14 September 2022

BIG EU GOOGLE FINES...Not so much here in the State of Arizona (data center secret deals)

Please Note - This is Google's second big loss in the EU courts. The company was also fined 2.4 billion euro for bundling Google shopping with search and 1.5 billion euro for bundling search and advertising. In total, Google has been fined 8.25 billion euro in the EU.

arstechnica.com

EU upholds Google’s 4.1B euro fine for bundling search with Android

by Ron Amadeo - Sep 14, 2022 3:10 pm UTC 
Ron Amadeo / Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work.
5 - 6 minutes

Google will have to pay the EU's biggest fine ever.

Let's see, you landed on my "Google Ads" space, and with three houses... that will be $1,400.

Ron Amadeo / Hasbro

"Google has lost its latest battle with European Union regulators. This morning, the EU General Court upheld Google's record fine for bundling Google Search and Chrome with Android. The initial ruling was reached in July 2018 with a 4.34 billion euro fine attached, and while that number has been knocked down to 4.125 billion euro ($4.13 billion), it's still the EU's biggest fine ever.


The EU takes issue with the way Google licenses Android and associated Google apps like the Play Store to manufacturers. The Play Store and Google Play Services are needed to build a competitive smartphone, but getting them from Google requires signing a number of contracts that the EU says stifles competition.


The Commission zeroed in on three unlawful restrictions. 

1 First, Google bundles Google Chrome and Search with Android. The company requires Android manufacturers to sign a "Mobile Application Distribution Agreement" (MADA) contract, which says that manufacturers that want to include one Google product must include a large collection of them and make Google the default. There are even requirements for where icons and widgets should be placed.

2 The second unlawful restriction is the contract's "anti-fragmentation agreement," which says that anyone who creates a fork of Android, even as a separate product or under a different brand, will have their company's Google app license instantly revoked.

3 The third issue concerns Google's revenue-sharing agreements, which give manufacturers adhering to all these rules a share of the Google search and Google ad revenue that a customer generates. 

 



The EU Commission found that "the objective of all those restrictions was to protect and strengthen Google’s dominant position in relation to general search services and, therefore, the revenue obtained by Google through search advertisements."

Google

The original ballot screens. In the EU, these will pop up when users open the Play Store or during initial setup.

  1. Google

    The original ballot screens. In the EU, these will pop up when users open the Play Store or during initial setup.

  2. Google

    The updated version has a new design and scrolls to show more search providers.

  3. Google

    Chrome will also give users the option to pick an alternate search engine.

While the appeal has only just been shot down, Google's solutions for its issues were already rolled out around the time of the initial ruling. In the EU, Google took a page out of Microsoft's antitrust compliance book, and Android now shows browser and search engine ballots that let users pick a non-Google option. Google says it used the ad revenue from default Google apps to fund Android development, and now that these apps don't have to be included, manufacturers can choose to pay for Android directly instead of getting it for free. If manufacturers don't bundle Google's apps, Google will charge as much as $40 per phone in the EU. The EU also forced Google to allow partners to build Android forks without facing retribution from the company. You can now sell Google Play Android and a forked device based on Android next to each other without getting kicked out of the ecosystem. . ."

READ MORE 

35 minutes ago · This morning, the EU General Court upheld Google's record fine for bundling Google Search and Chrome with Android. The initial ruling was ...
8 hours ago · Google loses appeal over illegal Android app bundling, EU reduces fine to €4.1 billion | The EU has upheld a 2018 antitrust charge against

RELATED CONTENT

INSERT: POST FROM THIS BLOG 2019

 
The news broke here in Mesa yesterday, after a closed-door Executive Session of the Mesa City Council at a study session about 'a very big deal". However, back in March there was an un-notice hearing in front of the Planning & Zoning Board that tells the story and gives a narrative to rezone and qualify Red Hawk as a job-creation area - Red Hawk Employment Opportunity District
Very careful wording with this disclaimer more than three months ago:
Please read the official narrative and City Council staff report with the denial
"not known at this time"

