Last week, Reddit user Brazedowl received a curious notification on his phone: Google was telling him that a smoke detector in his home had gone off. Brazedowl, a teacher from North Carolina who goes by Drew in real life, knew about the smoke alarm — he was at home himself and had just fried some sausages in his kitchen. But up until that moment, he had no idea that his smart speaker was able to detect such events. “Google just made my dumb smoke detectors smart,” he wrote on Reddit. “Pretty rad.”
A Google spokesperson told Protocol that the feature was accidentally enabled for some users through a recent software update and has since been rolled back. But in light of Monday’s news that Google invested $450 million — acquiring a 6.6% stake — in home security provider ADT, it may be a sign of things to come for Google, as it hints at the company’s secret home security superpower: millions of smart speakers already in people’s homes.
Once the deal closes, ADT’s more than 20,000 installers will also sell Google-made smart displays, security cameras and other hardware, and ADT will more closely integrate Google technology into its own home security offerings. “The goal is to give customers fewer false alarms, more ways to receive alarm events, and better detection of potential incidents inside and around the home,” Google Nest VP and GM Rishi Chandra said in a blog post.
Brazedowl wasn’t the only Google smart speaker user receiving a possible preview of this kind of incident detection in recent days. Other Reddit users reported getting security alerts after breaking glassware, as well as some false alarms triggered by sounds like popped bubble wrap and high-frequency noises that could be confused with a smoke alarm.
When Reddit user Brazedowl fried some sausages last week, accidentally setting off a smoke alarm, his Google Home smart speaker sent alerts to his phone.Screenshot: RedditGoogle announced support for the detection of “critical sounds” for paying subscribers of its Nest Aware home security subscription service in May. “Your Nest speakers and displays will notify you if a critical sound is detected, like a smoke alarm or glass breaking, by sending an alert to the Home app,” the company wrote in a blog post. “From there, you can hear an audio clip or listen live within the Home app to confirm the alarm.”
“A recent software update enabled these alerts on some of our speakers that didn’t have a subscription, but we’ve since rolled that back,” a Google spokesperson told Protocol last week. The spokesperson declined to comment on whether Google had any plans to bring the feature to users without subscriptions in the future. Google did announce Monday that ADT customers would get access to Nest Aware over time.
On the one hand, there is some potential for a privacy backlash. Google has long told users that its speakers only actively monitor ambient audio for utterances of the “Hey Google” wake phrase. Any use of far-field microphones for other purposes, especially for users who didn’t sign up for advanced monitoring, could result in some consumers rejecting the device category altogether.
On the other hand, the feature does demonstrate how powerful Google’s smart speakers can be in the context of home security. Google sold around 30 million smart speakers and displays in 2019 alone, market research company Strategy Analytics estimated earlier this year. All of these devices feature powerful far-field microphones capable of detecting not only voice commands but also environmental noises.
Some of this functionality is less obvious than the detection of blaring smoke alarms. Google’s smart displays sense it if someone walks up to them by emitting and monitoring ultrasonic sounds. Right now, this is being used to change the size of fonts on the display, but the same technology could conceivably also be used to detect possible intruders and other movements inside a home.
Google isn’t the first company to rely on smart speakers for monitoring; rival Amazon also uses smart speakers to detect fire alarms and other sounds as part of its Ring Alarm security system.
But in a way, it is a very Google-ish approach to home security: The search giant has long made its own cameras and smoke detectors, with mixed success, and largely failed to make a mark when it introduced its very own home security system in 2017.
With its ADT partnership, Google now signals that it is happy to rely on others for the more mundane aspects of home security, including the huge workforce needed to install and troubleshoot window sensors and the like. Instead, Google is bringing to the table what it does best: advanced technology, including millions of cheap speakers with far-field microphones, ready and able to become smart home security sensors.
Contact Tracing: Your governors, red or blue, are coming after you
A driver gets tested for COVID-19 at a drive-through testing center. CREDIT: Reuters
Red-state governors threaten their own citizens with arrest if they don’t comply with contact tracing investigators — up to six months in jail in Texas!
It was late morning on Tuesday, May 26, when James Daggett heard a knock on the door of his apartment home in Cedar Park, Texas, about 20 miles north of Austin.
When he answered it, two uniformed officers wearing badges and facemasks stood and stared.
One officer appeared to be a sheriff’s deputy and had a gun holstered on his side. The other wore a white uniform.
They said they had an important document to deliver that required his immediate attention.
The man in the white uniform handed him an envelope containing a letter from the Williamson County health department, demanding that he read it closely and follow its orders. What followed was a barrage of questions about his health, how many others he had living in his home, where he may have traveled recently.
As Daggett, 35, tore open the envelope and started to read the letter, the two men vanished from his doorstep as quickly as they had arrived.
James Daggett lives in Cedar Park, Texas, just north of Austin
These were just two of the foot soldiers in an army of 4,000 “contact tracers” hired by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, according to the Houston Chronicle, who signed a $295 million contract with Albany, New York-based MTX Group Inc., which partners with Google and SalesForce to data-mine the public and store their data forever in the Google Cloud.
The job of the contact-tracer investigators is to build a web, at the center of which are people like James Daggett, who just happened to test positive for COVID-19.
They reconstruct the spokes that come off the central hub – James’s family members, friends, the guy he may have sat next to on an airplane or at the local diner last night, or in the adjoining cubicle at work.
All it takes is to spend 10 or 15 minutes sitting or standing within six feet of another human being who was infected. These are all potentially infected persons who must be tracked down and sent into quarantine, then interviewed to get a list of their contacts.
In the end, one case such as that of James Daggett can ensnare hundreds of healthy, innocent Americans, and send them into lockdown, simply because they happened to breathe the same air that James breathed, or stood next to someone who did.
Contact tracers are trained to make sure all of these people, healthy or not, get thrown into complete isolation, away from their children, spouses and other family members while they get monitored for at least 14 days. Their release date is at the discretion of the public health authorities. The potential for abuse is great and could lead to continued rolling lockdowns throughout the country for months or even years. It is that very potential that has government watchdogs on alert.
As of this writing, every state has plans to exponentially expand their contact-tracing workforces.
