While the withdrawal of Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others from ALEC’s vast pool of corporate funders was widely celebrated by climate campaigners, a recent report released by Forecast the Facts and SumOfUS shows how Google – and many others who claim to do good by climate – are still funding climate denial in politics.
The Silicon Valley wage theft anti-trust lawsuit known as “Techtopus” will not be allowed to end with a whimper (or that sound the fax machine used to make). The judge overseeing the trial has struck down a $324 million settlement on the grounds that…wait for it…it’s not enough. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koch states that, given the nature of the case and the likely millions of workers it effects, the case cannot end with a settlement lower than what should be expected if it were to go to trial.
Google says that cars it has programmed to drive themselves have started to master the navigation of city streets and the challenges they bring, from jaywalkers to weaving bicyclists — a critical milestone for any commercially available self-driving car technology. Despite the progress over the past year, the cars have plenty of learning to do before 2017, when the Silicon Valley tech giant hopes to get the technology to the public.
A new Obama administration privacy policy released Friday explains how the government will gather the user data of online visitors to WhiteHouse.gov, mobile apps and social media sites, and it clarifies that online comments, whether tirades or tributes, are in the open domain. "Information you choose to share with the White House (directly and via third party sites) may be treated as public information," the new policy says.
In 2013, Rajan Anandan, MD of Google India, made a promise to Ring The Bell in order to help Indian women pursue their entrepreneurial dreams by only investing in startups that have women co-founders. He's since invested in two such companies and promises to expand the venture.
Technology companies and privacy advocates are praising a new government compromise that will allow the Internet's leading companies to disclose more information about how often they are ordered to turn over customer information to the government in national security investigations.
The two web companies have become corporate leaders in renewable energy investments, powering data centers with wind and funding green projects around the globe. So why, then, are they members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a group mostly consisting of fossil fuel firms with open opposition to the growing renewables sector?
San Francisco's mayor says he doesn't know what it is. Police say it's not their jurisdiction. And government inspectors are sworn to secrecy. Google is erecting a four-story structure in the heart of the San Francisco Bay but is managing to conceal its purpose by constructing it on docked barges instead of on land, where city building permits and public plans are mandatory.
France is giving Google three months to be more upfront about the data it collects from users — or be fined. Other European countries aren't far behind.
