@ocdtrekkie I was just mentioning to someone earlier today: lost my insurance card. As you know, that can be a pretty significant risk to health in the US.

I'd taken a photo of it, but no idea when.

Google photo searched for "insurance card" and it was right there.

All that creep powers magic that keeps me sane, so I'm gonna be a hard sell on "most evil." I was there for the engineers revolting when management even considered AI for drones. I was there to see the internal fights on figuring out what ethics looks like in a tech space that never existed before. And yeah, I bore witness to a lot of less-than-perfect.

But dude... There are actual defense contractors out there. I have no idea where you put the "evil" bar, but it must encompass a pretty wide swath if Google is over it.

@mtomczak All of the people who protested or stood against Google's actions were fired or pushed out. At least most defense contractors support a cause, Google is just as happy to sell to Russia as the US, and only withdrew because they couldn't transfer the funds out.

@ocdtrekkie I literally know people currently at Google, so your "all of" assertions are falling on deaf ears here.

Google got hit with a fine by Russia for letting prohibited Ukraine news and information discrediting the Russian military on its services, particularly YouTube.

I follow your content and generally like it, but on the Google topic you're far off-base, no offense intended.

@mtomczak No offense intended, but give it a few more years free from the cult tactics they used on employees and see if you still hold the same position. And people working at Google today still are deeply unethical people who have put personal wealth ahead of ethics and human rights.

@mtomczak And for the record, I won't censor truth to maintain followers, it's entirely your choice if you choose to follow or not!

@ocdtrekkie It's already been years.

I think I'd have to get a better idea of what you define as unethical (besides, broadly, pursuing their mission statement "To organize the world's information and make it university accessible and useful") to have any thoughts on whether they're current staff is unethical. More often than not, ethics at their scale is hard to pin down (especially given how many mutually-exclusive templates there are at global scale).

I mean, if your assertion is simply "no company can be that big and ethical at the same time," agree to disagree.

@mtomczak I mean, it's generally true that for a company to be that profitable, it is almost certainly doing something wrong. But no, Google is still owned and run by it's sexually-harassing founders, a pile of executives who set a new bar for inappropriate workplace conduct, and a it has actually managed to act illegally in nearly every single business vertical in every jurisdiction it operates, and it pays off a wide variety of politicians and media outlets to spin otherwise.

@mtomczak If you work at Google, you have decided to help Sergey "the point of hiring female employees is ****ing them" Brin make more money for his yacht. And everyone who ever worked for him is going to have to square that with their conscience some day.

@mtomczak I mean, Google's former head of *Legal* had an affair with a subordinate, got her pregnant, abandoned his kid, and had her transferred out of her role (and eventually pushed out of the company) when it became public. I believe he got a wonderful severance package too.

@ocdtrekkie Agreed. Happy to solicit suggestions for better. But a lot of those suggestions won't offer the opportunity to make the world better Google's scale does, sadly.

@mtomczak I conclusively believe Google makes the world a worse place. It has not only caused the mass harm that I've described, but also has massively stifled innovation. Countless promising technologies have been squashed by acquisitions and shutdowns chiefly concerned with preventing superior technology from leading.

@ocdtrekkie There's no doubt Google buys a lot of companies.

Not sure that's the same as stifling innovation (also not convinced Silicon Valley's idea of "innovation" is a qualitative good by itself). Google tends to be able to bring scale to companies with neat ideas but without the tools to do them with the work needed for scale, accessibility or (most importantly) security.

I wonder how many data breaches Google has inadvertently prevented by buying a company that was storing user data in plain-text databases.

@ocdtrekkie We will.

Me, I take some solace in the fact that their computer is the only machine my older relatives have ever used that works for them, isn't trying to sell them something, isn't perpetually advertising at them, isn't perpetually broken, and is locked down enough that they can't install anything that breaks it.

There's obviously room for improvement and Brin's behavior (and the behavior of several execs) is indefensible. I'm not sure we're covering a lot of "special evil" ground by calling out American CEOs for being personally trash, but yes, room for improvement.

(Insert Summer Smith's rant about working for the devil here ;) ).