………
Bye Bye Fourth Amendment
John Whitehead, a constitutional attorney and founder of the Rutherford Institute, said citizens are not generally required to speak to an officer about anything, much less their personal health.
“But if they have reasonable suspicion that you’ve committed a crime, they can hold someone for questioning,” he said. “Just an intimidation tactic.”
Whitehead said privacy rights are gone in today’s America, as the Fourth Amendment has been “shredded over and over and over again” since 9/11. The Fourth Amendment guarantees Americans’ rights against unreasonable searches and seizures of their personal property, papers and effects.
“The point is, who’s behind all of this? It’s Google and these big corporations,” Whitehead said. “They want to make the money on this. The dangerous thing I’m warning people about in all of this is if they get your DNA.”
He said Amazon, which built the intelligence cloud for all 17 intelligence agencies, “is now handing over your biometric information, your DNA, your fingerprints. There’s no privacy now. They can get whatever they want. And if they have it, either by police records, cases, or Ancestry.com, the FBI has access to that. A lot of this will drill down to this testing, where they get your DNA.”
What’s disappearing in today’s America, he said, is the legal principle of “bodily integrity.”
Once the state has your data and has turned it over to corporations, you will be vulnerable to them targeting you for various medical treatments [vaccine anyone?], as well as the possibility of discriminatory action by your employer.
“Here’s the key and people don’t realize this,” Whitehead said. “Access to healthcare data by big corporations will enable them to build a profile on people’s ailments, and target them for marketing campaigns; they will give that information over to employers and you could end up getting discriminated against. Landlords could ask you to leave their building. And they could also give it over to police. Police will have access to most of this information anyway because most of the police chiefs across the country are being trained by the FBI.”
Further arming the surveillance state
Americans must push back, now, or wave goodbye to their civil liberties.
….
Another red state goes all in for tracing, threatening arrest
In Georgia, GOP Gov. Brian Kemp has hired 1,000 contact tracers. He has given his contact-tracing program a new Orwellian name, “The Healthy Georgia Collaborative.”
In a report by Fox 5 Atlanta, health reporter Beth Galvin stated that she had received her information on Georgia’s contact tracers from the North Georgia Health District. Here’s how Galvin punctuated her May 28 report:
“If you’re in quarantine and you’re supposed to be checking in every day and you’re not, your health district will check in with you, and if you still don’t comply you could face a misdemeanor.”
“All information collected is provided voluntarily, and will be kept confidential according to HIPAA standards,” according to the state’s press release.
In an effort to clarify the state’s position, I called Jennifer King, the public-information officer with North Georgia Health District, who provided the following statement:
“All persons identified as infectious persons are required to comply with the quarantine ordered by the state (please refer to the attached ORDER FOR HOME QUARANTINE). They are required to check in daily while under quarantine in one of three ways: They may choose to have us call them to monitor, they may monitor through the application on their mobile device, or they may call the Georgia Poison Control Center. Information other than this requirement may be provided voluntarily and will be kept confidential according to HIPAA.”
The attached order provided by King states in bold print: “TAKE NOTICE that failure to comply with this Quarantine Order is a misdemeanor offense pursuant to O.C.G.A 31-5-8.”
Governors such as Kemp in Georgia and Jay Inslee in Washington are publicly stating that compliance with their contact-tracing spies will be “voluntary.”
But to say the program is “voluntary” is blatantly dishonest linguistic trickery. Remember how, in the early days of the lockdowns, we were told the draconian rules were just “temporary?”
The politicians and bureaucrats lied about “temporary,” knowing they would later shift to “new normal,” making “social distancing” and “no more handshaking” fixtures in a permanently reordered society.
Voluntary is the new temporary. It’s only voluntary until they say it’s not. It’s only voluntary until you refuse to volunteer. Then it becomes mandatory.
The scenario works something like this: Citizens will be asked to voluntarily quarantine and report daily to the local health authorities. If the citizen fails to submit to quarantine or to check in on a daily basis, the case becomes mandatory.
At that point, your medical privacy rights under the HIPAA law no longer apply. You have become an enemy of the state.
“The information can be given to a public-health agency if the government says it’s required to prevent an imminent threat to public safety,” Whitehead said. “And guess who gets to determine the definition of an imminent threat? The public official who is sitting somewhere far away in an office with drapes and flowers on his desk that we pay for.”
The new normal: Enslavement to the state
With contact tracing in place as part of the “new normal,” very few governors are likely to return to mass lockdowns like they did in late March and early April. They will simply apply the lockdowns to individual persons through contact tracing.
Watch the disturbing video below from a woman in California who went through that state’s training program for contact tracers.
It will actually be possible for some healthy people to go in and out of multiple 14-day lockdowns, depending on who they happen to come in contact with at work, in restaurants, or other places where people gather.
Imagine a salon worker or barber who comes in close contact with dozens of customers per day. If one of them happens to test positive, that barber will get outed and sent into lockdown.
The only way to escape this endless loop is to accept the vaccine being pushed by Bill Gates in his repeated statements to the media that “we cannot go back to normal until the whole world is widely vaccinated.”
Whitehead said the most terrifying aspect of contact tracing is it turns people into government snitches, using fear to encourage a turn-in-your-neighbor mentality.
That’s the mentality that has existed in all totalitarian societies throughout history, from Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia and Communist China. After the state-run media whips up an atmosphere of fear, people are easily led and will turn on each other if they think it will protect themselves or their family.
“Fear builds its own prison walls,” Whitehead said. “Everybody becomes a suspect and this time we are using the word “lockdown;” that’s prison terminology. We are prisoners in our own homes now. We can be reported by a neighbor if you cough, you don’t wear a mask.”
How did people end up in the Nazi camps? Whitehead said he was curious so he studied history to find out.
“Almost 85 percent of people who wound up in the camps were reported by their neighbors,” he said. “That’s where we are going. We’re following that model. Everyone is going to be nervous. You’ll be afraid to speak. First Amendment rights are dwindling. Anybody who speaks the truth today is going to look like a rebel or a radical.”
That’s why the Fourth Amendment was written, he said, to protect Americans against such abuses. But today’s politicians and judges have little respect for it.
