Tag: google

Google To Start Running “Prebunk” Ads and Quizzing YouTube Viewers To Fight So-Called “Misinformation”

Prebunking – until relatively recently it was just one of the fringe concepts in the relentless “war on misinformation industrial complex.”

A short way to describe it is as a dystopian version of debunking false or incorrect information. But here the idea is to stop users (“help them identify”) unwanted content, before they can even see it.

A short way to describe what’s wrong with the “war on misinformation” is that it all too easily turns into a smokescreen for plain censorship of lawful and factually correct speech.

And now, prebunking is moving from ideations pushed by murky “fact-checking” and similar outfits, to the very top of the mainstream – Google.

The company that in effect controls the search market and some of the largest social platforms in the world (outside China) has announced that its latest anti-misinformation campaign will incorporate prebunking.

No doubt with an eye on the US election later in the year, Google’s attention is now on Europe, specifically the EU ahead of the European Parliament vote in June.

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Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead

Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet. Google Search’s “cached” links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off. Google “Search Liaison” Danny Sullivan confirmed the feature removal in an X post, saying the feature “was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”

The feature has been appearing and disappearing for some people since December, and currently, we don’t see any cache links in Google Search. For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:” plus a website URL, or by typing “cache:” plus a URL into Google Search. For now, the cached version of Ars Technica seems to still work. All of Google’s support pages about cached sites have been taken down.

Cached links used to live under the drop-down menu next to every search result on Google’s page. As the Google web crawler scoured the Internet for new and updated webpages, it would also save a copy of whatever it was seeing. That quickly led to Google having a backup of basically the entire Internet, using what was probably an uncountable number of petabytes of data. Google is in the era of cost savings now, so assuming Google can just start deleting cache data, it can probably free up a lot of resources.

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Google Update Reveals AI Will Read All Your Private Messages

There’s understandable excitement that Google is bringing Bard to Messages. A readymade ChatGPT-like UI for a readymade user base of hundreds of millions. “It’s an AI assistant,” says Bard, “that can improve your messaging experience… from facilitating communication to enhancing creativity and providing information… it will be your personal AI assistant within your messaging app.”

But Bard will also analyze the private content of messages “to understand the context of your conversations, your tone, and your interests.” It will analyze the sentiment of your messages, “to tailor its responses to your mood and vibe.” And it will “analyze your message history with different contacts to understand your relationship dynamics… to personalize responses based on who you’re talking to.”

And so here comes the next privacy battlefield for smartphone owners still coming to terms with app permissions, privacy labels and tracking transparency, and with all those voice AI assistant eavesdropping scandals still fresh in the memory. Google’s challenge will be convincing users that this doesn’t open the door to the same kind of privacy nightmares we’ve seen before, where user content and AI platforms meet.

There will be another, less contentious privacy issue with your Messages requests to Bard. These will be sent to the cloud for processing, used for training and maybe seen by humans—albeit anonymized. This data will be stored for 18-months, and will persist for a few days even if you disable the AI, albeit manual deletion is available.

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Hackers Exploit Third-Party Cookies to Access Google Accounts Without Passwords

Security experts at CloudSEK have reportedly identified a new form of malware that exploits third-party cookies, allowing unauthorized access to Google accounts without the need for passwords.

The Independent reports the alarming security breach, first announced on a Telegram channel by a hacker in October 2023, exploits vulnerabilities in third-party cookies. Specifically, it targets Google authentication cookies, which are normally used to streamline user access without repeated logins.

Hackers have devised a method to extract these cookies, allowing them to bypass password-based security and even two-factor authentication mechanisms to access user accounts.

This exploit is a major risk for all Google accounts as it allows for ongoing access to Google services, even after a user’s password has been changed. An analysis by the cybersecurity firm CloudSEK indicates that several hacking groups are actively experimenting with this technique.

