Evil, Faceless Corporation: Google Steals Money From You If You Don't Purchase an Android Device for MFA
Recent: Google "Hey Hi" (Slop) Having a Stroke, Thinks I am Married to the Grandmother of My Grandfather | Google is "Bullshit"
As noted the other day, Google locked me out of my account for absolutely no reason other than me not having a skinnerbox ("mobile" "phone"). I did nothing wrong, I didn't forgot my username/password, I didn't change my E-mail address.
Google owes me money. Now it won't let me log in. Not until (or unless) I join the 98% of Brits who have a "mobile" "phone". It's so absurd and any effort to reach an actual person at Google (as I could and did 20+ years ago) is wishful thinking at best. There's no way to recover access - it should be noted that this skinnerbox requirement didn't exist 20+ years ago when this account was created. Back then (before 'iPhone') the whole "smart" "phone" thingie with "apps" "fashion" was rare and Blackberries didn't really count.
At this point, under the guise of "hey hi" (slop) Google is firing tens of thousands of workers (in the UK they call these "buyouts" because it sounds so much better; layoffs are "offers") and its debt is soaring.
At this point it's not clear if Google's "bread and butter" will keep "bringing home the bacon". It's not Android, it's ads, and Android is fast becoming proprietary just like 'iOS' (Apple's hypeOS). It's a spying and ad delivery system inside people's pockets, that's what Android is. Maybe that's what it always was - it just wasn't all that obvious at first.
An associate of ours, pointing to this new article from Dr. Glyn Moody, explains that "Google runs on ad money. People buy ads from Google knowing that the ads and accompanying search engine will lead people to their site. Google's AI [sic] summary cuts off the flow of visitors from the search engine, thus eliminating the reasons to buy ads from Google..."
Quoting Moody: "This is terrible news for access to knowledge because it frames the Google AI search engine as the fount of all knowledge – one that will do all the hard work of finding information and combining it into an easily-digested answer that can be interrogated further. It can do that because it has already ingested billions of Web pages and other information sources as part of the Large Language Model (LLM) training process. But search engine users will no longer know what some of those sources are unless they painstakingly click on the links in the new panel. [...] Similarly, the new Google search is the publishing industry’s worst nightmare. Not only is Google drawing on material they have published, but it is pushing links to those sources into the background. It seem inevitable that the Web traffic to publishers will fall yet further, making already struggling business models based on advertising even more precarious. That will have knock-on consequences for the funding of many sites – particularly newspapers and magazines – and for the commissioning of work from journalists and other creative professionals. [...] What emerges from Google’s latest announcements is less of a search engine, and more of an immersive virtual environment that is designed to keep people engaging with Google’s services, asking them for information, advice and even delegating actions to them. [...] But these impressive technical features come at a high price, even leaving aside issues such as the environmental impact of the huge server farms they require. With the latest incarnation of its search engine, Google is making the World Wide Web as we have known it for over 30 years invisible, and therefore increasingly irrelevant to most people, who will be happy to let Google become their universal user interface to everything. And yet Google still depends on the Internet to supply all the information it is analysing and repackaging. It risks killing the very thing that sustains it."