“All my research and study shows that we’re headed down a really bad path and I’m afraid that people are going to give in,” Whitehead said. “We are being psychologically re-engineered to accept really tight control over our movements, how we think, and how we relate to other human beings.”
What to do if you are called by a contact tracer?
“If people want to take a Fourth Amendment stand, they don’t have to give over any information, their name or whatever when asked. They’re not required to. One question I would ask is: ‘Am I being charged with a crime? Why would you be contacting me?’ If they show up at the door, you can say the same thing.
“Now, the caution is that you could get arrested, but the only thing that’s going to change things around in this situation is either the people stand up and say ‘I’m not going to take it,’ or they take it. If you take it, it’s going to get really bad. But I’m afraid that, this is what I see generally, most people believe what they see on the mainstream media; they’re going to fall into the game.”
One man who has decided not to “take it” is James Daggett in Texas.
“People need to understand that this is how they’re handling this,” Daggett said. “It’s very heavy-handed…That’s what tyrants depend on. People wilting in the heat of the moment. If I am in any way impeded from carrying out my normal life, then I am going to contact an attorney.”
Americans need to know that the warnings being given about contact tracing are not some vague conspiracy theories.
“It’s reality,” he said. “There were guys with guns at my door.”
As Whitehead says, the only way to tip the scales and turn things away from tyranny is to take a stand and refuse to cooperate with the burgeoning army of health spies.
The time to make that stand is now.
Leo Hohmann is an independent freelance journalist and author of the 2017 book “Stealth Invasion.” If you appreciate the research and reporting of LeoHohmann.com, please consider a donation of any size.
…. Before we begin please FORGET NOT THE WORDS OF:
DR. EDWARD L. BERNAYS, the Founding Father of Public Relations: “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it… …The conscious and intellectual manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
FORGET NOT THE WORDS OF:
JOHN F. KENNEDY’S speech before the American Newspaper Publishers Association on April 27, 1961 (some two years before his assassination):
“We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence —-on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of election, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system that has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations… …Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, nor rumor printed, no secret revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.”
NOW, As you read ahead I ask that you remember and always consider the following very important questions, ones that I pray will never unring from your mind or anyone’s consciousness.
… Do you want to live in a world where you don’t want to stand close to someone or dance with them, shake their hand or hug them, strike up a conversation, express your most heartfelt care for someone who’s lost a loved one, injured themselves and experienced a loss, reach out and tenderly hug them or wipe away their tears because you’re afraid of getting sick?
Do you want to live in a world where you see everyone as an enemy carrier of some illness that you’re afraid of getting sick from or are compelled and forbidden by draconian laws to show open and loving affection?
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty or safety.” – Benjamin Franklin
If you’re an adult or parent, what will you tell your friends, lover, spouse, children or grandchild about this turning point in history? I’m sorry, I acted like a coward and complied with the manipulating lies and propaganda that I was falsely fed and foolishly believed by authority figures whom I delusionally chose to believe had my best interest at heart.
Yes, I sort of sensed I was being manipulated and lied to and yet I forgot the axiom of following the money trail back to the criminals who would most profit from something like this.
“In every age, it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.” — Eugene Victor Debs, Voices of a People’s History of the United States
And yes, I acted like a coward, I never put up a fight for my basic freedoms, those of my family, my friends and neighbors, and that of humanity. Yes, I chose to comply with the cruel and indifferent orders of the Cabal/Deep State/Illuminate/Kazarian Mafia…etc… orders that stripped me of my basic constitutional rights and threatened me, my family, and my loved ones and instead I voluntarily choose to comply like one of the millions of other cattle who were herded into giving up their freedoms and liberties and resigned myself, all I loved, and cared about to poverty, confinement or a detainment/concentration camps? Yes, this is what I did.
“For PEOPLE to rule themselves in a REPUBLIC, they must have virtue; for a TYRANT to rule in a TYRANNY, he must use FEAR.”— William J. Federer
OR, Will you choose and will you help lead humanity to collectively awaken from this cowardice dream that presently allows misguided bullies to bioweapon humanity, engineer and inflict wars around the world, propagandize, imprison, endanger, victimize and/or harm ourselves, our families and/or the people of our world …WILL YOU/WE RISE-UP TO REALIE, PROCLAIM AND EXPRESS YOUR/OUR GREATEST HERO WITHIN AND BE KNOWN AS THE GLADIATORS OF THE HEART…WHO LIVED BY THE FAITH OF LOVING TRUTH AND CHOSE TO ACT IN TURN, WE WERE DESTINED TO BE, OUR TRUEST, MOST POWERFUL, SOVEREIGN AND LOVING SELF?
Let us all collectively and courageously rise up to proclaim, Never on My Watch, Never on My Shift …I WILL NEVER NOW AND FOREVER MORE allow any tyrant to bully, harm, oppress, and rob me, my family, or anyone, of their natural-born freedom to be their best and live their dreams come true…because I know in my heart of hearts that Love Will Prevail and that Love Will Always Win!
LET US PROCLAIM, NOT ON MY WATCH, NOT ON MY SHIFT, EVER AGAIN!!!
Now that I’ve stepped down off of my soapbox, let us face the glaring reality of the propagandized Covid-19 pandemic. Perhaps like yourself, and if you’ve been doing the research I have, you’ve watched and noted numerous Youtube videos with huge viewership numbers in the millions that differ substantially from that of the mainstream media’s narrative about how Covid-19 is playing out locally, within our state, nation, and world.
These videos are by smart, well-educated, thoughtfully articulate leaders and credible; various Doctors, Scientists, Nurses, Thought-leaders, Attorneys and more, who are attempting to get the word out/whistle-blow on the various aspects of fraud about the pandemic and non-sensical, irrational, incongruent realities about what is substantiated by hard facts and/or science that they’ve been educated, field-trained on and know to be true based on various medical scenarios and realities they’re dealing with, specifically regarding people’s health issues and the lies, wrongfully directives and protocols they are being forced to comply with and by higher supervising authorities.
In truth these brave and heroic people are putting everything on the line… their career, reputation, and the primary sources of income to boldly and courageously face this global Psyops and hoax to make sure the facts are known and with integrity, call things out as they really are, different from the false script they’re being forced to read. In other words, from the perspective of these heroic few and from their world view: rocks are hard and water is wet. In their world, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck then it’s likely a duck, rather than a cow.
