Google Glass: Orwellian surveillance with fluffier branding

New technology will make us all agents for Google. Nick Pickles, Director of Big Brother Watch, says the implications for privacy are profoundly worrying.

Sergey Brin showing off Google Glass augmented reality spectacles

In the online world – for now, at least – it’s the advertisers that make the world go round. If you’re Google, they represent more than 90% of your revenue and without them you would cease to exist.

So how do you reconcile the fact that there is a finite amount of data to be gathered online with the need to expand your data collection to keep ahead of your competitors?

There are two main routes. Firstly, try as hard as is legally possible to monopolise the data streams you already have, and hope regulators fine you less than the profit it generated. Secondly, you need to get up from behind the computer and hit the streets.

Google Glass is the first major salvo in an arms race that is going to see increasingly intrusive efforts made to join up our real lives with the digital businesses we have become accustomed to handing over huge amounts of personal data to.

The principles that underpin everyday consumer interactions – choice, informed consent, control – are at risk in a way that cannot be healthy. Our ability to walk away from a service depends on having a choice in the first place and knowing what data is collected and how it is used before we sign up.

Imagine if Google or Facebook decided to install their own CCTV cameras everywhere, gathering data about our movements, recording our lives and joining up every camera in the land in one giant control room. It’s Orwellian surveillance with fluffier branding. And this isn’t just video surveillance – Glass uses audio recording too. For added impact, if you’re not content with Google analysing the data, the person can share it to social media as they see fit too.

Yet that is the reality of Google Glass. Everything you see, Google sees. You don’t own the data, you don’t control the data and you definitely don’t know what happens to the data. Put another way – what would you say if instead of it being Google Glass, it was Government Glass? A revolutionary way of improving public services, some may say. Call me a cynic, but I don’t think it’d have much success.

More importantly, who gave you permission to collect data on the person sitting opposite you on the Tube? How about collecting information on your children’s friends? There is a gaping hole in the middle of the Google Glass world and it is one where privacy is not only seen as an annoying restriction on Google’s profit, but as something that simply does not even come into the equation. Google has empowered you to ignore the privacy of other people. Bravo.

It’s already led to reactions in the US. ‘Stop the Cyborgs’ might sound like the rallying cry of the next Terminator film, but this is the start of a campaign to ensure places of work, cafes, bars and public spaces are no-go areas for Google Glass. They’ve already produced stickers to put up informing people that they should take off their Glass.

They argue, rightly, that this is more than just a question of privacy. There’s a real issue about how much decision making is devolved to the display we see, in exactly the same way as the difference between appearing on page one or page two of Google’s search can spell the difference between commercial success and failure for small businesses. We trust what we see, it’s convenient and we don’t question the motives of a search engine in providing us with information.

The reality is very different. In abandoning critical thought and decision making, allowing ourselves to be guided by a melee of search results, social media and advertisements we do risk losing a part of what it is to be human. You can see the marketing already - Glass is all-knowing. The issue is that to be all-knowing, it needs you to help it be all-seeing.

^{Google's Sergey Brin wearing Gogle Glass on the New York Subway}

If choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without, then Google Glass goes to the heart of what it is to live in a digital world and what it is to exercise choice about your privacy. The danger is that we lose our privacy and Google gains the power. The reality is that as profit-making strategies go, there’s nothing better.

Source: The Telegraph

Say NO to Google Glass: 'Stop the Cyborgs' website goes viral

A website designed to draw attention to a new technological development by Internet search giant Google is going viral, thanks in large part to a growing wave of concern over personal privacy.

The site, called StopTheCyborgs.org, was established "in response to the Google Glass project and other technology trends. The aim of the movement is to stop a future in which privacy is impossible and corporate control total," say developers in a post describing the site's intent.

The concept behind Google Glass is an eye wear device that uses Google's virtually limitless bank of data to allow the user to record everything he or she sees, in real time, and then be able to utilize smart phone, Internet and other communication technology to immediately transmit, post or otherwise publicize that content - all without the permission of the subjects who have been videotaped.

"We are already continually tracked though smart phones, online tracking, banking transactions, and CCTV. So why all the fuss about a smart phone on your face?" says StopTheCyborgs.

Millions of 'creepy' cameramen

Consider these reasons, among many others:

-- First of all, Google has the marketing resources and power to make recording of private activity or conversations socially acceptable. "Would you have even considered wearing a hidden spy camera or recording conversations a few years ago? Well soon everyone will be doing it and finding you odd for objecting," says the site.

For comparison's sake, the site's founders say, check out Seattle's "Creepy" Cameraman.

-- With Google Glass, how are you supposed to know if somebody's recording you? Keep in mind the very design of the Google device makes it difficult to know. "This is in contrast to a smart phone where the user must visibly hold the camera up to take a picture or record video. We must therefore assume that we are being recorded at all times (and possibly publicly broadcast) from a low angle where ones face is clearly visible," the site warned.

-- Even if a Google Glass user isn't recording video, audio for their own personal use may still be collected and processed to the cloud, so as to display contextual information using image, object, face, voice identification and speech recognition, which is "so-called augmented reality," says the site.

-- Information collected about you won't just sit in a database somewhere, to be read only by security services or bored IT workers. Rather, it will be delivered directly to the people you are interacting with - and all without your permission.

