Originally published at: "Google tries to control our thoughts," insists GOP's Kevin McCarthy | Boing Boing
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Yeah, I think they’d probably go for someone who can formulate their own ideas Kev, you’re already infected with brain worms.
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“control our thoughts” <— isn’t this the whole point of advertising company?
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I mean I can see the argument that google promotes paid advertisers in their search as being somewhat manipulative and I can also see how individualized ranking is could be viewed as problematic by locking us all in a self-reinforcing bubble. But that isn’t what this guy is saying. He’s saying something along the lines of “Google is downranking Covid misinformation and therefore it hates Republicans” or something like that. Dude’s a jackass.
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In addition to his being a coward, McCarthy always strikes me as being a genuinely stupid person. Not quite to the degree of Louis Gohmert, but close.
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Indeed. If this truly were his fear, he should install as much adblocking as he can, right away.
Unfortunately for him, his cognitive landscape is barren except where it’s planted with the ideas capitalists and the religious have put there for their own benefit
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The weird thing about this is, the feds have been doing this for years. Kevin McCarthy is just now catching wind of it, because he hasn’t been paying attention.
Decades of stories like this: “Suspected bomber had excessive searches for bomb making in search history”. Sometimes the articles play more coy suggesting it’s just “browsing history”. But anyone paying attention knows that sometimes it’s the GOOG coughing up a user’s search history.
Where this is problematic is that it’s putting the cart before the horse. Nobody’s committed a crime yet, so they are casting a really wide net for anyone who might be thinking about such crimes.
With search engines like DuckDuckGo, you’re only going to catch the stupid criminals with Google search history. Which I suppose is exactly what McCarthy is worried about. Those are his constituents. /s
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Control your thoughts… what a silly notion. Anyway, would you kindly watch this video:
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+1 for multilayered reference
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For these past examples, this can be something shown after the fact, either through browsing history, cookies, or a log kept by Google. Which if attained with a search warrant, I have less of a problem with.
If they are scanning and reporting on search terms with out a warrant and with out a specific suspect in mind, as this interview suggest, that I have a problem with. Even if it is specific key words and actions, such as domestic terrorism. If they ID a potential suspect through internet posts and then ask for search term monitoring, at least that would be through the established process. But I get very wary of domestic spying powers.
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we know police do this already. they just buy the info from 3rd party companies like all the other data miners do making it… somehow… legal
( see also how they caught the cop who was the golden state killer using commercial dna genealogy searches )
[ edit: and didn’t the supreme court somewhat recently allow parallel evidence construction where cops can use methods that wouldn’t stand up in court to gain information to construct a more legal case against someone? ]
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My friend, the NSA built a datacenter in Utah to track all of America’s webtraffick all the time.
They also intentionally sabotaged the standards for public key cryptography we’ve been using for a couple of decades now.
Warrants are meaningless if our security agencies have no oversight anyway.
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I saw how that was done. It was one of those 23 and me type sites where relatives to the killer had put their DNA up for people to access, and a woman who was good at finding lost relatives or parents of adoptees was able to narrow it down that way. And they got someone to grab a cup he drank from to see if the DNA matched, as they couldn’t get him to give a sample directly.
Yeah, that is the government directly spying on us. (PRISM?) Which I know in some cases is done with corporate help (like black rooms in ATT data centers.)
That is the system we are supposed to be using - and it is both corrupted and has little oversight. So while it has issues - it is different than mass surveillance or getting private companies to flag and report searches.
So - have we confirmed that is what the Biden administration wants Google to do? I of course am not OK with being flagged for internet searches.
The other thing I know they are trying to do is get banks to flag any transfer to the IRS of over $600 bucks.
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Control your thoughts.
Well, he’s safe.
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Interviewers should save us all a lot of time by lowering the microphone to McCarthy’s ass, because one fart would be enough to show that’s where he actually talks from.
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GQP should open movie theaters…
because it’s projection all the way down.
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Is there any way I can get the information in the clip without actually having to listen to this morally bereft spawn of a barnyard husbandry experiment between a clam and a syphilitic goat gone more horribly wrong than the initial description already implies?
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If he was interested in real problems and solutions rather than shaterring the little remaining grip on reality that death cult members might still have.
The GOP doesn’t want to regulate Google or any other company. Regulation is a set of rules and require thought and work even to do badly. They just want to be able to inflict punishment on their enemies without having to follow rules.
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Never go full Gohmert.
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