industryterm:internet searches

An open letter to Google: Stop the censorship of the Internet! Stop the political blacklisting of the World Socialist Web Site! - World Socialist Web Site
▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/25/pers-a25.html

https://www.wsws.org/img/open-graph-icon.png

Gentlemen:

Google’s mission statement from the outset was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Its official code of conduct was proclaimed in Google’s famous motto: “Don’t be evil.” In recent years, you have seriously lost your way. You are now engaged in hiding the world’s information, and, in the process, are doing a great deal of evil.

Google, and by implication, its parent company Alphabet, Inc., are now engaged in political censorship of the Internet. You are doing what you have previously publicly denounced.

Google is manipulating its Internet searches to restrict public awareness of and access to socialist, anti-war and left-wing websites. The World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws.org) has been massively targeted and is the most affected by your censorship protocols. Referrals to the WSWS from Google have fallen by nearly 70 percent since April of this year.

Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting. The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree.

Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president for search engineering, attempted to justify the imposition of political censorship with a blog post on April 25, claiming that the changes to the algorithm were a response to “the phenomenon of ‘fake news,’ where content on the web has contributed to the spread of blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information.”

Google, according to Gomes, has recruited some 10,000 “evaluators” to judge the “quality” of websites. These evaluators are trained to “flag” websites that are deemed to “include misleading information” and “unsupported conspiracy theories.” Gomes explained that the blacklists created by these evaluators will be used, in combination with the latest developments in technology, to develop an algorithm that will impose censorship automatically, in real time, across future search results.

Whatever the technical changes Google has made to the search algorithm, the anti-left bias of the results is undeniable. The most striking outcome of Google’s censorship procedures is that users whose search queries indicate an interest in socialism, Marxism or Trotskyism are no longer directed to the World Socialist Web Site. Google is “disappearing” the WSWS from the results of search requests. For example, Google searches for “Leon Trotsky” yielded 5,893 impressions (appearances of the WSWS in search results) in May of this year. In July, the same search yielded exactly zero impressions for the WSWS, which is the Internet publication of the international movement founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

As stated above, since April, other left-wing publications that present themselves as progressive, socialist or anti-war also have suffered significant reductions in their Google search results:

alternet.org fell by 63 percent
globalresearch.ca fell by 62 percent
consortiumnews.com fell by 47 percent
mediamatters.org fell by 42 percent
commondreams.org fell by 37 percent
internationalviewpoint.org fell by 36 percent
democracynow.org fell by 36 percent
wikileaks.org fell by 30 percent
truth-out.org fell by 25 percent
counterpunch.org fell by 21 percent
* theintercept.com fell by 19 percent

Google justifies the imposition of political censorship by using a loaded term like “fake news.” This term, properly used, signifies the manufacturing of news based on an artificially constructed event that either never occurred or has been grossly exaggerated. The present-day furor over “fake news” is itself an example of an invented event and artificially constructed narrative. It is a “fake” term that is used to discredit factual information and well-grounded analyses that challenge and discredit government policies and corporate interests. Any invocation of the phrase “fake news,” as it pertains to the WSWS, is devoid of any substance or credibility. In fact, our efforts to combat historical falsification have been recognized, including by the scholarly journal American Historical Review.

#Google #Censure #Fake_news #Appétit_géants

Why Is Snap Calling Itself a Camera Company? - The New Yorker
▻http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-is-snap-calling-itself-a-camera-company

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Malik-WhyIsSnapCallingItselfaCameraCompany-1200x630-1487014507.jpg

Technically speaking, Snap is a camera company, and has been for a number of months. In September, it announced the launch of Spectacles, camera-equipped sunglasses that allow you to record a ten-second video by tapping a button near your left eyebrow. (For the moment, Spectacles are sold exclusively in itinerant vending machines called Snapbots.) But the company’s vision of the future appears to be more expansive than that. “In the way that the flashing cursor became the starting point for most products on desktop computers, we believe that the camera screen will be the starting point for most products on smartphones,” it writes.