Yes, like you, I’ve noted almost all of these whistleblowing videos have a common theme that traces things back to the old saying, follow the money and who benefits most. You see most people don’t know there is a massive chessboard game for power and control going on here. And the few who are aware of this, a very small percentage don’t understand know that this is a multi-layered chessboard game.
One related and important whistleblowing video that shows how the Cabal is calling the shots and playing a huge role in shaping the perverted perceptional lens of humanity is subconsciously been and remains programmed through the Music, TV, and Film industries run by Hollywood.
The documentary film “Out of Shadows” blew the lid off of the Cabal, the CIA, Hollywood, Sex Honey pots (like the Playboy mansion), and pedophilia rings around the world. This film went totally viral in a matter of days and exceeded several million views. Then, almost immediately, it was taken down by Youtube and later showed only a few hundred thousand views.
Another video that went viral and ran a similar course of events, that of Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (an MIT graduate and Robert David Steele’s interview, an extremely well educated and articulate man who was running for state office in Massachusetts who then dared to talk about and call out the Cabal being centered in and bookended in Massachusetts by the institutions of Harvard and MIT.
He likely didn’t know, interestingly, that Dr. Edward Bernay’s, Founding Father of Public Relations, a clear Rothchild/Illuminati, etc… agent, lived in Boston. Remember Edwards’ quote from above? Yes, Dr. Shiva’s videos were also taken down along with so many more.
These videos are being taken down by the big and deadly-mind-manipulating-spiders/spider web of the Cabal: Youtube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, all mainstream media, and others who intentionally alter video viewership count numbers downwardly in order to minimize and perceptional bias the collective consciousness.
Ultimately, video takedowns or the manipulation the viewership counts is the way the Cabal attempts to diminish the credibility of such people/videos and thus slow down the progress of humanity waking up.
Yes, the above mentioned evil entities and the soulless trolls who work for them and who orchestrate these manipulating tactics are only an arm of much greater Villians who pull the black-magic strings on these puppets who attempt to implement the full-spectrum dominance of the Cabal. To understand more go to:
You see the Cabal, as I’ve written about so many times, wants people to stay dumb, remain asleep, to continue watching mindless TV programs or sporting events and be persistently distracted from ever thinking, especially critical thinking, enough to put their big boy or girl pants and deduce and/or more importantly realize …
Hey, what I’m watching now is drool bucket stupid, it is not helping, empowering, teaching me and/or inspiring me to be, do or have anything that I know is spiritually or morally right, good and for the betterment of humankind and so why, am I allowing myself and/or my precious children to watch brutally violent cage fighting, ice-hockey, boxing, vulgar and/or sexually explicit content of any kind…
…and if I was to take my attention off of this foolish content and/or note the commercials/sponsors that are paying to advertise on these type of shows and promise to myself I’ll never ever buy their products or services again, maybe even write that company’s President a letter about my thoughts…maybe then funding for these shows would dry up, they would go away and perhaps be replaced by life-affirming content that helped to inspire the human spirit.
“A filmmaker has the unrestricted privilege of haranguing an audience for two-hour stretches–the chance to influence public thinking for good or for evil…“It is, therefore, his responsibility to emphasize the positive qualities of humanity by showing the triumph of the individual over adversities.” – Frank Capra, legendary filmmaker of “Its A Wonderful Life.”
to read the rest, go to: https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/05/15/the-cabals-covid-19-psyops-and-the-santa-claus-effect/
As the propatainment media hysteria over the Lieber-Wuhan-Fauci (rhymes with Grouchy) virus continues, and as everyone throws in their two cents on what they think is going on and what “they” hope to accomplish with all of this, I’ve been hearing from teachers. I have a few friends who are teachers, and there are a few members of this site who are teachers. And I can assure the regular readers of my blogs, that without exception, none of them were in favor of the Common Core curriculum and agenda being promoted by Darth Hillary, Jeb What’s-his-Name, and Billious Hates.
Most of their criticism of the whole miserable thing was its reliance on computer standardized tests that were “adaptive”, i.e., that in addition to the normal multiple guess questions on standardized tests composed by “experts”, the tests would be adapted to individual students by computer algorithms, algorithms again prepared by “experts.” The problem with standardized tests, as I and so many others have so often pointed out, is that multiple guess questions do not require reasoning, nor that one shows one’s reasoning. They are tailor-made to present narratives, and this particularly so in the so-called “soft” disciplines like history. Consider the following hypothetical question on a standardized test for, say, late elementary school or middle school: “Who killed President John Kennedy?” You know that the establishment edugarchy – a word we’ll return to in a moment – will push the narrative of the Warren Report. Answer: “Lee Harvey Oswald.” Never mind all the vast amounts of research that has been done since that event that have raised serious questions about that event.
But as my co-author Gary Lawrence and I pointed out in our book about Common Core, Rotten to the (Common) Core, the standardized tests had massive problems even in their presentations of questions and answers for the so-called hard sciences. In the book, we pointed out a controversy in the late 1950s and early 1960s between mathematician Banesh Hoffman – a friend of Albert Einstein – and the Educational Testing Service over some questions about physics where the Educational Testing Service’s “correct answer” to a question was manifestly and seriously flawed. Hoffman wrote articles about the controversy at the time which ran in various national magazines and newspapers. All to no avail. The Educational Testing Service’s explanations of their “reasoning” for insisting a wrong answer was correct, only dug themselves into further difficulties (and please note, they were allowed to explain their process of reasoning for insisting a wrong answer was in fact correct, while their test subjects were not allowed to do so). We call this attitude and the people behind it the “edugarchy.”
And all of this before Common Core’s “adaptive” tests.
So what’s the goal? Get everyone addicted to “computer books” and the easy sound-bite of a google search, and call that “research”, just so long as you agree with the promoted narrative (and with Google designing the search algorithms, how could it be anything but?). And along the way, reduce teachers to classroom proctors for standardized tests, break the teachers’ unions, and gain total control of a curriculum in a one-size-fits-all federal monster, which, incidentally, tracks you throughout your entire “academic” career.
