1mo ago

"A privacy breach on a scale never before seen": Google's "sentence" for its antitrust conviction is to share all the data it gathered on users with every company that wants it

Pluralistic: The worst possible antitrust outcome (03 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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.

48 comments

Elections matter people.
Biden admin was pushing for a breakup. Trump admin does this
- The assholes who steered people away from Biden deserve more contempt than anyone
  
  Nobody deserves more contempt for Joe Biden's loss than Joe Biden himself.
  The man presided over the worst economy in my lifetime, insisted on running for a second term despite not being mentally or physically up for the task, and then crippled the Harris campaign by barring her from criticizing his policies or his record.
  But after what they did to Sanders, and what they're doing to Mamdani, who'd expect anything different?
  Elections have consequences. And centrist Democrats who sabotage good left-wing candidates and then run shit campaigns are much more to blame for those consequences than voters stuck choosing between different flavors of shit.
  
  No.
  
  It's hilarious that democrats find it impossible to acknowledge their own faults and instead blames it on some conspiracy of people being "steered away". If your party sucks so hard that people think Trump isn't worse, you know there's something wrong with the party and not the people whose votes you feel entitled to.
  
  Luckily for all there is plenty of contempt to go around. We wouldn't want to be in danger of getting over it and making progress.
- The only reason biden became the president was because trump was his predecessor. The second reason was he said he was going to be a single term president.
  That lie made people angry about biden and through him every other democrat who followed him.
But the DoJ could appeal. If MAGA's promises about holding Big Tech to account mean anything at all, the DoJ would appeal.
I'll bet you a testicle⹋ that the DoJ will not appeal. After all, Trump's DoJ now has a cash register at the reception desk, and if you write a check for a million bucks to some random MAGA influencer, they can make all charges disappear:
And if you're waiting for Europe to jump in and act where America won't, don't hold your breath. EU Commission sources leaked to Reuters that the EU is going to drop its multi-billion euro fine against Google because they don't want to make Trump angry
Better idea... fucking purge it.
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
This is by design. The United States will do anything to make it easier to surveil you (American or not), "Voyeurism fetish" might be our next constitutional amendment. Vote, but ultimately your only protection is to get really good at using privacy tools. Donate to them if you have the means.
So not only we can't trust Google to handle privacy, we can't trust the US as a whole to handle privacy. Not using gmail anymore.

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