Senators Demand Google Hand Over Internal Memo Urging Google+ Cover-up (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Three Republican senators have sent a letter to Google demanding the company hand over an internal memo based on which Google decided to cover up a Google+ data leak instead of going public as most companies do. The existence of this internal memo came to light on Monday in a Wall Street Journal article that forced Google to go public with details about a Google+ API bug that could have been used to harvest data on Google users.

According to the report, the internal memo, signed by Google's legal and policy staff, advised Google top execs not to disclose the existence of the API bug fearing "immediate regulatory interest." Google's legal staff also feared that the bug would bring Google "into the spotlight alongside or even instead of Facebook despite having stayed under the radar throughout the Cambridge Analytica scandal," and would "almost [guarantee] Sundar will testify before Congress," akin to Facebook's CEO. In a letter sent today to Google, three GOP senators want to see this internal memo for themselves by October 30, and also with on-the-record answers to seven questions in regards to what, why, and how Google handled the Google+ API data leak.

Comments

There was no leak

[JarekC]

The tricky part is there was no leak. The data was available, but there is no evidence of any unauthorized access. So technically they were not required to report the leak, because there was no leak.

Let's say they promised to keep your cash safe, then kept the safe unlocked for a couple of months, then realized what's up and locked it before anyone noticed. Are they legally obliged to tell you about it?

So even if they are assholes from moral point of view, legally they may be clean.

Re:So Dems don't care I guess

[pgmrdlm]

f IT is biased against republicans,
I think the bias you are talking about occurs in coastal states, which are predominantly liberal.

and news media is biased against republicans,
Not all media is biased, there are some main media that offer both sides. Maybe not always, but the effort is there. Also, if a person is smart. They reference multiple sites when getting their information. Both opposed and for any given subject.

and Hollywood is biased against republicans,Again, not all Hollywood. Look up republican actors/actress's.

and women are all biased against republicans
There are women republican senators, governors, congresswomen, business leaders, and just every day American citizens.

if sports is biased against republicans,
Easier just to link on this one: https://www.ranker.com/list/sp...

if social media is biased against republicans,
This one, I actually think is true when it comes to our main stream social media.

immigrants are biased against republicans,
Immigrants, or minorities? Or Naturalized citizen? I don't think all are against republicans.

Re:So Dems don't care I guess

[edi_guy]

You can likely extend this as a trait for American's in general. As a nation we have far and away the most economic power, most military power, massive and varied natural resources, and a forgiving climate. Our immediate border neighbors are small, friendly, non-threatening, and there's only two of them. Our enemies are all geographically very, very far away, across huge oceans. And yet, as a society we feel like the rest of the world is out to get us. Or is cheating us our of our fair share in some way, even though demonstrably we have way more than our 'fair share'.

Not even a Democrat/Republican thing as I see this behavior in myself as well, and it'd be interesting to know what the underlying cause is.

innate biases of the wage-slave aristocray

[epine]

The elite, wage-slave aristocracy everywhere leans Democrat. It's that simple.

Spend $200,000 on your tuition at an elite university, you're pretty much guaranteed (trust us) a highly compensated job in a city with a very high cost of living (such as New York, where you make nowhere near enough to command a spacious appartment—one not situated at the distal terminus of the Origami subway line—but plenty enough to pay the hand-to-mouth legions of the service industry to cook your food for you; and even service your debt a tiny bit, too, at the end of the month).

Where are these jobs? In the knowledge economy. Such as journalism. Or anywhere that knowledge and literacy are thick on the ground. The knowledge economy always concentrates in large cities, and generally coastal cities, because the billionaires of the knowledge economy do so love their secluded, clifftop beach homes (like hell your head office winds up in Cleveland, unless you sell some kind of weed killer).

Often these jobs have a fair amount of clout, and with enough staying power, some percentage graduate from wage-slave circumstances. But not for a long time, and always in minority terms.

The wage-slave aristocracy is a strange power base. For one thing, it's debt financed. Back when junk bonds were all the rage, debt-financed corporations were also a strange power base. Real corporations glanced at them sideways.

One thing this group has in common is that they all been sufficiently trained not to automatically believe whatever they read (just because it's got an Apple Pie masthead). So this group is a constant sticking point in political discourse. And you can't simply ignore them, because they're so deeply embedded in the white-collar corporate machinery that makes the world go around on a daily basis.

So if you can't bluster effectively with seven-word talking points, and you can't ignore an audience with enough aggregate power to tilt the landscape, you have to treat them like a cancer, with a daily chemotherapy regime of "fake news!"

Journalists will always hate this shit, because any significant job in journalism (below the Murdoch C-suite) is typically held by a wage-slave aristocrat.

Jon Stewart completely nailed the fifth estate in his altercation with Chris Wallace when he described the flaws of journalism as tilting toward the lazy and the sensational.

I think their bias is towards sensationalism and laziness.

We all pander to what pays the bills. Especially after forking $200,000 to your alma mater.

Analyzing 100,000 documents to write a 14,000 word piece on how the Trump family evaded $400 million in taxes (by more separate ruses than you can count) was definitely not lazy. So maybe you have to lard up half the rest of the publication with celebrity click bait (People lite) in order to retain a viable readership. Humans are stupid, myopic animals most of the time. There's nothing here that "biased" against Republicans. It's a fundamental, predictable difference of opinion about how the world works.

The Republicans believe you can fashion curt language which unifies their ridiculously broad tent: the plutocrats and the evangelicals. The wage-slave aristocracy doesn't think those two flavours go together like chocolate and peanut butter. (And they never will.) As soon as you write more than 300 words, any superficial, Frank Luntz alignment between the interests of the plutocrats and the evangelicals start to look parlous. The wage-slave aristocracy has a 300-word attention span (many of us have a 3000-word attention span, and some of us only drummed our fingers impatiently once or twice during that entire 14,000-word expose).

Literacy: the ability to unpack hollow slogans.

Most people settle for the owner's manual (Trump's twitter feed). But I've read the source code, in so far as the source code can be obtained. Probably on the order of five 2000-word articles per day for two ye