So as this propatainment media hysteria over the Fauci-Lieber-Wuhan virus has taken down schools, and forced teachers into “distance learning” and “online classrooms,” I’ve been wondering whether or not that may have been one of the operational objectives of this whole plandemic. Just a few weeks ago, the pushback from parents and teachers against Common Core – not to mention its disastrous results as I’ve blogged about recently – were in, and Common Core was in trouble.
Not so any more, as one of our regular readers, N.S., caught this tweet from Andrew Cuomo, New York’s infanticide-approving governor:
As we prepare to reopen we have the opportunity to reimagine and build back our education system better.
We will work with the @gatesfoundation and develop a blueprint to do this.
Yes, what a great idea: let’s turn our edgykayshun system over to the man whose vaccines have allegedly killed people in India (which has banned him), who has invested in 3d printed “meat,” who has made his fortune by designing the world’s worst and most-virus ridden operating software and who wants to tell everyone how to deal with real viruses, and who was a major backer of the Common Core fiasco.
Funny how all this has worked out to his benefit, isn’t it?
Big Tech Has Performed the “Greatest Bait-and-Switch in American History” As It Now Turns On Free Speech
Big tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have performed “perhaps the greatest bait-and-switch in American history” as they now have committed to an about-face to the American value of free speech.
That is the assessment of Breitbart New‘s Allum Bokhari who exclusively presented a leaked Google internal briefing titled “The Good Censor” to the public on October 9th, exposing the world once again to major tech companies’ attitude towards the bedrock of traditional American attitude.
“The Good Censor” is an 85-page briefing that openly admits that Google and other tech platforms are undertaking a “shift towards censorship” in response to unwelcome political events around the world. Unsurprisingly – especially after leaked video showed google employees in an emotional meltdown after the election victory of Donald J. Trump – The Good Censor cites the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the rise of the populist Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany as unwelcomed events.
While admitting the shift away from free speech it is also simultaneously admitted that those select few giants “control the majority of online conversations.”
The briefing goes into how Google, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are stuck in a position of going along with the “unmediated marketplace of ideas” (free speech and free markets) vs. “well-ordered spaces for safety and civility” (censorship). These two directions are also described as the “American tradition” which “prioritizes free speech for democracy, not civility” and the “European tradition,” which “favors dignity over liberty and civility over freedom.” The internal pages claim that all tech platforms are now moving toward the European tradition.
Perhaps the most significant part of the brief, as Breitbart’s Bokhari reports, is when it associates Google’s new role as the guarantor of “civility” with the categories of “editor” and “publisher.”
This is significant, given that Google, YouTube, and other tech giants publicly claim they are not publishers but rather neutral platforms — a categorization that grants them special legal immunities under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Elsewhere in the document, Google admits that Section 230 was designed to ensure they can remain neutral platforms for free expression.
What ordinary Americans long suspected, The Good Censor has proven beyond doubt. According to Google’s own analysis, tech companies have performed perhaps the greatest bait-and-switch in American history, promising their users free speech while they were taking over the market, only to go back on their word once they came to “control the majority of online conversations.”
What better example to prove this bait-and-switch than the statement given by Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s vice president for public policy and communications in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa who told British politicians at the end of last year that it’s “no longer possible to stand up for all speech.”
Just 5 years prior, Twitter’s first executive in the UK, Tony Wang, described the company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”
The once acceptance and defense of free speech by these big tech players is discussed in The Good Censor, as the document reads: “This free speech ideal was instilled in the DNA of the Silicon Valley startups that now control the majority of our online conversations.”
And while Google hubrisly boasts that its free speech bait-and-switch has placed them and a few other giants as controllers of “the majority of online conversations” (aka the majority of all conversation happening on earth) the company has come out and finally admitted directly that it has a censored Chinese search engine project in the works. What better guarantor of “civility”, “publisher, “editor” could the masses of internet users wish to oversee the majority of online conversation?
For more on this from Mke Adams, see text from: https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-10-17-tech-giants-pull-off-epic-bait-and-switch-in-turning-against-free-speech.html
Published: 04:58 EDT, 5 July 2017 | Updated: 09:05 EDT, 5 July 2017
Artificial intelligence is already being put to use in the NHS, with Google’s AI firm DeepMind providing technology to help monitor patients.
And a new study suggests that Google could soon be meeting with Genomic England – a company set up by the Department of Health to sequence 100,000 genomes – to discuss whether DeepMind could get involved.
In an article for The Conversation, Edward Hockings a researcher at the University of the West of Scotland, explains the risks of letting a private company gain access to sensitive genetic data.
In Google‘s case, he says, it could allow them to target users with personalised advertising based on their preferences and health risks.
It could also create profiles of people based on their DNA data, which may provide details such as their risk of becoming a criminal.
He says genomic data is ‘the oil of the digital era’ and there is nothing stopping it from be captured, bought and sold in the future.
Genomic sequencing has huge potential – it could hold the key to improving our understanding of a range of diseases, including cancer, and eventually help find treatments for them (stock image)
HOW COULD GENOMIC DATA BE USED?
Privacy campaigners are concerned that governments and private organisations have too much access to our personal details.
This could help them carry out mass surveillance.
When it comes to genetics, the implications are particularly frightening, says Edward Hockings.
For example, there is evidence of a link between genes and criminality.
Scientists say 40 per cent of sexual offending risk is down to genetic factors.
A ‘single national knowledge base’ as the one the UK government is aiming to create might therefore be used for broad genetic profiling.
Genomic sequencing has huge potential – it could hold the key to improving our understanding of a range of diseases, including cancer, and eventually help find treatments for them.
The 100,000 Genomes Project was set up by the government to sequence genomes of 100,000 people.
And it won’t stop there.
A new report from the UK’s chief medical officer, Sally Davies, is calling for an expansion of the project.
However, a statement by the Department of Health in response to a freedom of information (FoI) request I made in February reveals this decision has already been made.
The department said in this response that the project will be integrated into a single national genomic database.
The purpose of this will be to support ‘care and research, and the acceleration of industrial usage’.
Though it will ‘inevitably exceed the original 100,000 genomes, we do not anticipate that there will be a set target for how many genomes it should contain,’ the statement reads.
The costs of sequencing the genome on a national scale are prohibitive. The first human genome was sequenced at a cost of £2.3 billion ($3 billion).
