I am probably far more sympathetic than you can ever imagine but the antecedents are not really unique to google. The technical destination of targeting advertising just looks like this given privacy laws (well the lack thereof).
Like I get it but be mad that congress is a bunch of goofy old people who give zero shits. If you can point at some lobbying by google then by all means so be it - certainly they appeared to have kissed the ring as of late. But keep in mind googlers personally direct money into the eff every year too.
No - they are an advertising company. It is to their advantage to be ahead of the game with something like federated ML if that is where society is headed. To say Google has no positive impact is absurd - engineers there generally care about protecting user data. There is probably better access controls at Google than anywhere else. Sure there are pressures like you said but a gross misplace of user trust is what would destroy them.
Citation needed - see google and project maven. Of course that is all well in the past now - but for a brief moment google was capable of taking an ethical stance.
Just s/AI/surveillance state/ and it reads pretty much the same. People in the US you should read NSPM-7 which is obviously simply targeted at this admin's out group. Things seem to be well in motion already from the outward indications we have about DHS spending and disregard for legal processes. People are just still in denial or not paying attention.
Yeah the resulting stigma on tariffs is a bit unfortunate. You could imagine a system of tariffs that was intended to set a sort of globalized minimum wage in certain segments. The US could even have foreign entities to distribute the tariff income to the workers in those countries for example.
Tariffs are totally a reasonable tool for protecting national security interests or leveling the playing field for the American worker. Unfortunately none of that was done in a coherent or legible way.
With all the global fallout and nothing to show for it I'm really not sure I could have come up with a better way to sabotage the United States.
I remember rolling out encryption over all the DC<->DC fiber after the PRISM leaks at Google. People were pissed about it. I'm sure they comply with legal requests but I would be very surprised if they break the law (such as it is) in any way.
See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/eff-congress-heres-wha... or probably any recent publication about privacy rights by the eff.
Like I get it but be mad that congress is a bunch of goofy old people who give zero shits. If you can point at some lobbying by google then by all means so be it - certainly they appeared to have kissed the ring as of late. But keep in mind googlers personally direct money into the eff every year too.