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DATA SOLUTIONS PROVIDER TELUS INTERNATIONAL IS PAYING $50 FOR IMAGES OF KIDS TO TRAIN GOOGLE’S AI

In a recent initiative, Google and TELUS International, a subsidiary of the Canadian tech conglomerate TELUS, have collaborated to collect biometric data from children for age verification purposes. This project, running from November 2023 to January 2024, involved parents filming their children’s faces, capturing details such as eyelid shape, skin tone, and facial geometry. Parents who participated were paid $50 per child.

First reported by 404media, the project requested that parents take 11 short videos of their children while wearing things like face masks or hats. Another request was for children’s faces with no coverings at all. Each video must be less than 40 seconds, and participants were expected to spend 30 to 45 minutes on the task.

According to the summary document, which has now been taken down, a TELUS International moderator would be on a call while the parent took these videos of the child.

According to TELUS International, the purpose of this project was to capture a diverse range of biometric data to ensure that their customer’s services and products are representative of various demographics. Google told 404media that the goal was to enhance authentication methods, thus providing more secure tools for users. 

“As part of our commitment to delivering age-appropriate experiences and to comply with laws and regulations around the world, we’re exploring ways to help our users verify their age. Last year, TELUS helped us find volunteers for a project exploring whether this could be done via selfies. From there, Google collected videos and images of faces, clearly explaining how the content would be used, and, as with all research involving minors, we required parental consent for participants under the age of 18. We’ve also put strict privacy protections in place, including limiting the amount of time the data will be retained and providing all participants the option to delete their data at any time,” Google told 404media in a statement.

While this aligns with Google’s broader commitment to developing responsible and ethical facial recognition technology, the project has raised significant concerns regarding children’s privacy and consent.

Parents had to consent to Google and TELUS International collecting their child’s personal and biometric information in order to participate. This included the shape of their eyelids, the color of their skin and their “facial geometry.” According to the TELUS International summary, Google would then keep the data for five years at most, which for some participants, would be into their early adulthood.

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Google’s New Patent: Using Machine Learning to Identify “Misinformation” on Social Media

Google has filed an application with the US Patent and Trademark Office for a tool that would use machine learning (ML, a subset of AI) to detect what Google decides to consider as “misinformation” on social media.

Google already uses elements of AI in its algorithms, programmed to automate censorship on its massive platforms, and this document indicates one specific path the company intends to take going forward.

The patent’s general purpose is to identify information operations (IO) and then the system is supposed to “predict” if there is “misinformation” in there.

Judging by the explanation Google attached to the filing, it at first looks like blames its own existence for proliferation of “misinformation” – the text states that information operations campaigns are cheap and widely used because it is easy to make their messaging viral thanks to “amplification incentivized by social media platforms.”

But it seems that Google is developing the tool with other platforms in mind.

The tech giant specifically states that others (mentioning X, Facebook, and LinkedIn by name in the filing) could make the system train their own “different prediction models.”

Machine learning itself depends on algorithms being fed a large amount of data, and there are two types of it – “supervised” and “unsupervised,” where the latter works by providing an algorithm with huge datasets (such as images, or in this case, language), and asking it to “learn” to identify what it is it’s “looking” at.

(Reinforcement learning is a part of the process – in essence, the algorithm gets trained to become increasingly efficient in detecting whatever those who create the system are looking for.)

The ultimate goal here would highly likely be for Google to make its “misinformation detection,” i.e., censorship more efficient while targeting a specific type of data.

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Google Experiments With “Faster and More Adaptable” Censorship of “Harmful” Content Ahead of 2024 US Elections

In the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election, Big Tech engaged in unprecedented levels of election censorship, most notably by censoring the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story just a few weeks before voters went to the polls.

And with the 2024 US presidential election less than a year away, both Google and its video sharing platform, YouTube, have confirmed that they plan to censor content they deem to be “harmful” in the run-up to the election.

In its announcement, Google noted that it already censors content that it deems to be “manipulated media” or “hate and harassment” — two broad, subjective terms that have been used by tech giants to justify mass censorship.