However, almost two decades later, Illumina, who is responsible for the sequencing side of the 100,000 Genomes Project, produced the first ‘$1,000 (£770) genome’ – a staggering reduction in cost.
Applying machine learning to genomics – that is, general artificial intelligence – has the potential to significantly reduce the costs further.
By building a neural network, Google’s algorithms can interpret huge amounts of genetic, health, and environmental data to predict a persons health status, such as their level of risk of heart attack (stock image)
WHAT IS GOOGLE DEEPMIND?
Google DeepMind is an artificial intelligence lab within Google,
It was created after Google bought University College London spinout, DeepMind, for £400 million in 2014.
Its goal is to solve general intelligence and make machines capable of learning for themselves.
It wants to do this by creating a set of powerful general-purpose learning algorithms that can be combined to make an AI system.
Google wants its DeepMind algorithms to make many of its products and services smarter and more responsive.
By building a neural network, these algorithms can interpret huge amounts of genetic, health, and environmental data to predict a persons health status, such as their level of risk of heart attack.
DeepMind is already working with the NHS.
As part of a partnership with several NHS trusts, the company has built various platforms, an app and a machine learning system to monitor patients in various ways, alerting clinical teams when they are at risk.
But it’s been controversial.
The company announced the first of these collaborations in February 2016, saying it was building an app to help hospital staff monitor patients with kidney disease.
However, it later emerged that the agreement went far beyond this, giving DeepMind Health access to vast amounts of patient data – including, in one instance, 1.6m patient records.
The Information Commissioner’s Office ruled recently that the way patient data was shared by the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust violated UK privacy law.
The company asserts that patient data ‘will never be linked to Google products or services or commercialised’.
Google’s ambitions to digitise healthcare continue.
I received a response to an FoI request in May which reveals that Google and Genomics England have met to discuss ‘using Google’s DeepMind among other subjects’ to analyse genomic data.
Davies insists that data could be anonymised.
The Royal Free NHS Trust did not comply with the Data Protection Act when it passed on personal information of around 1.6 million patients to Google’s DeepMind. Pictured is the Royal Free Hospital in London, one of several hospitals the Royal Free Trust is responsible for
The Department of Health always promise that medical data used in such initiatives will be anonymised, yet one of the reasons that Care.data (an initiative to store all patient data on a single database) was abandoned is that this was shown to be untrue.
I have also shown that the department has misinformed the public about the level of access granted to commercial actors in the 100,000 Genome Project.
In particular it said the data would be ‘pseudonymised’ rather than anonymised, meaning there would still be information available such as age or geographical location.
The danger of personalisation
What could genomic information add to Google’s already far-reaching database of individual information?
NHS KIDNEY APP
Google announced the first of its NHS collaborations in February 2016, saying it was building an app to help hospital staff monitor patients with kidney disease.
The data was provided in a medical trial that began in 2015.
The trial integrated information from existing systems used by the Royal Free.
The systems used technology to track patients’ symptoms and alerted clinicians when signs of deterioration in a patient with Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) were found.
AKI affects up to 18 per cent of those admitted to hospital.
The investigation found that many patients did not know their data was being used as part of a test.
As part of the deal between the Trust and Google, DeepMind gained access to sensitive patient information such as HIV status, mental health history and abortions.
A hint lies in its self-confessed aspiration to organise our lives for us.
The algorithms ‘will get better, and we will get better at personalisation’, according to Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet.
This will ‘enable Google users to ask the question, ‘what shall I do tomorrow?’, or ‘what job shall I take?’.
With personalisation as their ultimate ‘goal’, Google intend to use the machine learning algorithms which track our digital footprint and target users with personalised advertising based on their preferences.
They also want to analyse health and genomic data to make predictions such as when a person might develop bipolar disorder or tell us what we should do with our lives.
Let us not forget that data, genomic or otherwise, is the oil of the digital era.
What is stopping genomic information from being captured, bought and sold?
We cannot assume that people will make life choices based upon their ‘genetic profile’ without undue pressure – commercial or governmental.
When it comes to genetics, the implications are particularly frightening. For example, there is evidence of a link between genes and criminality (stock image)
As for how genomic data might be used and what decisions will be taken about us, the mass surveillance by government agencies of their own citizens is a chilling reminder of the way information technology can be used.
There is something unpalatable about everything being connected and everything being known.
When it comes to genetics, the implications are particularly frightening. For example, there is evidence of a link between genes and criminality.
We know that 40 per cent of sexual offending risk is down to genetic factors.
A ‘single national knowledge base’ as the one the UK government is aiming to create might therefore be used for broad genetic profiling.
Although early intervention programmes that buy into genetically deterministic notions of ‘crime genes’ are reductive, serious debate about policies involving genetic information will no doubt happen soon.
We can already see the beginnings of this in the United States.
The bill Preserving Employee Wellness Programs Act – which has received strong backing from Republicans and business groups – would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing.
The results would be seen by employers, and should employees refuse to participate they would face significantly higher insurance costs.
Too much personalisation is likely to be intrusive. The challenge, then, will be to harness the potential of genomics while introducing measures to keep government and big business in check.
The UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry on genomics and genome editing was cut short (due to the recent snap general election).
Its recommendations for further lines of enquiry include creating a quasi-independent body, which could be more attuned to broader, social and ethical concerns.
This might introduce more balance at a pivotal time for the future of human genetic technologies.
Just in time for the Trump administration, the FBI has gotten what critics characterize as broad new hacking powers. As of Thursday, government agents can now use warrants obtained from a single judge to hack computers in multiple jurisdictions, rather than having to get warrants from judges in each distinct jurisdiction, as required under the old rule. The rule went into effect despite the last-ditch efforts by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and others to either kill or delay it in order to give Congress time to study its implications.
In a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday, Wyden said the change to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure was especially troubling given the imminent presidency of Donald Trump, who has “openly said he wants the power to hack his political opponents the same way Russia does.”
“By sitting here and doing nothing, the Senate has given consent to this expansion of government hacking and surveillance.”
