Google’s terms of service have changed over the years, at one time the tracking cookies ‘expired’ after 31 years,654 but more recently they claim the cookies will now expire after two years.655 The advocacy group Privacy International said Google was “hostile to privacy” and gave them their lowest ranking of any company in their assessment. Even browsing in ‘incognito’ mode on Google Chrome is not private as most people are led to believe.656 Google knows what you’ve been looking up, and so do countless advertising agencies, political organizations, law enforcement, and anyone else Google wants to give that information to.
For years Gmail users had the content of their emails scanned and read by Google in order to use them to show people advertisements based on what they were writing about.657 Users consented to this when they agreed to the terms of service which hardly anyone even reads or thinks twice about. After word of this creepy tactic started making headlines, Google announced that they would stop doing so.
In response to critics about their privacy concerns CEO Eric Schmidt, declared, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”658 An interesting statement from a man who allegedly has an open marriage and had his $15 million dollar Manhattan penthouse soundproofed, which New York Magazine called a “depraved sex palace” for him and his presumed mistresses.659
Google Street view allows anyone to get photos of your home, which is just as easy as looking up pictures of just about anything else. When gathering the 360 degree images of every street in America for the Street View feature Google also collected names, addresses, passwords, emails, text messages, hardware IDs, and browsing histories through people’s home WiFi routers if they weren’t password protected.660
Burglars often use Google Street View to conduct reconnaissance on homes and garages before breaking into them.661 One survey showed that 80% of burglars use social media and Google Street View to case houses they’re planning on burglarizing.662 Police in Chicago say that a burglar suspected of breaking into at least eight different homes used Google Maps to find expensive houses located on a highway (for an easy escape) and then further cased the homes using Google’s Satellite View of those properties.663
As Google grows more powerful and as their products and services become more ingrained in society, the dangers will likely grow in step. Many have voiced concerns about Google Home, which can enable hackers to listen in on people in their living rooms or bedrooms, and similar ‘smart home’ devices allow hackers to remotely open people’s doors making them easy targets for burglars.664
Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company) CEO Eric Schmidt admitted the plan is to have Google think for people, saying, “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’”665 Three years later he doubled down on his assertion that Google would think for people, telling The Wall Street Journal, “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”666 Tell us what we should be doing? As strange as this sounds their goals are far more disturbing than that.
Google’s executives want the company to be more than just a search engine and smartphone operating system; more than an ebook store and a place to stream music and movies; more than something that runs smart home gadgets and medical devices; they want it to become an artificially intelligent, all-knowing ‘God.’ Then they want to wire it directly into the brains of humans through what’s called a neural interface or BMI (brain machine interface) to merge man with machine, creating a new hybrid species of cyborgs.667 Their final plan is to then upload the totality of one’s mind into the Cloud or a silicon-based hard drive that’s attached to a robotic body, believing this is the key to ‘immortality’ and ‘transcendence.’668
Google’s director of engineering Ray Kurzweil actually said, “So, does God exist? Well, I would say, not yet.”669 He was hired by Google in 2012 to work full-time on artificial intelligence and is one of the most well-known proponents of transhumanism, which is the idea of merging man with machine to create superhumans. Kurzweil believes that by the year 2099, neural interfaces or BMIs (brain machine interfaces) will be surgically implanted into almost everyone, and that, “humans who do not utilize such implants [will be] unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues with those who do.”670 He and other transhumanists believe they will elevate humans to the level of gods in what they see as the final phase of humanity’s physical and spiritual evolution as we merge into a cybernetic ‘Borg.’
In a strange and creepy side note, Google reportedly owns P.O. Box 666 on the Caribbean island of Bermuda, which has a zero corporate tax rate, in an apparent effort to prevent paying taxes on about ten billon dollars in annual revenue.671
[Author’s Note: Please take a moment to rate and review this book on Amazon.com or wherever you purchased it from to let others know what you think. This also helps to offset the trolls who keep giving my books fake one-star reviews when they haven’t even read them. Almost all of the one-star reviews on my books are from NON-verified purchases which is a clear indication they are fraudulent, hence me adding this note. These fraudulent ratings and reviews could also be part of a larger campaign trying to stop my message from spreading by attempting to tarnish my research through fake and defamatory reviews, so I really need your help to combat this as soon as possible. Thank you!]
Wikipedia
Wikipedia was launched in 2001 as an online encyclopedia that “crowdsourced” its articles by allowing anyone to write and edit them, a strange business model which has surprisingly led to them becoming the fifth most popular website in the world.672 Its name derives from the words ‘Wiki,’ which is a website format that allows collaborative modifications, and ‘encyclopedia.’ It currently has over five million articles and is usually one of the top Google search results for most subjects entered into the search engine.
Unlike traditional encyclopedias, which are written and edited by experts in their field, pretty much anyone can add almost anything to Wikipedia articles, which are then read and believed by countless people. Since Wikipedia has become the most popular online “encyclopedia” and one of the most visited websites online, we must take a serious look at articles published on the site and how they are fact checked, edited, and censored.
Editors at most newspapers and traditional encyclopedia companies have names and titles, not to mention bosses and company policies they must abide by, but much of what happens on Wikipedia is a mystery, and most of the editors and writers are anonymous or only referred to by their online handles which rarely reveal any information about who they actually are or what credentials they have.
Since Wikipedia is free and there are no advertisements on the site, this leads to the question of who funds them? And how did an online ‘encyclopedia’ that was written by random anonymous people on the Internet come to be a trusted source of information by so many people? Their parent company, the Wikimedia Foundation, employs over 280 people and in 2016 they took in over $80 million dollars in revenue and now have over $91 million dollars in assets.673 Where does all this money come from, and what are they doing with it since the articles are written and edited by random volunteers on the Internet who have too much time on their hands?