Google could just do what everyone else did and just lie and say it happened.
This whole “hacking” thing really have the “my uncle works in Nintendo” energy.
Edit: It seems I’m significantly more out of touch with what Google et al. have been doing recently than I first thought. After reading many of the replies, I certainly failed to consider how much of their behavior impacts the average person. I’ll leave my old comment here, but I no longer stand by what I said.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but compared to everything else big tech has been doing recently, Google almost doesn’t feel like a bad guy. They’re still invasive as hell, but compared to any other mainstream AI, search, email, cloud storage, VPN, etc. providers, they almost feel closer to Apple levels of evil rather than removing “don’t be evil” from your moto levels of evil. Crazy how humanity continues to outdo itself.I think that’s the first time in my life that I saw someone change their mind and admit it publicly on the internet. Thank you, if everyone did that we would avoid a lot of rage!
Google chose to do business with the military and Israel despite protests from their own employees.
I’m not sure how it is at Google, but in my experience large businesses loathe their employees for being the largest line item on their expense sheet. Not surprised they give absolutely zero weight to their desires.
Google used to be "hey, we’re different. We listen to our employees and “don’t do evil!”
Who would have thought that if money is the bottom line, companies eventually do evil. I’m not surprised about what turned out. Enshittification is real.
Huh… they’ve literally stuck AI into every product they’ve created and in the process slowed them down and caused them to use ten times the number of resources they used to use. I just got a new job and I opened 5 different tabs with Google products and my computer slowed to a crawl. I tested in two browsers and both browsers were using literally 4gb of ram just for the fucking Google products.
And they’re training AI on all the stuff you’ve stored with them over the years. Photos, music, emails. Instead of being just bad in one sector they’re bad in every sector.
I remember when Google used to advertise Chrome as being super fast and lightweight. They even did ads where a page loaded in the time that it took for a fired potato to fly through a slicer.
Plus, you know, being the absolute worst (or best, depending on how you see it) at storing every single piece of data about their users. And ruining YouTube completely, just so they’re able to harvest more data from their users. And… You know, making their money on selling that data to ad companies and shoveling ads on every site they’re able to, and offering their users to pay a fee to avoid said ads, which are used by the advertising company who bought the data about the specific user, which was harvested by Google.
Oh, and turning Android into literal spyware, just to harvest even more data about everyone, so they can sell even more aggressively personal data about their users. And now trying to limit their Android userbase from being able to use apps without the literal spyware that they provide.
So there’s that… But yeah, they do have great marketing, funding a lot of side projects, and donate to charities enough so that their userbase remain gullible enough to think that they “are the best of the worst”. Which isn’t really a hard job given the competition with the current American tech market ghouls at the top, who use other strategies to gain attraction.
So basically the tech version of the Overton window
