening to stifle free speech through its aggressive online regulations. This from the company infamous for its own censorship crusades against conservative voices and inconvenient truths. If even Google is raising the alarm, you know the situation in Britain has hit rock bottom.

The move signals a broader culture shift in Big Tech, where woke agendas are crumbling under pressure from free speech advocates. It’s no coincidence this comes after Elon Musk turned Twitter into X, a platform where ideas flow without the heavy hand of ideological gatekeepers.

Google, which has demonetized, shadow-banned, and outright censored content that doesn’t align with leftist narratives, now positions itself as a defender of open discourse, accusing Britain of threatening to stifle free speech in an escalation of US opposition to online safety rules.

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Gmail Explainer: How to Stop Google AI from Snooping Through Your Emails

Google has quietly started accessing Gmail users’ private emails and attachments to train its AI models, requiring manual opt-out to avoid participation. To make the process even trickier, Gmail users have to opt out in two separate places for the change to work. Follow these steps to protect your privacy from Google’s invasive AI endeavors.

Malwarebytes reports that Google has recently implemented changes that enable Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for the purpose of training its AI models. This means that unless users take action to opt out, their emails could be analyzed to improve Google’s AI assistants, such as Smart Compose or AI-generated replies.

The motivation behind this change is Google’s push to enhance Gmail’s features with the company’s Gemini AI, aiming to help users write emails more efficiently and manage their inboxes more effectively. To accomplish this, Google is utilizing real email content, including attachments, to train and refine its AI models. These settings are now reportedly switched on by default, rather than requiring explicit opt-in consent.

As a result, if users do not manually disable these settings, their private messages may be used for AI training without their knowledge. While Google assures strong privacy measures are in place, such as data anonymization and security during the AI training process, those handling sensitive or confidential information may find little comfort in these promises.

To fully opt out of Gmail’s AI training, users must change settings in two separate locations. This article features a guide and images for opting out on desktop, but the selections are very similar if accessing Gmail via the mobile app.

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