Googlebug
All options are equal….
A few weeks ago, after an update, my Chromebook suddenly began throwing up a popup…
…offering me the one-click option to give Google access to my microphone. No one-click ‘No’ option.
After discussing the situation at some length with Google AI, I couldn’t see how it could be legal. I bet it wasn’t in the EU: they’re pretty strong on this kind of thing. So I asked:
So why don’t we enjoy such protection over here? Well, you’ll never guess, turns out we do. Lucky us. Again, Google AI has no qualms about confirming:
Questioned about its take on deliberate and calculated criminality, Google AI was adamant that Google doesn’t break criminal law, nor would it, ever. This is not criminal law. Ok, it is the law, and Google is breaking it, but it’s not criminal law.
So that’s ok, is it?
Personally I don’t think so. I don’t think we should be allowing Google to brazenly break our laws, and openly trash our rights. I’m old enough to remember when they said an Englishman’s home was his castle. Now, it seems, he’s no option but invite in a speccy, unsmiling dweeb, to hover in the corner of any room, unresponsive, unsmiling, silently hoovering up everything that’s said, everything that’s done, everything that happens. How can it be legal for someone to degrade my property until I allow them to use it to spy on me? Oh, hang on – it isn’t. And yet it’s happening, right now, to millions of people in this country.
Most, probably, will shrug their shoulders and click on ‘Yes’ without giving it much of a second thought. Some, like me, will try to kill the popups. They will fail. It never stops, until you click ‘Yes’. I saw the damn thing hundreds of times, during my attempts to eradicate it. When I got tired I amused myself by forwarding screenshots of the thing, which would immediately trigger a reoccurrence, which I would then forward, which would trigger another reoccurrence….
Rinse and repeat as many times as you like. That popup is never going away; not until you say “Ok Google, have it your own way: you can spy on me, in my own home, using my hardware.” As far as I‘m concerned, they’ve degraded my property, and made it clear it will stay degraded until I do what they want. I don’t think that’s right, and I took it up with Google AI at some length, over the course of a very long trail, littered with evasions, misdirections and false leads (it’s called an ‘intentional friction loop’, apparently, created by engineers to wear you down into submission) I was assured by Google AI that I was now effectively at the end of the road. There was only one way to stop the popups without granting access. I had to fool the operating system into thinking I had, then effectively nullify what I’d just done. Which would leave me in the same position I would’ve been in if I’d been allowed to click ‘No’ in the first place.
In short, however counter-intuitive (not to say laborious) the only way to actually achieve what I wanted – to stop the popups while continuing to deny Google access to my microphone – was to give Google access to my microphone.
Say wha? You heard right. According to Google AI, while one-click was enough for a ‘Yes’, the only way to log a ‘No’ was to give a system-wide ‘Yes’, then go through a list of every specific site and system element, disallowing each one individually. I have only their word for it that this will ‘effectively’ leave my microphone in a non-eavesdropping state. And strange to tell, I’m not minded to set much store by Google’s word right now. But what option do I have? I need a usable laptop. So I capitulated. I said ‘Yes’.
I don’t now know whether or to what extent Google will be eavesdropping, having finally forced me into that ‘Yes’, however supposedly qualified. What I do know is that as it stands, despite a steely determination, many hours of effort, and a fair bit of technical nous, I have been unable to rid my property of Google’s virus without granting them access to my microphone. This makes me very, very angry. Can you tell?
When I asked Google AI for its take on Google acting in clear and deliberate breech of the law, Google AI insisted that Google ”are not exempt from the law, nor are they choosing to openly break it.” I responded: One moment you tell me EU law makes it strictly illegal to offer a Yes option without the No option being given equal prominence; you accept that that is exactly what Google is doing; but now you tell me Google is not choosing to ‘openly break the law’. Are they offering me an illegal popup inadvertently? Google AI apologised for the ‘poor explanation’, to which I responded:
It went on:
I think it’s about time the UK Government did what the French have done and taught Google that breaking the law to spy on British citizens will not be tolerated. If ‘multi-million-pound fines’ are what it takes to persuade a foreign company to abide by the laws of our land, it’s time for some multi-million-pound fines, wouldn’t you say? Or are we all just Google’s bitch, and we might as well just suck it up?
I say a government failing to act on this is a government abdicating one of its most fundamental responsibilities: to protect its citizens from wrongdoers. This should be stopped. Now. Right now, millions of people are being coerced, completely illegally, into surrendering fundamental freedoms. How can we claim to be a nation of law when we allow anyone to flout it so brazenly, so cynically, and to such malicious effect.
Google should be required to stop using this popup, today. Then they should be required to issue a new update which returns everyone’s device to the state it was in before the ‘virus’, with microphone access off by default. Then they should be required to delete all illegally-derived data, and prove that they have done so. Then promise, pinky promise, never to do it again.
Google are breaking the law, every day. Consciously, cynically, calculatedly. Based purely on a P&L calculation, they are riding roughshod over fundamental civil liberties. They are denying us the right to say:
No, Google, I do not want to give you access to my microphone
Our legal right. Our human right. Our right as citizens of this country, to do and say what we like in the privacy of our own homes without fear of eavesdropping.
How long will the UK government continue to ignore it? Isn’t it time to tell corporate America in unequivocal terms, with teeth if needs be, that here in Britain we abide by the law, and if they want to operate here they have to abide by it too.