The following is part of a post on this blog earlier this year
25 March 2019
Mesa Planning & Zoning Board Public Hearing Last Week Wed 20 March 2019
_________________________________________________________________________________
Here we go Loop-de-Loop!
We're talkin' here about massive developments in-the-works  mostly in the "Outer Loops" that were up at a Public Hearing last week on Wednesday 20 March 2019 in front of the Mesa Planning & Zoning Board - nothing to get bored about in either the Outer or Outer Loops or the east-west tech corridors and industrial parks on the planning boards. Seriously - Take the time to find out.
Here are all the links you need > Digitize
________________________________________________________________________
Two geographic hot spots: Scroll down to see new OZone Redhawk RHEOD
Northeast Mesa District 5 and Southeast Mesa District 6 There are Minutes available that will take you a long to take a look at - just enough extracted here for your interest. . .
Item 4-e: 187 acres
to create the Red Hawk Employment Opportunity Zone
Project Red Hawk 
Employment Opportunity District Project Narrative [7 Pages]

Revised February 19, 2019  
Introduction
Pew & Lake, PLC is pleased to provide this project narrative and related materials to the City of Mesa in support of the proposed Red Hawk Employment Opportunity District (RHEOD). . .
The area is a minimum of 160 contiguous acres. 
As noted above, the Red Hawk property is approximately 187 acres and is currently designated in the Mesa 2040 General Plan as Employment Mixed Use Activity District.  Accordingly, this property is appropriate for designation as an Employment Opportunity District.


Apr 2, 2020 · The Arizona town of Mesa, where Google plans a 750,000 square-foot data center, gets half its water from the drought-prone Colorado River. A ...
 
✓  www.datacenterdynamics.com
Mesa Council approves $1bn Google data center, with $16m in tax breaks
Sebastian Moss
3 - 4 minutes

Mesa City Council has voted to approve a development agreement for a large Google data center in the Phoenix, Arizona suburb.


The $1 billion facility will span 750,000 square feet (70,000 sq m) once fully built out. The deal was negotiated over the past year under the codename 'Project Red Hawk,' with Google operating under the pseudonym 'Stone Applications, LLC' as it sought planning permission for the data center on 187 acres of farmland on the northwest corner of Elliot and Sossaman roads.
 


City of Mesa's "Home-Run" Deal on Google Data Center ? (What They Didn't Tell Us)

Hold on! Report from Bloomberg News today: 
How much water do Google Data Centers use? 
Billions of gallons
NOTE: According to that report, "In Mesa, the company is working with authorities on a water credits program, but said it’s too early to share more details.  .  ."

Google Data Centers’ Secret Cost: Billions of Gallons of Water
By 
Nikitha Sattiraju 

To meet surging demand for online information, internet giant taps public water supplies that are already straining from overuse.
In August 2019, the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association built a 16-foot pyramid of jugs in its main entrance in Phoenix. The goal was to show residents of this desert region how much water they each use a day—120 gallons—and to encourage conservation. 
“We must continue to do our part every day,” executive director Warren Tenney wrote in a blog post. “Some of us are still high-end water users who could look for more ways to use water a bit more wisely.”
A few weeks earlier in nearby Mesa, Google began building a giant data center among the cacti and tumbleweeds. The town is a founding member of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association, but water conservation took a back seat in the deal it struck with the largest U.S. internet company. 
> Google is guaranteed 1 million gallons a day to cool the data center, and up to 4 million gallons a day if it hits project milestones. If that was a pyramid of water jugs, it would tower thousands of feet into Arizona’s cloudless sky.
> The company has boasted for years that these huge computer-filled warehouses are energy efficient and environmentally friendly. But there’s a cost that the company tries to keep secret. These facilities use billions of gallons of water, sometimes in dry areas that are struggling to conserve this limited public resource.
The Arizona town of Mesa, where Google’s 750,000 square-foot data center has been under construction for months, gets half its water from the drought-prone Colorado River. A contingency plan was signed into law last year requiring states dependent on the river to take voluntary conservation measures. Still, Mesa officials say they remain confident about future supply while continuing to remind residents to limit their water consumption. 
“We do not have any immediate concerns,” said Kathy Macdonald, a water resources planning adviser with the city. 
In 2019, Mesa used 28 billion gallons of water, according to Macdonald. City officials expect that to reach 60 billion gallons a year by 2040, a demand Mesa is capable of meeting, she said.
Big companies like Google wouldn’t locate to the city if it couldn’t meet their water demands, Macdonald said. Mesa passed an ordinance in 2019 to ensure sustainable water use by large operations and fine them if they exceed their allowance.
. . .Google considers its water use a proprietary trade secret and bars even public officials from disclosing the company’s consumption. But information has leaked out, sometimes through legal battles with local utilities and conservation groups. In 2019 alone, Google requested, or was granted, more than 2.3 billion gallons of water for data centers in three different states, according to public records posted online and legal filings.