The last bits of your privacy are about to go away for good

"These concerns go beyond privacy," warns the site. "There are serious consequences for human society. There will no longer be any distinction between the 'digital world' and the 'real world.' People will make decisions and interact with other humans in the real world in a way which increasingly depends on information that Google Glass tells them."

Further, people will gradually "stop acting as autonomous individuals, when making decisions and interacting with others, and instead become mere sensor/effector nodes of a global network. There will be no room for multiple identities, hypocrisy or experimentation. There will be no space in which you can escape your online profile and the system will be controlled by a small group of corporations."

Other concerns regarding Google Glass:

-- Such devices could destroy the very last vestiges of privacy Americans - who are already videotaped on the street by cities, in stores and parking lots by businesses, by banks - have left.

-- They could hold people accountable for easily pardonable "offenses."

-- They may increase violations of doctor-patient confidentiality and attorney-client privilege.

-- The devices could spawn a whole new generation of stalkers.

Privacy in America has been vanishing for years. Google Glass and devices like it will put the final nail into the coffin, leaving your home just about the only place left on the planet where you might have some semblance of privacy (unless you invite someone in who's wearing a pair of Google Glasses).

Source: Natural News

What's really in vaccines? Proof of MSG, formaldehyde, aluminum and mercury

Have you ever wondered what's really in vaccines? According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control's vaccine additives page, all the following ingredients are routinely used as vaccine additives:

• Aluminum - A light metal that causes dementia and Alzheimer's disease. You should never inject yourself with aluminum.

• Antibiotics - Chemicals that promote superbugs, which are deadly antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that are killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.

• Formaldehyde - A "pickling" chemical used to preserve cadavers. It's highly toxic to the nervous system, causing blindness, brain damage and seizures. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services openly admits that formaldehyde causes cancer. You can see this yourself on the National Toxicology Program website, featuring its 12th Report on Carcinogens.

There, the formaldehyde Fact Sheet completely neglects to mention formaldehyde in vaccines. This is the "dirty little secret" of government and the vaccine industry. It does state, however, that "...formaldehyde causes myeloid leukemia, and rare cancers including sinonasal and nasopharyngeal cancer."

• Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) - A neurotoxic chemical called an "excitotoxin." It causes brain neurons to be overexcited to the point of death. MSG is toxic even when consumed in foods, where it causes migraine headaches and endocrine system damage. You should NEVER inject MSG into your body. But that's what health workers do when they inject you with vaccines.

• Thimerosal - A methyl mercury compound that causes severe, permanent nervous system damage. Mercury is highly toxic to the brain. You should never touch, swallow or inject mercury at any dose. There is no safe dose of mercury! Doctors and vaccine pushers LIE to you and say there is no mercury in vaccines. Even the CDC readily admits vaccine still contain mercury (thimerosal).

In addition, National Toxicology Programs admits in its own documents that:

• Vaccinations "...may produce small but measurable increases in blood levels of mercury."

• "Thimerosal was found to cross the blood-brain and placenta barriers."

• The "...hazards of thimerosal include neurotoxicity and nephrotoxicity." (This means brain and kidney toxicity.)

• "...similar toxicological profiles between ethylmercury and methylmercury raise the possibility that neurotoxicity may also occur at low doses of thimerosal."

• "... there are no existing guidelines for safe exposure to ethylmercury, the metabolite of thimerosal."

• "...the assessment determined that the use of thimerosal as a preservative in vaccines might result in the intake of mercury during the first six months of life that exceeded recommended guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)..."

• ..."In the U.S., thimerosal is still present as preservative in some vaccines given to young children, as well as certain biological products recommended during pregnancy. Thimerosal remains a preservative in some vaccines administered to adolescents and adults. In addition, thimerosal continues to be used internationally as a vaccine preservative."

The report then goes on to say that the FDA studies thimerosal and somehow found it to be perfectly safe. It also states that vaccine manufactures are "working" to remove thimerosal from vaccines, but in reality it's still being manufactured right into the vaccines.

By the way, this report also reveals that the FDA requires preservatives like thimerosal only in so-called "multi-dose" vaccines -- vials that contain more than one dose of the vaccine. Drug companies could, if they wanted to, produce "clean" single-dose vaccines without any mercury / thimerosal. But they choose not to because it's more profitable to product mercury-containing multi-dose vaccines. As the report admits, "Preservatives are not required for products formulated in singledose vials. Multidose vials are preferred by some physicians and health clinics because they are often less expensive per vaccine dose and require less storage space."

So the reason why your child is being injected with vaccine boils down to health care offices making more money and saving shelf space!

"Mercury in vaccines is a conspiracy theory!

I've been told by numerous "skeptics" and doctors that there's no such thing as mercury in vaccines, and that any such suggestion is nothing more than a "wild conspiracy theory." That just goes to show you how ignorant all the skeptics, doctors and health professionals really are: They have NO CLUE what's in the vaccines they're dishing out to people!

All they have to do is visit this CDC vaccine additives web page, which openly admits to these chemicals being used in vaccines right now. It's not a conspiracy theory, it turns out. It's the status quo of modern-day vaccine manufacturing!

And just in case the CDC removes that page, here's a screen shot, taken October 22, 2012, showing exactly what was on the CDC vaccine additives page:

Source: Natural News