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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.
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.
Google's on their team, so who cares if they fuck everyone?
We're Google. We don't care. We don't have to.
Bring it on, bois
The existence of a memo suggesting you hide something to avoid regulatory oversight is a sure way to get some (deserved) regulatory oversight.
This was self-serving, and I'm glad to see it's backfiring on them.
Google is long passed the point of being given the benefit of the doubt for having good intentions.
What do you guys think of that fucking Sambo, Coon, Uncle Tom, Stupid Nigro Kanye West?
Goddamn I hate uppity blacks!
It was HER FUCKING TURN YOU STUPID MONKEY!
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.
Until they say "Now gimme your private data, or else..."
People still send memos? I don't think I've sent a memo since 1995.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Big surprise.
Now back to our Russian collusion coverage.
Did they stomp their foot and stick out their bottom lip while making this "demand?" Google has gotten away with shit for years, any posturing by the government is just that, posturing.
after Trump farts his breakfast burrito. Stay tuned to CNN for more fart news. It's not fake news, it fart news.
This is all optics in the government's current pursuit of the pockets of the big IT corporations.
Approximately 430 people had access to the API. Google knows who those people are.
This API was for Google+. Despite reporting that glosses over the fact. Google+ is an unused wasteland where social media accounts go to die.
There is no proof, in fact not even a suggestion, that this bug was known in the wild. They've not found it on the usual suspect web pages where information like this is sold.
There is no log or data (according to Google) that it was ever exploited.
This news-event is entirely artificial and is being used to build a case. The motivation here is not to fix a problem, it's to create a bigger problem/outcry/outrage so that something else happens. It's unfortunate that the Slashdot contributors can't recognize a tempest in a teapot.
Google is a company with lawyers. Because companies are "people", then the company has client-lawyer privacy rights.
The "memo" was from the legal team.
Next some Senators will try to get the Google BoD's wives to testify against them.
This is a political witch hunt. I've **never** voted FOR a democrat in my life, but it is pretty clear what this is.
An API that may have leaked data isn't the same as a leak. Internal googlers found it, not some external security team, so even in the uncovering of the issue, there wasn't a leak.
It isn't like the available data contained classified materials which were stored and transmitted over non-classified networks and systems. That is and always has been illegal. Everyone with a clearance knows that.
Google didn't break any laws and wasn't required by any laws, even that EU thing, to notify anyone of anything.
Also, I'm no fan of google or most cloudy services. We self-host everything.
I don't know about you guys, but I totally trust the Senate to investigate google in an ethical and unbiased way and not try to use this to gain political advantage or punish perceived enemies.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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
Non-disclosure of possible data breaches falls into the arena of SEC disclosure regulations. It's up to them to figure out if Google ran afoul of regulations or not.
Breaking and entering to get dirt on your political rival. And no, "everybody did it" is not an excuse. Nixon had a pretty crazy disregard for the rule of law, going so far as to kick off the Drug War in order to crack down on the left wing because he knew they smoked pot. That's not a conspiracy theory, his own people came out later, admitted it and apologized for it.
I'd call this a hit piece except Google gets along just fine with the Republican majority. They supported the last few Supreme Court Nominees (albeit on the sly via various PACs) and were happy to take the tax cut.
What this is really is enemy creation. Racism is winding down as an effective vehicle for making bogymen. But any good ruling class needs a way to divide the working class. Instead of Black/White they're working on Technocrat/Blue Collar as the next point of division.
This is how the Japanese created their divides to keep the working class from organizing, BTW. They declared some professions as "bad" (unclean ones, like butcher and undertaker) and kept books of who was who based on family names. That's how you create classes without racial divides.
What annoys me is we see this pattern over and over again. The Japanese, India Caste systems, American Racial Slavery, hell the Canadians have been caught doing it with Eskimos (South Park made fun of it). You'd think the working class would catch on to the trick and stop being fooled but so far, no dice...
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Damn it Google. Instead of having a bug in your code, you should have just sexually assaulted someone instead
that was some grade A trolling there. If you could have resisted the temptation and skipped the insult at the end you mighta got modded up.
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Go read all the stuff you typed. You aren't middle of the road slightly right. You're a 100% MAGAtard. You just want to seem reasonable for argument's sake, yet you still toe the party line. Pitiful really.
Can someone please tell me what the fuck a memo is in 2018? A memo was from the days when people had inboxes and outboxes on their desks and your secretary typed it for you.
Is it an email?
You're a jap chank in a land of Whites who hates diversity and to top it off, you're a goddamned Canuk. Your opinions for America don't matter. Does the nagger get a say at the klan meetings now?
Get THE FUCK outta here.
Had an external law firm written the memo, it would have been privileged and Google could not even have been obliged by a court to provide it.
The "angry unhinged mob" was media's go to talking point all day yesterday. Here you are today parroting that same bullshit narrative.
And yet...
you have no idea why people on this site don't like you
you have no idea why they call you a liar
you have no idea why you're accused of shilling
you have no idea why you're told you're a partisan hack
Fuck off.
In Soviet Russia, Bear Fucks You!
At least get your insults right, leftist Nazi.
Wouldn't that be akin to demanding that someone hand over a signed confession or face the consequences? Since it was specified what the memo should contain and who should have signed the document. An investigation is fine, but this strikes me as an illegal demand to manipulate the optics of the situation if and when Google refuses such a demand.
Are there any /. lawyers left who can clarify this?
see here. And I doubt it went away in the 90s, but like how the US passed laws to stop racial profiling in loan applications the Japanese gov't appears to have cracked down on this particular form of discrimination.
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