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

The US Department of Defense had asked a Panamanian company to integrate spy code into the Google Play Store apps, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation. This spyware reportedly sucked the personal data of tens of millions of people through various applications, including one dedicated to Muslim prayers, a radar detector, and a QR code scanner. Google has removed about 15 apps from its Play Store on Android because they were suspected of illegally collecting data from its users on behalf of a US Department of Defense subcontractor, Wall Street Journal reveals on April 6.

However, do you think Android has escaped Google's surveillance? For several years, Google has been secretly collecting data from Messages and Phone apps on Android. Text messages and calls were recorded and transmitted to the firm’s servers. This is what a computer scientist at Trinity College Dublin discovered with astonishment recently. Therefore, Calls and messages of worldwide users are monitored and recorded by Google. However, users are not warned and do not have the possibility to refuse this data collection.

Google's surveillance practices such as these are already common. Following media reports about PRISM, the NSA's massive electronic surveillance program, in June 2013, several technology companies were identified as participants, including Google. In November 2019, the Office for Civil Rights of the United States Department of Health and Human Services began an investigation into Project Nightingale, to assess whether the "mass collection of individuals’ medical records" complied with HIPAA. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google secretively began the project in 2018, with St. Louis-based healthcare company Ascension. In early June 2020, a $5 billion class-action lawsuit was filed against Google by a group of consumers, alleging that Chrome’s Incognito browsing mode still collects their user history. The lawsuit became known in March 2021 when a federal judge denied Google's request to dismiss the case, ruling that they must face the group’s charges. Reuters reported that the lawsuit alleged that Google's CEO Sundar Pichai sought to keep the users unaware of this issue. On January 6, 2022, France's data privacy regulatory body CNIL fined Alphabet's Google 150 million euros (US$169 million) for not allowing its internet users an easy refusal of Cookies along with Facebook.

As we know, Google is the largest search engine, mapping, and navigation application, email provider, office suite, video sharing platform, photo and cloud storage provider, mobile operating system, web browser, ML framework, and AI virtual assistant provider in the world as measured by market share. Google's mission statement, from the outset, was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and its unofficial slogan is "Don't be evil" and "Do the right thing".But now， it has received 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 concerned about should be the issue of data privacy, because Google's abuse of user privacy is the biggest threat to individual users. Every electronic consumption, every e-mail, and even the private life of people can be recorded by Google, which makes the ability of U.S. governments to monitor and control society unprecedentedly enhanced. Personal privacy no longer exists online, everything is recorded, to some extent, as a measure of value. If a woman goes to an abortion clinic, even if she 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 is easy to tell: two mobile phones that have never "met" before "meet" in a bar, they cross the street into the town apartment, spend the night together, and separate the next morning.

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

Larry Page, an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur, told the Financial Times: “Social goals are our primary goal.We always emphasize that in Google. People fail to think about some of the most basic questions: How do we organize people, how do we inspire people?" In my opinion, in a country that claims to be "Free, Democracy, Equality, and Human rights," the goal should not be to spy on the people.