It’s not just Amazon and Apple
that expect massive taxpayer subsidies in exchange for locating
physical plant in your town: when Google builds a new data-center, it
does so on condition of multimillion-dollar “incentives” from local
governments – but Google also demands extraordinary secrecy
from local officials regarding these deals, secrecy so complete that
city attorneys have instructed town councillors to refuse to answer
questions about it during public meetings.
Data-centers consume massive amounts of electricity and water, and so
companies are always on the hunt for low costs for these necessities.
Sometimes, those savings come from geography – siting a data-center by a
river or lake, or in a cooler climate – but they can also come from
sweetheart deals from local power and water companies.
The Partnership for Working Families has been fighting for transparency
on these deals since Google’s first wave of data-center buildouts in San
Jose in 2006. They recently filed public records requests in eight
cities where Google has built or is building data-center and seven
cities with Google offices.
The records reveal a pattern of extreme secrecy: Google uses
special-purpose, anonymous LLCs to do its deals, sometimes using
multiple LLCs for different parts of the deal (for example, one LLC
might acquire the land, and another might develop it).
Google binds the cities it deals with to vows of silence, through
extensive nondisclosure agreements. The agreements prohibit cities from
revealing Google’s power and water usage, payroll data, and investment
level. Google argues that these are trade secrets that might reveal
sensitive competitive data, but this is also the information that voters
need in order to assess whether they are getting value for money when
they hand over millions to one of the world’s largest, most profitable
companies.
What’s more, the NDAs also prohibit disclosure of the existence of the
NDAs themselves – a kafkaesque American version of the UK’s notorious “super-injunctions” – further shielding these deals from democratic scrutiny and debate.
For example, if it wasn’t for the Partnership for Working Families’
records requests, the people of Council Bluffs, Iowa would not know that
the city government sold Google 850 acres of land for one dollar; the
people of Midlothian, Texas would not know that Google got a ten-year
tax-holiday from the city in exchange for creating a mere 40 jobs; and
so on.
The secrecy doesn’t end after Google opens its data-centers, either. In
Berkeley County, South Carolina, Google formed a new LLC to apply for
additional water usage permits, years after it had opened its
data-center. The people of Berkeley County are not allowed to know how
much water Google is already drawing from their local aquifers, but the
new LLC was applying for permission to be the county’s third-largest
water user, and its link with Google was only discovered because the
company made the mistake of listing it as sharing an address with the
other anonymous LLC it had formed to build and operate its data-center.
Long-serving local officials defended the secrecy and the subsidies,
saying that corporate America expects democratically elected governments
to negotiate in secret to pay companies to operate in their
jurisdictions.
In other words, so many people have come to the general consensus that Donald Trump is an idiot that it actively affects Google’s algorithm which takes into account trillions of websites and web searches to try to match keywords with relevant images. This is a real world example of “If you look up x in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of y” and the fact that the Republicans blame Google for “search results bias” instead of admitting that most people think that the current president is an idiot. That’s hilarious.
Binding arbitration is corporate America’s favorite dirty trick: to use a product, you are forced to give up your right to sue if the company hurts you, cheats you, or even kills you.
But if you buy a Pixel 3, there’s a bizarre, obscure option where you are given the chance to enter your device’s serial number in order to opt out of binding arbitration.
It feels like some kind of uneasy truce between different Google
factions: the mustache-twirling villains who say, “Who cares if it looks
evil? We’re Google, fuck you!” and the more image-conscious ones who
say, “OK, fine, but if we ever do end up in the middle of a shitstorm over this, we can point to this opt-out option and say, ‘See? Everyone chose
binding arbitration! There was a perfectly easy way not to choose it,
in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory
with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’”
In any event, if you have a Pixel 3, you should opt out of binding arbitration.
But now a leaked transcript of a July 18 presentation by search chief
Ben Gomes has the executive congratulating the Project Dragonfly team
and predicting launch in six to nine months, and holding out the
possibility of a launch in as little as three months.
On September 23, Gomes lied to a BBC reporter and said that Dragonfly
was just a plan on the drawing board, saying “all we’ve done is some
exploration” and “we don’t have any plans to launch something.”
This lie apparently prompted angry googlers to leak the transcript of
Gomes’s remarks to The Intercept. Gomes refused to comment to the
Intercept and when they called him, he twice claimed that the connection
was so bad that he couldn’t understand their questions.
Project Dragonfly has also cost Google key engineers and has been the source of mass discontent inside the company, especially when news broke that the censored tool was designed to personally identify
searchers who looked up banned topics like “student protests” and
“democracy” and to deliver these identities to China’s security
establishment.
There was a time when you could get the smartest people at Google to do
the stupidest things you could imagine by getting Yahoo to do them
first; thankfully that era ended – only to be replaced by an era in
which every stupid thing Facebook did became a bucket-list item for
Google management.
The peak of this was when Google set out to create a social network and
tasked every googler with making it a success. The company decided to
call this network Google+, and decided that the longstanding, widely
used plus-sign (which historically was used in search queries to mean
“must have” as in +cory +doctorow) would be unilaterally repurposed for use in its social network.
Googlers’ bonuses were tied to their ability to integrate Google+ into
every product Google offered, creating an ever-tightening noose around
Google users who had no interest in using G+.
To make matters worse, Google decided to ape Facebook’s
privacy-invading, nonsensical “real names” policy, insisting that every
user use their legal name and putting Google in the unenviable position
of deciding (for example) when a trans person could stop using their
deadname, or when an indigenous person’s name was “real” enough for use,
or when people fleeing domestic violence could use an alias.
By the time Google+ rolled out, there was already nascent discontent
with Facebook. Google+ offered all the downsides of Facebook, but with
fewer of the people you wanted to connect with.
Years later, G+ is a sad also-ran. What’s more, the company just
discovered an extremely grave bug in the system – – that would have
allowed for serious privacy violations. Though the company says it has
fixed the bug, it’s taken the opportunity to simply shut down G+ for
“consumers” (the service will persist for enterprise users, who
apparently use it).
In the product’s obituary, Google wrote that Google+ “has not achieved
broad consumer or developer adoption, and has seen limited user
interaction with apps.”
One bright spot in all this: the defect in Google+ was discovered
through “Project Strobe,” a serious privacy and security audit of every
Google product.
So my little brother works at Sandia Labs, which he loves; he’s a physicist and engineer, and good at it. He just got hired a few months ago, and is like bottom of the clearance level totem pole, but.
Apparently the lab loaned a seismometer to a missile test site, who broke it.
So they gave it back to the lab with an apology, and the lab went “welp fuck guess we’ll buy a new one”
“Wait a minute,” my brother says. “I think I got this.”
He proceeded to google up the user manual for the model, take it apart, clean it, and put it back together.
It now works flawlessly and his bosses think he’s a goddamned genius because he just saved them 20k with four minutes of google searching.
He specifically works as an engineer in their super-computing research division; he did his master’s on quantum computing technology.
What I’m saying is that he LITERALLY works in an office full of nuclear physicists, engineers, and rocket scientists and he impressed them by knowing how to google a product number.
I’m dying, as a mechanical engineering intern this is entirely my life. I fixed a machine worth 175k by sitting down, actually reading the manual, and disconnecting and reconnecting two wires that were in the wrong place. Smart people can be dumb.
He even told them what he did.
“I googled up the user manual.”
“You can DO that???? YOU ARE BRILLIANT.”
“….you know what, yes. You are correct. I am. Raise my pay grade please.”
The moral of this story is that don’t sell your own skills short, kids, knowing how to google shit is a marketable skill.
