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Voting App Disappears After Russia Pressures Tech Companies Ahead of Elections

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Silicon Valley companies might need to offer an explanation after a voting app created by allies of imprisoned Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny vanished from Google and Apple stores on Friday.

The Russian people head to the polls on Friday to elect a new parliament. The vote lasts three days and the current party in charge, the United Russia, is anticipating a win. The app disappeared when voting started across Russia for the elections, raising concerns about what the reasoning was behind the move.

“Allies of Navalny, President Vladimir Putin’s fiercest domestic opponent, planned to use the mobile app to organise a tactical voting campaign to deal a blow to United Russia,” Reuters reported.

As The Washington Post reported, “Roskomnadzor, the Russian censorship agency, had threatened to fine the Silicon Valley giants if the app, which encourages voters to cast ballots against the party of President Vladimir Putin, was not removed. The censorship agency argued that the companies were interfering in the nation’s electoral processes.”

The top companies appeared to cave to Russian authorities instead of standing up to them, upsetting opposition allies and digital rights advocates around the world. (Read more from “Voting App Disappears After Russia Pressures Tech Companies Ahead of Elections” HERE)

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Google ‘Founder’ Admits in Nasty Divorce Battle To Creating Revenge Site Against Wife

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. . .Scott Hassan, 51, who wrote much of the original code that powers the search giant, is embroiled in a nasty divorce battle that has raged for seven years and involves millions of dollars, claims of treating his children unfairly — and even a shocking online revenge campaign.

His ex wife, Allison Huynh, a senior research fellow at Stanford University’s robotics laboratory, claims Hassan is withholding a fortune that her attorney claims she is legally entitled to.

“In 2018, the [couple’s] estate was valued at $1.8 billion and [Hassan] wanted to give her a minuscule fraction,” Huynh’s attorney Pierce O’Donnell claimed in a statement to The Post. “His court position is that she gets nothing: Zero, zip, nada. Every settlement conference, he’s reduced his offer. I haven’t seen that in my 45-year-long career. He’s trying to pull off the ultimate dirty trick on his wife and three teenage children.” . . .

After being accused by his ex, he has admitted to launching the site AllisonHuynh.com earlier this year, seeding it with links to positive articles written about his ex — but also links to court documents from three embarrassing lawsuits that involve her. . .

Asked if he put up the site, Hassan admitted to The Post: “I did, but I have taken it down. It came together in a moment of frustration, when I felt Allison and her attorney were telling one-sided stories to the press. I thought aggregating publicly available information without commenting or editorializing would help … It only ended up making our dispute more public and tense, which was never what I intended.” (Read more from “Google ‘Founder’ Admits in Nasty Divorce Battle To Creating Revenge Site Against Wife” HERE)

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Facebook, Google Mandates Vaccines for Employees

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Google and Facebook have both announced that all employees returning to company offices must be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

NBC News reports that Google and Facebook have both stated that all employees returning to company offices will need to be fully vaccinated as fears around a delta variant of the coronavirus continue to rise amongst the Silicon Valley elite.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a memo to employees this week: “Anyone coming to work on our campuses will need to be vaccinated. We’re rolling this policy out in the U.S. in the coming weeks and will expand to other regions in the coming months. Getting vaccinated is one of the most important ways to keep ourselves and our communities healthy in the months ahead.”

Just a few short hours after Google’s announcement, Facebook enacted a similar policy. Lori Goler, Facebook’s vice president of people, told employees: “As our offices reopen, we will be requiring anyone coming to work at any of our US campuses to be vaccinated. How we implement this policy will depend on local conditions and regulations. We will have a process for those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons and will be evaluating our approach in other regions as the situation evolves. We continue to work with experts to ensure our return to office plans prioritize everyone’s health and safety.” (Read more from “Facebook, Google Mandates Vaccines for Employees” HERE)

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Google Diversity Head: Jews Have ‘Insatiable Appetite for War’

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Google’s head of diversity strategy is under fire over a 2007 blog post in which he wrote that Jews have “an insatiable appetite for war and killing” — and an “insensitivity” to people’s suffering.

Kamau Bobb made the comments in a Nov. 30, 2007, post titled “If I Were a Jew” when he was a research associate in technology at Georgia Tech, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

In it, he described how he believed Jews should view the Middle East conflict as he assailed Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon at the time.

“If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself,” he wrote.

“Self defense is undoubtedly an instinct, but I would be afraid of my increasing insensitivity to the suffering (of) others. My greatest torment would be that I’ve misinterpreted the identity offered by my history and transposed spiritual and human compassion with self righteous impunity.”

(Read more from “Google Diversity Head: Jews Have ‘Insatiable Appetite for War’” HERE)

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AZ AG: ‘Google Is Doing Everything It Can to Spy on Everyone It Can’

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An ongoing lawsuit against Google by the Arizona attorney general’s office, which alleges that the tech behemoth has continued to collect location information even when users had turned tracking off, has revealed that some of Google’s own employees had concerns about the company’s practices after a news report detailing the controversy was published.

“The reality is that the stuff we’ve uncovered is shocking,” Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich told FOX Business in an interview last week. “It just confirms that Google is doing everything it can to spy on everyone it can, without providing any sort of notice to anyone.”