@mtomczak Google's leading ad vertical is scams and malware, and that convenience for *your* older relatives have cost everyone else's relatives hundreds of billions of dollars. Google is complicit and profits from pervasive malicious ads that they deceptively portray as the top search result. (Educating seniors on how to protect themselves from Google Ad scams is a top part of helping seniors recover from scams. I've been working in this area in particular for well over ten years.)

@mtomczak Nearly every scam or malware install I've ever dealt with has been traced back to a search ad. Google has reinstated malicious advertisers I've reported, using the same domain name. And of course, search ads are permitted to lie about the destination URL, leading to countless examples where the "top result" is an ad which says the URL is a reputable domain but goes to a scammer.

@ocdtrekkie (Incidentally, if you catch one of those scam ads, feel free to screenshot and send my way. I'm curious how they're beating the filters)

@mtomczak I will find you some examples when I'm at my desk. They're generally easy to find on any topic aimed at seniors, and I've even had Googlers internally get them blocked only for them to get reinstated, presumably because they're wildly profitable ads to run.

@ocdtrekkie I'd be interested. If you can pass the keywords my way I'll be happy to do my own research too.

Senior scams are *absolutely* insidious. I field phone calls for a relative, and it's all damn day with those people. Manage to get one cursing me out because he called back-to-back with his colleague in the same call center; that was a fun day. ;)

@mtomczak Here's a great example. If you want to see ads targeted at seniors, look for "mapquest" (nobody else would look for MapQuest on Google... instead of Google Maps).

@mtomczak You'll notice the top three results are all ads, and all malicious. The real MapQuest result is nestled near the bottom of the screen. Searching for MapsTab, MapsAssist, and GetSuperMaps will all reveal they are browser hijacking extensions.

Oh, and here's some Chrome Web Store malware I commonly see advertised, and I've tried having Google take down before:

@mtomczak The same malicious hijackers appear on more generic queries sometimes too, when people might otherwise want to go to Google Maps.

@mtomczak Here's another fun/weird one, for a very common first thing people search. Google outbid it (you can pay yourself infinite money for free, after all), but it's just odd:

@ocdtrekkie Oh, this one's clever. It appears to be grey-walking the policy very carefully. *Technically,* its disclosure and the text on the page says exactly what it's going to do, but you and I both know it doesn't pass the smell test.

But ads policy isn't made of smell tests; it's made of bright-line rules (because Google can be sued for anticompetition if it isn't consistent in enforcing those rules). I've no doubt this one is playing cat-and-mouse with Google ads policy.

@mtomczak I mean, I think you can admit Google could absolutely defend banning this in a court of law. But the primary issue, of course, is that Google is choosing to place a deliberately dishonest and harmful ad, styled to look like a search result in order to encourage people to click on it, above the legitimate result.

Search ads used to be obvious but every A/B test has proven revenue goes up when they look more like search results.

@ocdtrekkie I think at this point, I may start advising my elderly relatives to use Bing for the same reason I advised them to use Apple back when Microsoft didn't have its malware-and-viruses house in order. Ethics / "evil" aside, there's such a thing as being a victim of one's own success, and if Google can't police this crap purely because they're the biggest target, well, strong incentive to use the smaller targets.

Bing is certainly good enough for the 90% search space to act as a substitute, especially for queries like that.

@mtomczak I *will* state/advise Bing is not drastically better in this regard. I just think Google has a lot less of an excuse considering it's their primary competency. I'm using DuckDuckGo or Brave Search usually, but the main thing is I no longer believe seniors should use the Internet without an ad blocker.

Ads are too often misleading to people not tech savvy enough to identify them.

@ocdtrekkie All of that to say: I definitely agree that Google really effed up pushing ads into the main search flow in a way that only the technically-savvy elite can distinguish an ad from an organic result anymore. Bad move.

@ocdtrekkie > Nearly every scam or malware install I've ever dealt with has been traced back to a search ad

No surprise there, but if Google has most all of the searches, that's expected. What does that look like relative to total ads clicked?

> And of course, search ads are permitted to lie about the destination URL

That's just patently untrue; it's one of the oldest violations of ads policy. I don't doubt that some novel vectors slip through the cracks.

What is the alternative? Disable ads? Then there's no search. I'm reluctant to hand the reigns of the Internet ot Bing and Microsoft's stellar corporate track record.