The changes were approved by the US Supreme Court in a private vote at the end of April, after several years of discussion within the federal judiciary. They were never debated by Congress. The US Department of Justice says the news rules are necessary, particularly in cases where criminals use anonymizing software to conceal their location while committing crimes such as peddling child pornography. Another concern is the weaponizing of hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices into “botnets” that are then used to flood websites with traffic to shut them down, or for criminal activities that, in the words of Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, “siphon wealth and invade privacy on a massive scale.”
Wyden isn’t convinced that the changes are urgent. Along with Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.), he tried on Wednesday to get the Senate to approve legislation that would have either blocked or delayed the implementation of the new powers.
Those efforts failed.
“By sitting here and doing nothing, the Senate has given consent to this expansion of government hacking and surveillance,” Wyden said in a statement. “Law-abiding Americans are going to ask, ‘What were you guys thinking?’ when the FBI starts hacking victims of a botnet hack. Or when a mass hack goes awry and breaks their device or an entire hospital system and puts lives at risk.”
Caldwell argued the rules had already been debated and vetted. In a November 28 blog post, she wrote the federal judiciary deliberated on the changes for three years, using the same process used to modify other rules of criminal procedure. The current rule change deals specifically with venue issues—removing traditional jurisdictional constraints—and not what investigators can actually do as part of the search, she wrote. Further, investigators already had the power to search multiple computers at the same time, she noted, and it was already legal for investigators to hack victim computers to understand the scope of the criminal hack.
“It would be strange if the law forbade searching the scene of a crime,” she wrote.
Caldwell also wrote that the rule modification doesn’t change what is and isn’t permissible under the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. “The Constitution already forbids mass, indiscriminate rummaging through victims’ computers, and it will continue to do so,” she wrote. “By contrast, blocking the [rule change] would make it more difficult for law enforcement to combat mass hacking by actual criminals.”
But those reassurances likely will not satisfy privacy advocates. In June, tech writer Mike Masnick noted that the DOJ’s justification for the rule change “skirt[ed] the truth, at best.” The new rule, Masnick wrote, “effectively wipe[s] out the requirement to give a copy of the warrant to the person whose computers are being hacked,” which “pretty much guarantees that some of the people who are hacked following this won’t even know about it.” He suggested that the DOJ’s use of the threat of child exploitation as a way to legitimize the rule change in effect derailed the necessary review of serious modifications to the government’s powers that should be debated and approved by Congress. “The FBI has a rather long history of abusing its surveillance powers, and especially seeking to avoid strict oversight,” Masnick wrote. “Approving such a change just because the DOJ is insisting it’s ‘FOR THE CHILDREN, WON’T YOU PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!’ isn’t a particularly good reason.”
“Google has a significant interest in protecting its users and securing its infrastructure,” wrote Richard Salgado, Google’s director of law enforcement and information security, in a February 2015 letter submitted to the Judicial Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules. “The proposed amendment substantively expands the government’s current authority under Rule 41 and raises a number of monumental and highly complex constitutional, legal, and geopolitical concerns.”
Infographic – Lack of privacy on the Internet and in the real world continues to grow. Many people are becoming aware that what they share on their social networks can find its way to the furthest reaches of the Web. But did you realize that your private life at home could also become public, without your knowledge or consent? Here’s how technologies such as Google Street View and government monitoring initiatives are starting to intrude on people’s personal lives.
Alright, here’s the bad news: Google is about to start ranking sites according to their conformity with mainstream opinion. Or at least that’s what the headlines would have you believe.
The usual sources in the controlled corporate media are telling you that this is a good thing and that only “Anti-science advocates are freaking out about Google truth rankings”. But if that already seems like a remarkably blasé attitude to take when facing the prospect of a 1984-like reality where the modern-age Ministry of Truth (Google) is going to determine the “truth” of controversial subjects and rank search results accordingly, then keep in mind that such articles are written by the likes of Joanna Rothkopf, daughter of mini-Kissinger, and David Rothkopf, author of “Superclass”.
New Scientist – the website that broke the story with their article “Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links” – also framed the story, predictably enough, as “science” versus “anti-science”, starting their article by lamenting the fact that “Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free ‘news’ stories spread like wildfire.” The article rejoices in the fact that the good chaps at Google have come up with a bulletproof answer to this mess: “rank websites according to their truthfulness.”
The slightly good news is that, ironically enough, the New Scientist article seems to be a perfect example of a fact-free story spreading around the internet like wildfire. While the story does link to a research paper from a Google research team that outlines a “novel multi-layer probabilistic model” for assigning a “trustworthiness score” to web pages, it neglects to mention that the idea is still very much a theoretical work-in-progress at the moment and is nowhere near ready to be launched. If you have a fetish for multivariate equations, dynamically selected granularity, and line graphs comparing calibration curves for various data analysis methods, have at it!
For the rest of us who are not fluent in boffin-speak, the gist of it is this:
First, a page is harvested for its “knowledge triples.” These are connected triplets of information consisting of a subject, predicate and object. The paper itself helpfully provides the example: Obama – Nationality – USA. A “false value” (again according to the paper itself) would be Obama – Nationality – Kenya. These knowledge triples are assessed for their (Google-determined) accuracy and the page is assigned a KBT (Knowledge-Based Trust) score, which Google could use in place of (or perhaps in some combination with) the traditional PageRank score to determine how high in the search results the web page should place.
The paper uses a list of 15 gossip websites to demonstrate that using this method, sites with disputed and often incorrect information (gossip sites) might rank high in traditional search results, which are weighted toward popularity, but low in the KBT results. But even the paper itself admits there’s a long way to go before this KBT method would be usable by Google to rank billions of web pages.
This is good news for those alt media websites (and their readers) who realize that they are the ones directly in the crosshairs of this technology. Given that Google is nothing other than an American intelligence adjunct (and has been since its inception), would we expect anything resembling a fair assessment of the “truthfulness” surrounding the most politically controversial subjects of our time?
The Federal Reserve is a private cartel created by the banksters for the express purpose of manipulating the money supply and controlling the economy? CONSPIRACY THEORY! No Google for you!
Google and every other major Silicon Valley firm is in bed with the DOD and/or the CIA and/or the NSA? BLASPHEMY! You have been excommunicated from the church of Google.
You get the idea.