Brnovich’s office sued Google in May of last year, alleging that the tech giant used deceptive and unfair practices to track users’ location, even if they had opted out — and used that information to target users with ads that generated more than $130 billion in revenue in 2019.

The practice had initially been revealed after an Associated Press article in 2018 reported that Google could continue to track users’ locations even after they had opted out of Google getting access into “location history.” The outlet reported that, even with location history paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped data without a prompt, such as storing a snapshot of a location just when someone opens its “Maps” application. (Read more from “AZ AG: ‘Google Is Doing Everything It Can to Spy on Everyone It Can'” HERE)

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Big Tech Monitoring Millions of Users Without Consent in New Ad Test

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Google has made millions of its users the targets of a test for a new ad program without informing them, warns a privacy activist group.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation said Google’s test trial of its Federated Learning of Cohorts without consent “is a concrete breach of user trust in service of a technology that should not exist.”

Under the program, Google Chrome browsers “will begin sorting their users into groups based on behavior, then sharing group labels with third-party trackers and advertisers around the web.”

“Although Google announced this was coming, the company has been sparse with details about the trial until now,” EFF said. “We’ve pored over blog posts, mailing lists, draft web standards, and Chromium’s source code to figure out exactly what’s going on.”

EFF said Google “designed FLoC to help advertisers target ads once third-party cookies go away. During the trial, trackers will be able to collect FLoC IDs in addition to third-party cookies.” (Read more from “Big Tech Monitoring Millions of Users Without Consent in New Ad Test” HERE)

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Google Maps to Start Directing Drivers to ‘Eco-Friendly’ Routes

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Google’s Maps app will start directing drivers along routes estimated to generate the lowest carbon emissions based on traffic, slopes and other factors, the company announced on Tuesday.

Google, an Alphabet Inc unit, said the feature would launch later this year in the U.S. and eventually reach other countries as part of its commitment to help combat climate change through its services.

Unless users opt out, the default route will be the “eco-friendly” one if comparable options take about the same time, Google said. When alternatives are significantly faster, Google will offer choices and let users compare estimated emissions.

“What we are seeing is for around half of routes, we are able to find an option more eco-friendly with minimal or no time-cost tradeoff,” Russell Dicker, a director of product at Google, told reporters on Monday. (Read more from “Google Maps to Start Directing Drivers to ‘Eco-Friendly’ Routes” HERE)

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How to Stop Using Google Search on Your Computer and Phone

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Google controls what the vast majority of the world finds on the internet. Being put at the top of the Google results for search is not only immensely lucrative, it is also almost mind-bogglingly powerful in global affairs. . .

It is very simple to fix this problem of Google tampering with your thinking: Stop using Google’s search engine and start using something else. . .

Right now there’s not a really good solution to the problem of Google and Apple controlling essentially all of the U.S. smartphone market. But there is a really good and easy solution to Google controlling what you see when you search, and having an extremely detailed user profile on you from amassing all your data from using its products: Use Brave for your browser on all your screens (phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, etc.). . .

Brave is run by Mozilla founder Brendan Eich, who was kicked out of his own tech company for contributing a small amount to a California campaign to recognize male-female marriage as the only one that matters to society (because it’s the only one that organically generates children). Eich is a free speech advocate, and therefore Brave has a reputation for offering far better privacy than the browsers used as data vacuums by bigs like Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

DuckDuckGo is a search engine also explicitly committed to not manipulating results. The more we all use these two services, the better their results get and the more they reflect what unmanipulated searches show people want to actually find. To use DuckDuckGo as your default search engine, all you have to do is install and use Brave, and every time you type a search into the browser bar it automatically uses DuckDuckGo to get your results. If you’ve been using Google for search, you might be surprised at how different the DuckDuckGo results can look. (Read more from “How to Stop Using Google Search on Your Computer and Phone” HERE)

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Google Blacklists Parler Social Media App From Play Store For Promoting Free Speech

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Google has removed social media platform Parler from its Play Store for Android devices, stating the app will remain suspended until it implements “robust” moderation policies that crack down on free speech.

In a statement on Friday, Google claimed that “in light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat,” Parler is suspended from its Play Store until it implements moderation policies. . .

Google’s suspension of Parler arrives the same day that Apple threatened to ban Parler from its app store unless it cracks down on constitutionally protected speech that Apple doesn’t approve of — a move that would effectively exclude the app from all Apple smartphones. (Read more from “Google Blacklists Parler Social Media App From Play Store For Promoting Free Speech” HERE)

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Justice Dept. Files Landmark Antitrust Case Against Google

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The Justice Department on Tuesday sued Google for abusing its dominance in online search and advertising — the government’s most significant attempt to protect competition since its groundbreaking case against Microsoft more than 20 years ago. . .

“Google is the gateway to the internet and a search advertising behemoth,” U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen told reporters. “It has maintained its monopoly power through exclusionary practices that are harmful to competition.”

Lawmakers and consumer advocates have long accused Google of abusing its dominance in online search and advertising. The case filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., alleges that Google uses billions of dollars collected from advertisers to pay phone manufacturers to ensure Google is the default search engine on browsers. That stifles competition and innovation from smaller upstart rivals to Google and harms consumers by reducing the quality of search and limiting privacy protections and alternative search options, the government alleges. (Read more from “Justice Dept. Files Landmark Antitrust Case Against Google” HERE)

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