Got Chrome?
Google Just Silently
Downloaded This Onto Your Computer
truther July 1, 2015
that the DARPA affiliated corporation
has been silently
downloading
audio listeners
onto every computer that has Chrome.
This effectively means that Google sees your privacy as piddly-squat, which
does not necessarily come off as a surprise, when one considers Google’s
censorship of We Are Change – this very organization as nothing. The website
Private Internet Access‘s Rick Falkvinge reported how he came to understand
this new policy:
something.” Followed by strange status information that notably
included the lines “Microphone: Yes” and “Audio Capture Allowed: Yes”.
Without consent, Google’s code had downloaded a black box of code that –
according to itself – had turned on the microphone and was actively listening
to your room.”
Without going into detail, Falkvinge
describes the nature of
and how it relies on
transparency and the innovation of many software
programmers before
being finished as a final product. The transparency
allows the user to
know that the open-sourced software truly does what
it claims to do. Chromium, the open-source version of Google Chrome
is
supposed to operate the same way. Only Google abused the nature
of
open-sourced transparency, and by-passed the process that would have
prevented this from happening.
Google rationalized that enabling the
ability to be eavesdropped via your
personal computer was well worth it,
because now “Ok, Google” works!
Now when you say certain words, Chrome
begins searching preliminaries
– is it truly worth losing the stability
of your privacy though? Obviously,
it is Google’s servers that respond
to what is being said along with
your computer.
So a computer black-box was installed, hooked onto a
private
corporation’s server and now has the ability to eavesdrop on you
and
Google had no intention to let anyone know about it!
Eventually Google did respond to the accusation, in which Falkvinge “paraphrased”:
“1) Yes, we’re downloading and installing a wiretapping black-box to your computer.
But we’re not actually activating it. We did take advantage of our
position as trusted
upstream to stealth-insert code into open-source
software that installed this
black box onto millions of computers, but
we would never abuse the same trust
in the same way to insert code that activates the eavesdropping-blackbox
we already downloaded and installed onto your computer without your consent
or knowledge. You can look at the code as it looks right now to see that the
code doesn’t do this right now.
2) Yes, Chromium is bypassing the entire source code auditing process by
downloading a pre-built black box onto people’s computers. But that’s not
something we care about, really. We’re concerned with building Google Chrome,
the product from Google. As part of that, we provide the source code
for others
to package if they like. Anybody who uses our code for their
own purpose takes
responsibility for it. When this happens in a Debian installation, it is not
Google Chrome’s behavior, this is Debian Chromium’s behavior.
It’s Debian’s responsibility entirely.
3) Yes, we deliberately hid this listening module from the users, but that’s because
we consider this behavior to be part of the basic Google Chrome experience.
We don’t want to show all modules that we install ourselves.”
The writer describes that “software
switches” are no longer enough to protect
against this type of
eavesdropping, software switches are programs that
turn off your
webcam/mic etc,. Really, the author feels a physical switch that
cuts
electrical connection to the device is required to prevent this. It is
an odd
thing to observe for me, because many people were furious when
news
of the NSA’s technological trawler of private information became
common
knowledge. When Google silently attempts to install even more passage ways
for your intimate information to be siphoned, not much is said about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment