Cory Doctorow is rightfully enraged:
This is all downside. If Google complies with the order, it will constitute a privacy breach on a scale never before seen. If they don’t comply with the order, it will starve competitors of the one tiny drop of hope that Judge Mehta squeezed out of his pen. It’s a catastrophe. An utter, total catastrophe. It has zero redeeming qualities. Hope you like enshittification, folks, because Judge Mehta just handed Google an eternal licence to enshittify the entire fucking internet.
harrowing and deeply upsetting, and unfortunately the kind of incompetence on the DoJ that i would expect to see on a lot of people’s bingo cards.
what kind of transparent values can civilians offer/audit when trying to suss out which companies are using google’s data without our consent? my guesses are a few usual suspects: parent companies, employer worldview, and how they view ai