Apr 14, 2022 · According to DarkPatterns.org, dark patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that dupe you into doing something, such as buying or signing ...

 . . .“First, Google employs dark patterns through the use of confusing terminology that requires the user to intuit that location data is not only contained within Location History,” Gray said in his report. “Second, the use of opt-in by default for (Web and App Activity) automatically tracks users’ location data, possibly without their knowledge.” 

Gray also added that even if “every setting on an Android device were disabled Google would still collect a user’s location data through IPGeo” and another tool whose name was redacted from the documents. Both of those  tools operate  independent of settings.

www.azmirror.com

Google court docs show that users who opt out of tracking are still monitored

By: Jerod MacDonald-Evoy - September 9, 2022 4:40 pm
10 - 12 minutes

Newly released documents in the Arizona Attorney General’s lawsuit against tech behemoth Google reveal more details about the company’s response to reporting on its privacy policies and how Google users’ IP addresses are used to obtain exact location information. 

Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s case, filed in 2020, is part of a larger investigation that has been going on since at least 2018, after an Associated Press article revealed certain Google applications store location data without asking, and that deleting the data is a time-intensive process. AP found that Google Maps, for example, creates a snapshot of where users are whenever they open the application, even when location history is turned off..."

 



www.jumpstartmag.com

What Are Dark Patterns And Why Google, YouTube In Trouble

By Nidhi Singh Published April 14, 2022
6 - 8 minutes

Google and Facebook could face further penalties if they don’t change their practices.

There’s no doubt that Google and Facebook are two of the biggest tech giants in the world. But recent revelations about their use of deceptive design patterns, or dark patterns, have put them in hot water with regulators and consumers alike. 

Decoding dark patterns

According to DarkPatterns.org, dark patterns are tricks used in websites and apps that dupe you into doing something, such as buying or signing up for things, contrary to your intent. Regulators and lawmakers in the U.S. and European Union (EU) are highly concerned about dark patterns and have introduced bills to crack down on their use. Below are some commonly used dark patterns:

  • Manipulative cookie banners: When you enter a website, you will usually be asked by the cookie banner whether you want to allow cookies for browsing the site. Some cookie banners are designed to have a bigger “accept all” button, and if you want to change your cookie settings, you will have to get into another window by clicking a “manage to set” button. This makes it harder for users to reject cookies for the website. 
  • Confirmshaming: Users are shamed for not doing something suggested by the website, such as taking a survey or subscribing to a newsletter. For instance, an e-commerce website might want to collect your email address by offering you a coupon. If you don’t want to share that with the site, you might have to click a button that says, “No thank you, I don’t want to save money”. 
  • Forced continuity: This dark pattern makes it hard for users to cancel their subscriptions. Some companies, like Netflix and Hulu, might extend your subscriptions without telling you and charge you automatically when the next payment date arrives.  
  • Disguised ads: Ads designed to look like part of the content on a page, making it difficult for users to distinguish between ads and the actual content.
  • Privacy zuckering: Named after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, this dark pattern design refers to users being tricked into sharing more personal information than they intended to. Data brokering, in which users consent to companies selling your data collected by them, is a common and less obvious way to “zuck” up your privacy.

These dark patterns have one thing in common: they exploit human psychology to get us to do something we wouldn’t normally do. Now that you know what dark patterns are, let’s delve into how they have brought Google and Facebook into huge trouble.

Google & Facebook fined for leading users into cookie traps

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