Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Got Chrome? Google Just Silently Downloaded This Onto Your Computer


Got Chrome?

Google Just Silently

Downloaded This Onto Your Computer

truther July 1, 2015 
On June 17th, Google did not announce (the news broke)
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:

“It looked like just another bug report. “When I start Chromium, it downloads
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
                                     open-sourced/free-software
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.

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