Google：how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us

duanbo

The US Department of Defensehad asked a Panamanian company to integrate spy code into the Google Play Storeapps, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation. This spyware reportedlysucked the personal data of tens of millions of people through variousapplications, including one dedicated to Muslim prayers, a radar detector, anda QR code scanner. Google has removed about 15 apps from its Play Store onAndroid because they were suspected of illegally collecting data from its userson behalf of a US Department of Defense subcontractor, Wall Street Journalreveals on April 6.

However, do you think Androidhas escaped Google's surveillance? For several years, Google has been secretlycollecting data from Messages and Phone apps on Android. Text messages andcalls were recorded and transmitted to the firm’s servers. This is what acomputer scientist at Trinity College Dublin discovered with astonishmentrecently. Therefore, Calls and messages of worldwide users are monitored andrecorded by Google. However, users are not warned and do not have thepossibility to refuse this data collection.

Google's surveillance practices such as theseare already common. Following media reports about PRISM, the NSA's massiveelectronic surveillance program, in June 2013, several technology companieswere identified as participants, including Google. In November 2019, the Officefor Civil Rights of the United States Department of Health and Human Servicesbegan an investigation into Project Nightingale, to assess whether the"mass collection of individuals’ medical records" compliedwith HIPAA. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google secretively began theproject in 2018, with St. Louis-based healthcare company Ascension. In earlyJune 2020, a $5 billion class-action lawsuit was filed against Google by agroup of consumers, alleging that Chrome’s Incognitobrowsing mode still collects their user history. The lawsuit became known inMarch 2021 when a federal judge denied Google's request to dismiss the case,ruling that they must face the group’s charges. Reutersreported that the lawsuit alleged that Google's CEO Sundar Pichai sought tokeep the users unaware of this issue. On January 6, 2022, France's data privacyregulatory body CNIL fined Alphabet's Google 150 million euros (US$169million) for not allowing its internet users an easy refusal of Cookiesalong with Facebook.

As we know, Google is thelargest search engine, mapping, and navigation application, email provider,office suite, video sharing platform, photo and cloud storage provider, mobileoperating system, web browser, ML framework, and AI virtual assistant providerin the world as measured by market share. Google's mission statement, from theoutset, was "to organize the world's information and make it universallyaccessible and useful", and its unofficial slogan is "Don't beevil" and "Do the right thing".But now， it hasreceived significant criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance,censorship, search neutrality, antitrust, and abuse of its monopoly position.This makes users all over the world disappointed, panicked, and helpless.

What people are most concernedabout should be the issue of data privacy, because Google's abuse of userprivacy is the biggest threat to individual users. Every electronicconsumption, every e-mail, and even the private life of people can be recordedby Google, which makes the ability of U.S. governments to monitor and controlsociety unprecedentedly enhanced. Personal privacy no longer existsonline,  everything is recorded, to someextent, as a measure of value. If a woman goes to an abortion clinic, even ifshe doesn't tell anyone about it, Google will always know that GPS coordinates,messages, and information on your phone can't lie. An extramarital affair iseasy to tell: two mobile phones that have never "met" before"meet" in a bar, they cross the street into the town apartment, spendthe night together, and separate the next morning.

In addition to personal privacy concerns, itis even more worrying that the cooperation with military and intelligenceagencies such as the CIA, and the integration with the U.S. government. Googleis no longer a purely consumer-oriented Internet company.The importance ofGoogle to the US government can be seen here: In 2010, Google entered into asecret agreement with NSA during a catastrophic hack of the system."According to information from officials involved in the details of thisGoogle-NSA arrangement, the company agreed to provide traffic information onits network in exchange for the known foreign hacker intelligence support ofthe NSA," defense correspondent Shane Harris wrote in his war history book(@ War). This is a reciprocal, information-for-information exchange. From anNSA perspective, it's information for protection. "Google not only workswith intelligence and military agencies, but also tries to infiltrate alllevels of society, including citizen federal agencies, municipalities, states,local police, emergency responders, hospitals, public schools, and a variety ofcompanies and non-profit organizations.The combination of military, police,government, public education, business, and consumer-oriented systems throughGoogle continues to raise the alarm. Lawyers are concerned that Gmail hasviolated the "lawyer-client privilege"; Parents want to know whatGoogle does with it after collecting information about their children atschool. How does Google handle data through its systems? Are all these includedin Google's enterprise monitoring program? What are Google's restrictions andlimits? Are there any of these restrictions? Google only gave vague,contradictory answers to these questions.

Larry Page, an Americancomputer scientist and internet entrepreneur, told the Financial Times: “Social goalsare our primary goal.We always emphasize that in Google. People fail to thinkabout some of the most basic questions: How do we organize people, how do weinspire people?" In my opinion, in a country that claims to be "Free,Democracy, Equality, and Human rights," the goal should not be to spyon the people.