How Google Spent 15 Years Creating a Culture of Concealment
www.nytimes.com
Trying to avoid antitrust suits, Google systematically told employees to destroy messages, avoid certain words and copy the lawyers as often as possible.
    • tempest@lemmy.caEnglish
      12·
      25 days ago

      I mean they were built to make money, the fact that you can send them a national security letter is just a happy accident that keeps the NSA from having to run more datacenters.

      • StinkyFingerItchyBum@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        23 days ago

        I respectfully disagree. They were built for power and control from the start. Monestisation just paid for it and helped adoption.

        • spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          3·
          25 days ago

          I think you’ve got it backwards. Like the other person said, this shit was built to make money, the power and control came later. Said power and control also came partially from the money, since money is just power coupons, and they used that to buy up competitors and regulators alike to get to the state their in now.

          Not everything is built with evil intentions. Quite frequently, evil corrupts otherwise benign institutions as they gain power to serve the ends of those already in power.

          • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
            1·
            24 days ago

            The encryption battles of the early 1990s focused primarily on two issues: restrictions on the export of encryption technologies and the National Security Agency’s (NSA) attempts to introduce a chipset called the Clipper chip to network technology. The first was the result of Cold War era laws designed to control the diffusion of sensitive technologies, including encryption software. This became an issue in the early 1990s when encryption software became commonplace in web browsers. In 1996, President Clinton signed an executive order that loosened restrictions after technology companies claimed that the export controls on encrypted products hurt their sales.

            The National Security Agency (NSA) announced the Clipper chip in 1993. The chip was a piece of hardware designed for phones which would provide encryption on communications while also producing an encryption key and making it available to the NSA. After backlash from civil liberty groups, findings of technical vulnerabilities in the chip, and low adoption rates despite incentives, the program ended in 1996.

            https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-brief-history-of-u-s-encryption-policy/

      • StinkyFingerItchyBum@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        25 days ago

        Dead people also have no claim on the present or future. You can own more, even when the pie is shrinking if you negate others claims.