But here’s the really good news: even if Google does launch such a system, it is doomed to failure. The internet is one of the last, best bastions of the free market in action that we have in our stultified, regulated, controlled, manipulated economy. Google’s popularity did not come about because government goons pointed a gun at everyone’s head and forced them to use it. They didn’t even create a licensing system for operating search engines, a favorite government trick for keeping genuine competition out of the market. It became popular because it was a million times more useful than AskJeeves or Yahoo! or any of the other outdated, clunky, dysfunctional search “portals” that dominated the web in the late 1990s. Granted, the power of Google’s PageRank may have come directly from the NSA’s own engineers, as some have speculated, but the fact remains: people use it because they can find what they want quickly and easily with minimal fuss.
At that point at which Google stops being useful for its intended purpose (helping people to look for information), people will start to look for alternatives. And alternatives do exist.
DuckDuckGo is another popular alternative search engine focusing on privacy protection that uses a number of innovative tools to make searching quicker and easier.
SigTruth is an “Alternative Media Search Engine for Liberty Minded People” that uses Google’s own custom search abilities against itself by returning only alt media website results on various topics.
And even the news that Google might at some point start using its “truthiness” score to downgrade the alt media has spurred others in the alt media (like Natural News founder Mike Adams) to announce the creation of their own search engines.
This is how the free market of ideas is meant to work, and if and when Google starts returning sanitized propaganda, those who are uninterested in sanitized propaganda will vote with their feet/fingertips.
But here’s the best news of all: what this urge to categorize sites by “truthfulness” (and all of the back-slapping, high-fiving articles about this news from the dying establishment mouthpiece media) really shows is just how desperate the would-be gatekeepers are becoming in their fight to put the alt media genie back in the bottle. And even better yet, this is by no means the first sign that the gatekeepers are losing their war to keep the people in the dark on the topics that matter.
In 2008, arch-globalist Zbigniew Brzezinski started lamenting how, for the first time in human history “all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive.” This, as he stressed in speeches and articles at the time, means that it is no longer possible to dominate people in the same ways that they have been dominated for centuries.
In 2011, Hillary Clinton admitted that the US was losing the information war to alternative media outlets of all stripes.
In 2013, PopularScience.com had to turn off comments on all of their articles because, they said, a “decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics” like catastrophic man-made climate change.
And poll after poll after poll in year after year after year continues to chart the decline of the dinosaur print/radio/tv media and the rise of the internet as a source of daily news and information for the majority of the public.
Yes, there are dark skies and reasons to be concerned about what’s coming in the inevitable digital clampdown. But there are bright spots as well, and these deserve to be noted, highlighted and celebrated. After all, the people have had a taste for real information and now more people than ever before see through the increasingly clumsy propaganda of the establishment. And that makes the propaganda increasingly useless for setting the political agenda.
The internet revolution toothpaste is out of the tube, and it’s going to be one heck of a job getting it back in. And that’s good news.
How to avoid Google surveillance and protect your personal data
Friday, May 29, 2015 by: Daniel Barker
(NaturalNews) It all seemed rather innocent in the beginning. It certainly seemed convenient, and still is – maybe more so than ever, to be truthful. But if you haven’t noticed, slowly and gradually, during the past 17 years since its inception, Google has evolved from being a company which once merely provided Internet users with a free search engine and email to becoming an all-encompassing entity that monitors nearly everything you do.
And not only does Google snoop on you, it takes the personal information it has collected and sells it to corporations. Google also provides that information to intelligence agencies, such as the NSA.
A recent article penned by Derek Scally of The Irish Times explores the extent of Google’s tentacles into our private lives and offers some very useful advice on how to “de-Google” your life.
And why should you de-Google your life if you have “nothing to hide”?
From Scally’s article, which is titled “De-Google your life: it’s worth the hassle if you value your privacy”:
“For privacy campaigner Glenn Greenwald, the man who revealed Snowden’s mass surveillance claims against the National Security Agency, the most common response he hears on the road is what he calls the ‘I have nothing to hide’ argument. To this he has a simple answer.
‘Whenever I hear someone say “I have nothing to hide,” ‘ said Mr Greenwald in Berlin last year, ‘I always ask that person for their email password so I can read their messages. No one has ever taken me up on the offer.’ “
How to de-Google your life
Look for storage alternatives – Scally recommends not putting “all your digital eggs” in one basket. For example, he urges people to explore alternatives for storing emails, photos and cloud content. European-based services are preferable due to EU laws which protect privacy. German-based mailbox.org is one example of an alternative mail service that does not sell or give your data to corporate interests.
Change the way you search – Whenever you can, use an alternative search engine that doesn’t track your searches, such as DuckDuckGo.com or GoodGopher.com (GoodGopher is a new search engine described as “the world’s first privacy-protecting search engine that bans corporate propaganda and government disinfo”).
Block cookies – We’re told that cookies “improve the user experience,” but they also track everything you do online. Install a tracking blocker, such as Ghostery or DoNotTrackMe, into your browser. You can also download the privacyfix.com service from AVG, which helps you click the right privacy settings on your computer and the Internet services you currently use.
Find an alternative to Gmail – Scally admits that it’s “difficult” to give up Gmail and its 15GB of “free” storage, but he points out that even though you theoretically retain intellectual property rights to the content stored on Google, you also give the company a: “worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify . . . communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.” Better to use a service such as the above-mentioned mailbox.org or Posteo. Another alternative is to encrypt your emails using PGP.
Stop using Google and Apple cloud services – Keeping your calendars and contacts synced on multiple devices without using the Google or Apple cloud services can also be difficult because, as Scally notes: The “big players deliberately tinker with file standards for their calendar and address-book offerings to make migration possible and keep you inside their golden cage.” This “devious and effective practice” is perhaps not easy to sidestep, but it’s probably worth the hassle. And as Scally says, “if you clear this hurdle, you’re home free.”
Smartphone alternatives – It’s possible to wipe your Android phone and install CyanogenMod, which uses the same OS, only without Google’s presence. However, installing it requires some technical skills. Another alternative is to invest in a Jolla smartphone. Jolla is a Finnish-made smartphone that uses an OS with “no corporate tentacles.” A team of Nokia designers left the company to introduce this product, which aside from offering privacy also has some very innovative features.