However, ahead of 2024, the tech giant has started using large language models (LLMs) to experiment with “building faster and more adaptable” censorship systems that will allow it to “take action even more quickly when new threats emerge.”

Google will also be censoring election-related responses in Bard (its generative AI chatbot) and Search Generative Experience (its generative AI search results).

In addition to these censorship measures, Google will be continuing its long-standing practice of artificially boosting content that it deems to be “authoritative” in Google Search and Google News. While this tactic doesn’t result in the removal of content, it can result in disfavored narratives being suppressed and drowned out by these so-called authoritative sources, which are mostly pre-selected legacy media outlets.

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Look How Google Shoos You Away From The Biden Family Biz And Other Big News

While fact-checking a Federalist article early Monday morning, I did a quick Google search for “hunter biden joe biden ‘an absolute wall.’”

It’s the language now-President Joe Biden used during the 2020 campaign to allege a separation between his vice-presidential duties and his son’s overseas work for the family business. It’s back in the news after the House Oversight Committee on Thursday asked the National Archives and Records Administration for unredacted communications containing three of Joe Biden’s vice presidential pseudonyms: Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware.

Google, however, apparently didn’t want me to find too much information — at least not from certain sources.

“It looks like the results below are changing quickly. If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for reliable sources to publish information,” Google alerted me, prompting me to make sure the source is “trusted on this topic” and maybe just to “come back later.”

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“I Hope That We Succeed,” Man Suing Massachusetts Health Department For Silently Installing Covid Tracking App On His Phone Speaks Out

A plaintiff in a lawsuit against government “spyware” has shed more light on the situation. In a potentially far-reaching legal dispute, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health is being accused of covertly partnering with tech behemoth Google to clandestinely install COVID-tracing software onto as many as a million unsuspecting smartphone users. This was the claim being presented in a class-action lawsuit filed by the Washington-based New Civil Liberties Alliance.

The legal challenge alleges an explicit violation of both US and Massachusetts constitutional law. It targets not just the perceived breach of privacy but also the audacity of the health department’s actions. “Such brazen disregard for civil liberties violates both the United States and Massachusetts Constitutions, and it must stop now,” the suit asserts.

The case, filed in 2021, was raised on behalf of Massachusetts native Robert Wright and Johnny Kula from New Hampshire, who commutes daily into Massachusetts. The duo vehemently objects to the installation of the COVID-tracing app on their phones sans their explicit consent. Kula, in particular, alleged that his attempt to delete the app proved futile as it surreptitiously resurfaced on his device.

“I hope that we succeed, and this sets a precedent, and that, in the future, no government even considers tracking Americans’ movements 24/7 without their knowledge or consent,” Wright said in a recent statement.

Originally conceived amidst the COVID pandemic’s height, Apple and Google jointly developed a contact tracing system. This system used a smartphone’s Bluetooth capabilities to alert users of potential proximity to an infected individual. An alert from an infected person’s phone could prompt nearby app users to take a COVID test.

The lawsuit asserts that the state’s health department colluded with Google to create a version to be forcefully installed on all Android phones, unbeknownst to the owners.

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Google Likes To Say Fact-Checkers It Uses Are “Independent.” But It Also Funds Them.

In a world where censorship dons the cloak of fact-checking, the recent allocation of grants by the Global Fact Check Fund raises brows. The fund, which is a joint effort of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) housed at the Poynter Institute and the technology behemoth Google, along with its subsidiary YouTube, has been touted as a guardian of truth. With $875,000 in grants divided among 35 organizations across 45 countries, it aims to arm them with modern websites, manpower, and training to identify misinformation. However, the initiative comes with its own set of problematic undertones.

The broad strokes painted by the fund’s mission statement include terms such as “increasing quality, volume, frequency, scale, and impact of fact-checking abilities” – a seemingly lofty aim. The IFCN’s director, Angie Drobnic Holan, frames it as a crusade against misinformation, stating, “Misinformation is on the march in many parts of the world. This important funding will enable fact-checking organizations to become better at their work, stronger in their capabilities and wider in their reach.”

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