It’s Us Against Them

Us as in US, I mean.

German authorities are trying to limit what the American tech companies can do, but the Silicon Valley giants are fighting back (the key word is American here, folks).

Give the Germans what they want, I say. But what DO they want, anyway (this is one of my favorite German schizophrenia thangs).

It’s worth noting that Facebook and Google are actually quite popular in the country — the BBC reported in September that “a quarter of the German population are active Facebook users and Google has 95% of the country’s search market.”

Evil Internet Giant Now Within City Limits

Google Inc., that highly mistrusted and ruthlessly vilified corporate world dominator and spy on all things German (I got two words for you here: Street View), has just done an end-run around sleeping data privacy officers stationed at Berlin’s city gates and bought its way into Humboldt University itself by funding a new so-called Institute for Internet and Society, supposedly “based on a philosophy of openness and open access” which will “explore the impact of the digital age.”

Yeah, right. We all know what they’re really up to (or at least you do, I assume). Just don’t come crying to me later and say that I didn’t warn you. The next thing you now Googlezilla will be “approaching the power plant.”

Google Inc. has committed €4.5 million ($6.26 million) to the institute for the first three years as part of its recent push to invest in Germany, which has often been critical of the Internet giant’s practices.

Google Still Evil

But at least it saves German companies tons of money.

Something called the Institute for German Economy has just found out that fast research (and other services) carried out using Google saves German companies some 6.84 euros per employee per year. And how did they find this stuff out? I dunno. I guess they googled it or something.

Unfortunately, Google doesn’t seem to be helping the German national debt very much these days. In absolute terms, every German citizen carries 24,904 euros worth of public debt, whatever public debt is worth these days. Are we having a Greece here yet?

„Wirkungsvolle Online-Tools sind heute entscheidend für Umsatz, Produktivität und Innovationsfähigkeit vieler Unternehmen.“ 

iPhone 4 To Fill Street View Paranoia Market Niche

Now that Google has lost interest in continuing its Street View service in Germany, a lucrative privacy paranoia market niche has opened in that country.

Although unable to meet the demand completely, Apple’s iPhone 4 has volunteered to jump into the breach until something more sinister comes along. Some users have reported that the phone, not unlike Google’s Street View, sometimes takes secret photos of them. You know, without their expressed written permission and all that?

Macht das iPhone 4 heimlich Fotos?

German Streets Not Worth The View

With German streets offering such a blurry mess wherever you look these days, and apparently tired of driving an uphill battle ever since it began taking Street View shots in Germany, Google has now decided to opt out of the German Street View service itself.

Despite winning a Berlin State Supreme Court ruling last month confirming that Street View was legal here, the company’s priorities “have simply shifted” and it will now pursue activities in Germany that do not constitute such a royal freakin’ pain in the ass.

It remains to be seen just how Google’s Street View situation will affect similar street-based mapping services in the region, including the impending “Streetside” program from Microsoft’s Bing.

Street View Egging Update

No good “anti-privacy vandals,” egging Street View opt-out homes like that.

It’s folks like this (the vandals, not them there folks up there) that give Street View a bad name in this country. Other than Google itself, I mean.

And the latest bizarre German Street View shot? How about this one: Capturing the birth of a baby on a street in a Berlin suburb, “although there are question-marks over the veracity of the incident.”

“We respect people’s right to remove their house from Street View and by no means consider this to be acceptable behaviour,” a Google spokesperson said.

“Rebound” time?

For years, Germany did little to stem the flow of its nationals to jihad training camps, believing its decision not to participate in the war in Iraq meant it was off the jihadist radar-screen.

Western intelligence officers who met with their German counterparts after 9/11 say they received lectures about the country’s determination not to sacrifice civil liberties in the fight against terror.

The key members of the jihad cell now thought to be plotting attacks on Germany were recruited from a Hamburg mosque were 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta used to pray. The mosque was closed down after the 9/11 attacks, but then allowed to reopen (until they closed it down for good waaay later-blogger’s note).

That decision was an error.”

———-

But now for something completly different–the latest episode in the ongoing German Street View Saga: German Google fans are now throwing eggs at the pixelated homes (the real ones) of Germans who had decided to opt out of Street View. Never a dull moment around here I tell ya.

Street View way cool after all

Now that Google’s Street View is up and running in Germany, many of the very Germans so entsetzt (horrified) at the Datenkrake (data octopus) invading their privacy in the first place finally get to see how way cool this service really is and are now horrified that their homes have been pixelated without their permission–although this naked guy down here in his trunk in Mannheim was obviously thrilled with the Street View concept right from the start and wasn’t pixelated one tiny little bit, though he maybe shoulda outta been.

Many of these horrified Germans have now asked to have their pixelated homes unpixelated again ASAP but unfortunately this is now no longer possible, says Google, as one of the conditions for introducing Street View to Germany in the first place, as demanded by Germany’s horrified data security officials, was the immediate destruction of all photographic raw material once the data has been entered into the Street View database.

Lots of German real estate and tourism companies are upset about this unfortunate pixelization process too, by the way.

But hey,  you can’t displease all of the people all of the time, I guess.

“In keinem der 26 anderen Street-View-Länder gab es am ersten Tag einen solchen Zulauf wie in Deutschland., gab Google bekannt.”

Germans now to be frightened by Google Carbots

And they aren’t even here yet. But they will be, soon. Halloween is coming up, after all.

And you thought Street View was scary. This is going to be a real privacy invasion, people. These robotic nightmares have mind reading laser probes that will continually feed on their victims’ brain-stem cells and gather more personal information about them than even they (at Google Imperial Command) will know what to do with. But they will, with time.

Die sind immer und überall.