A significant majority of consumers do not expect Google to track their activities across their lives, their locations, on other sites, and on other platforms.

Google is about as open as a clam. Over the holidays, I found a Chromebook that Samsung had given me to evaluate about six years ago and which had been gathering dust ever since. Coincidentally, Laura’s sister Annie had just told me that she needed a laptop. Hmm… Well, there was no way I was going to give her a Google spy device, so I decided to liberate the Chromebook from Google’s surveillance-based operating system (ChromeOS) and gift it to her.

Facebook, Google, and other masters of the surveillance economy have bred a virulent mutation of capitalism, which explains why they aren’t interested in addressing their many scandals

The harvesting of our personal details goes far beyond what many of us could imagine. So I braced myself and had a look

Police are increasingly using judge-approved "reverse location" search warrants to find cellphones near crime scenes. Civil liberties experts worry it's a digital dragnet ripe for abuse. Authorities say it's an important new crime fighting tool.

Male impotence, substance abuse, right-wing politics, left-wing politics, sexually transmitted diseases, cancer, mental health. Those are just a few of the advertising labels that Google’s adtech infrastructure routinely sticks to Internet users as it watches and tracks what they do online in…

Google's public version of events of how it came to secretly intercept Americans' data sent on unencrypted Wi-Fi routers over a two-year period doesn't quite mesh with what the search giant told federal regulators. And if Google had its way, the public would have never learned the software on Google's Street View mapping cars was "intended" to collect payload data from open Wi-Fi networks.

Google's sibling company Sidewalk Labs offers planning agencies the ability to model an entire city's patterns of movement.

It’s always difficult admitting you’re wrong. But sometimes, it’s exactly what you have to do in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So, today, I admit that I was wrong about Google, Facebook, and surveillance capitalism in general being toxic for our human rights and democracy.
You see, it simply cannot be true given how they are endorsed by some of the most well-respected groups and organisations in the world.

The long read: We knew that being connected had a price – our data. But we didn’t care. Then it turned out that Google’s main clients included the military and intelligence agencies

Google wants to know what you buy and Mastercard is here to help.

Since Privacy International ranked Google worst in the world for Privacy in its 2007 privacy survey for its unique “comprehensive consumer surveillance & entrenched hostility to privacy,” Google has had at least 24 more public scandals/controversies over privacy/security.

Privacy-friendly alternatives to Google that don't track you

Mostly blogging about web development and Open Data

Google faces its first challenge under Europe’s strict new data protection rules

A smart home that really knows where you live.