The personal devices of the past decade have already made the camera more central to our lives than ever before; it has evolved into a multipurpose tool, a visual sensor, as useful for recording a lunch receipt as for capturing a dazzling landscape. (And don’t forget the screenshot, which has partly usurped the functions of the old-fashioned notebook.) At the same time, the huge demand for smartphones has forced developers to make their cameras better and better, with ripple effects well beyond the industry. Action cameras, drones, low-orbit satellites—many have directly benefitted from this arms race. Cameras can look down from on high and predict crop yields, traffic in Walmart parking lots, and travel patterns on Labor Day weekend. On the ground, they form the foundation of autonomous-driving systems. Snap is betting that the cameras we carry in our pockets could be even more powerful. In its S.E.C. filing, the company contends that “images created by smartphone cameras contain more context and richer information than other forms of input like text entered on a keyboard.”

Snap, of course, is not the first company to recognize that its users’ experience of the world is increasingly mediated through cameras. Consider WeChat, a free messaging app developed by the Chinese giant Tencent. The service, which has hundreds of millions of customers, allows people to use their smartphones to read the data hidden in QR codes. By scanning the codes with their cameras, WeChatters can buy food, call up Web sites, and make payments. According to Allen Zhang, WeChat’s founder, the technology constitutes a “third hand for humans.” Indeed, several years ago, at a time when barely anyone used QR codes, he described them in language similar to Snap’s. “The entry point for PC Internet is the search box,” he said. “The entry point for mobile Internet is the QR code.” Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that earlier this month Snap began expanding the use of QR codes on its platform. And, as Bloomberg’s Mark Bergen and Sarah Frier reported a couple of weeks ago, Snap was at one point in talks with Google to introduce a feature that would have allowed Snapchatters to perform Internet searches merely by pointing their phones at objects in the real world.

That search feature never came to fruition, but it’s a useful indicator of where the mobile Internet is headed. QR codes have always been a kind of half-measure, a useful but inelegant transitional technology; the ultimate goal is augmented reality.

#snapchat #medias_sociaux #messagerie #camera #input_device

Google faces record three billion euro EU antitrust fine : Telegraph
▻http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-eu-idUSKCN0Y60J4

Google (GOOGL.O) faces a record antitrust fine of around 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) from the European Commission in the coming weeks, British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph said. The European Union has accused Google of promoting its shopping service in Internet searches at the expense of rival services in a case that has dragged on since late 2010. Several people familiar with the matter told Reuters last month they believed that after three failed attempts at a compromise in the (...)

#Google #GoogleSearch #publicité #domination

##publicité

#Google faces record €3b fine from European Commission : Report | ZDNet
▻http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-faces-record-3b-fine-from-european-commission-report

Google is facing a record antitrust fine of around €3 billion from the European Commission in the coming weeks, British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph has reported.

The European Union has accused Google of promoting its shopping service in internet searches at the expense of rival services in a case that has dragged on since late 2010.

Several people familiar with the matter told Reuters last month that they believed after three failed attempts at a compromise in the past six years, Google now had no plans to try to settle the allegations unless the EU watchdog changed its stance.

The Sunday Telegraph cited sources close to the situation as saying that officials planned to announce the fine as early as next month, but that the bill has not yet been finalised.

Google will also be banned from continuing to manipulate search results to favour itself and harm rivals, the newspaper said.

How many of your friends never engage in public debate ? That is the power of #surveillance.
▻https://www.opendemocracy.net/nik-williams/cost-of-silence-mass-surveillance-selfcensorship #democracy #censorship

https://opendemocracy.net/files/imagecache/article_xlarge/wysiwyg_imageupload/555386/spyincensorship_0.jpg

The true impact of mass surveillance on media freedom can be felt in the moments when writers hesitate to conduct internet searches. With every pause, there will be something missed, something underreported, an opportunity to question lost.

When Google got flu wrong — Declan Butler (Nature News & Comment)
▻http://www.nature.com/news/when-google-got-flu-wrong-1.12413

When influenza hit early and hard in the United States this year, it quietly claimed an unacknowledged victim: one of the cutting-edge techniques being used to monitor the outbreak. A comparison with traditional surveillance data showed that Google Flu Trends, which estimates prevalence from flu-related Internet searches, had drastically overestimated peak flu levels. The glitch is no more than a temporary setback for a promising strategy, experts say, and Google is sure to refine its algorithms. But as flu-tracking techniques based on mining of web data and on social media proliferate, the episode is a reminder that they will complement, but not substitute for, traditional epidemiological surveillance networks.

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.8976.1360689365!/image/Flu.jpg_gen/derivatives/fullsize/Flu.jpg

#santé #prévisions #google #fail #grippe #épidémies