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According to The Guardian Google is a major funder of the New America Foundation, some researchers of which criticized monopolies and lauded the EU for levying a record fine for Google for antitrust reasons. This apparently wasn't received well at the advertisement company and subsequently the team who did the research got the boot.
Now might be a good time to consider your dependence on all services GOOG.
The New America Foundation is one of the leading left-leaning policy groups in the US and is led by Anne-Marie Slaughter, an author, foreign policy analyst and political scientist. In June, Barry Lynn, a senior fellow who led the thinktank's Open Markets initiative, wrote a blogpost praising the EU's decision to levy a record €2.42bn ($2.7bn) fine on Google for breaching antitrust rules and abusing its market dominance. "Google's market power is one of the most critical challenges for competition policymakers in the world today," Lynn wrote.
According to The New York Times, shortly after the post was published Schmidt, who chaired New America until 2016, contacted Slaughter to communicate his displeasure.
The blogpost was temporarily removed from New America's website before being reposted. Days later, Slaughter told Lynn that "the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways", according to an email from Slaughter to Lynn obtained by the Times. Slaughter said the decision was "in no way based on the content of your work" although she she accused Lynn of "imperiling the institution as a whole".
New America has received roughly $21m from Google, Schmidt and his family foundation since 1999. The organisation's main conference room in Washington DC is called the Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.
Lynn and his 10-strong team have now set up Citizens Against Monopoly. "Is Google trying to censor journalists and researchers who fight dangerous monopolies?" the website asks. "Sadly, the answer is: YES."
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday September 01 2017, @03:01PM (1 child)
I've got a bigger issue with Privacy Badger -- it seems to flag some things based on what the site *requests* rather than what actually gets *retrieved*. So if you've got a firewall somewhere blocking advertisers, they'll still show up on Privacy Badger, which isn't very helpful.
Instead I use a combination of an external firewall and Mozilla's own Lightbeam plugin. Lightbeam builds up a list of every domain that actually gets through, so you can periodically look through it and add anything fishy to your firewall blocklist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @05:00PM
For me the "balanced approach" of Privacy Badger is not enough which is why I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy/ [mozilla.org]
(there was some minor kink with requestpolicycontinued)
Yes you need to make the decisions yourself but in my book that's a definite plus. And I take whitelists over blacklists any day when it comes to my privacy. Why take a chance? Why let somebody else call the shots?