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Google

Fingerprinting: Critics say Google rules put profits over privacy

Google's new rules allowing 'fingerprinting' for online tracking have sparked criticism from privacy advocates, marking a reversal from their 2019 stance against such practices. The changes permit collection of IP addresses and device information for advertising purposes, which Google defends as necessary for emerging platforms while maintaining user privacy options.

technomancy search

A reflection on Google's evolution from a revolutionary search solution in the early 2000s to its current state of declining quality, exploring the limitations of centralized search and proposing personalized alternatives to navigate the web. The author advocates for a more conscious approach to web searching and experiments with building a personalized search index based on bookmarks and social media links.

A 2023 study concluded CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit masquerading as a security service' that made us spend 819 million hours clicking on traffic lights to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google

A 2023 UC Irvine study reveals that Google's reCAPTCHA system has consumed 819 million human hours while generating nearly $1 trillion in value through tracking cookies and AI training data. The research demonstrates that bots now outperform humans in completing these security checks, suggesting reCAPTCHA primarily serves as a data collection tool rather than a security measure.

Carbon is not a programming language (sort of)

Carbon is Google's experimental open-source project aimed at developing tooling for automated migration of C++ code to a modern programming language with improved governance. The project emerges from Google's disagreements with the C++ Standard Committee and focuses on solving C++'s evolution challenges while maintaining interoperability with existing codebases. Unlike other successor languages, Carbon prioritizes automated code migration and fundamental language rework while building stronger abstractions.