Google is Quietly Recording Everything You Say — Here’s How to Hear It, Delete It, and Stop It

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/google-quietly-recording-hear-it-delete-it-stop/
Google is Quietly Recording Everything You Say — Here’s How to Hear It, Delete It, and Stop It
By Matt Agorist -  June 5, 2016

Thanks to a function of their search software, Google could have years worth of your conversations recorded, and you can hear it for yourself. Your cringe-worthy history can be heard and viewed along with a list of all your searches, at your personal Google history page.

The feature was built into Google’s search function as a means of delivering accurate search results. However, the sheer accuracy and amount of data Google stores is chilling.

The good news is that you can turn it off and delete it, and at the end of this article, we will show you how.

As the Independent reports:

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The recordings can function as a kind of diary, reminding you of the various places and situations that you and your phone have been in. But it’s also a reminder of just how much information is collected about you, and how intimate that information can be.
You’ll see more if you’ve an Android phone, which can be activated at any time just by saying “OK, Google”. But you may well also have recordings on there whatever devices you’ve interacted with Google using.
However, even if you don’t have an Android phone and conduct Google searches on iDevices, Google is still listening.

When visiting your personal history page that the web giant keeps on you, it will show you everywhere Google has a record of you being on the internet.

Of course, Google claims that this information is never personally used against you and is done solely for the purpose of enlightening your experience on the web. However, imagine the ominous implications if this information was being used against you.

READ MORE:  Julian Assange -- 'Google is Not What it Seems' -- They 'Do Things the CIA Cannot'
Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.

The data from these searches is then stored on each individual who conducts them. Using this data or steering results in a particular direction, the internet behemoth could effectively influence the entire world. Aside from influence, Google could predict the future based on trends.

Much of this search history is tied location data retrieved from the device being used to conduct the query. So, not only does the search engine have information on what your interests are, it has you specific interests based on where you are at any given moment.

Google’s motto of Don’t Be Evil now seems like less like a request for its users and more like a way of keeping themselves in check.

Now for the good news — you can turn all of this off.

You can start this eye-opening journey by heading to Google’s history page and looking at the long list of recordings. The company has a specific audio page as well as their record of where you’ve been on the internet.

If you’ve never disabled the feature, you will see a list of audio recordings, even some done outside of the Google app, as well as a transcript of the audio Google has converted to text.

What we recommend, after you further panic by listening to or scrolling through Google’s creepy recordings of your search history, is to delete them all and disable the functions.

READ MORE:  WATCH: Constitutional Judge Begs America to "Wake Up" Over Fed's Plan to Spy on Your Web Activity
The Independent explains just how to do this:

To delete particular files, you can click the check box on the left and then move back to the top of the page and select “delete”. To get rid of everything, you can press the “More” button, select “Delete options” and then “Advanced” and click through.
The easiest way to stop Google recording everything is to turn off the virtual assistant and never to use voice search. But that solution also gets at the central problem of much privacy and data use today – doing so cuts off one of the most useful things about having an Android phone or using Google search.
Now that you know this exists quit voluntarily handing over your data to unknown parties and share this article with your friends and family to show them how to stop it as well.

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Julian Assange — ‘Google is Not What it Seems’ — They ‘Do Things the CIA Cannot’
By Claire Bernish -  November 14, 2016
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Julian Assange cautioned all of us a while back, in the vein of revelations similar to those provided by Edward Snowden, that Google — the insidious search engine with a reputation for powering humanity’s research — plays the dark hand role in furthering U.S. imperialism and foreign policy agendas.

Now, as the Wikileaks founder faces days of questioning by a Swedish special prosecutor over rape allegations inside his Ecuadorian Embassy haven in London today — and particularly in wake of the presidential election — Assange’s warning Google “is not what it seems” must be revisited.

Under intense scrutiny by the U.S. State Department for several controversial Wikileaks’ publications of leaked documents in 2011, Assange first met Google Executive Chairman, then-CEO, Eric Schmidt, who approached the political refugee under the premise of a new book. Schmidt, whose worth Forbes estimates exceeds $11 billion, partnered with Council on Foreign Relations and State Department veteran, Jared Cohen, for the work, tentatively titled The Empire of the Mind — and asked Assange for an interview.

Later acknowledging naïvte in agreeing to meet the pair of tech heavyweights, Assange found afterward how enmeshed in and integral to U.S. global agendas Schmidt and Cohen had become.

In fact, both have exhibited quite the fascination with technology’s role in burgeoning revolutions — including, but not-at-all limited to, the Arab Spring. Schmidt created a position for  Cohen in 2009, originally called Google Ideas, now Google Jigsaw, and the two began weaving the company’s importance to the United States into narratives in articles, political donations, and through Cohen’s former roles at the State Department.

That same year, Schmidt and Cohen co-authored an article for the CFR journal Foreign Affairs, which, seven years hence, appears a rather prescient discussion of Google’s self-importance in governmental affairs. Under the subheading “COALITIONS OF THE CONNECTED,” they wrote [all emphasis added]:

“In an era when the power of the individual and the group grows daily, those governments that ride the technological wave will clearly be best positioned to assert their influence and bring others into their orbits. And those that do not will find themselves at odds with their citizens.

“Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies. […] they offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world who are abused by their governments or barred from voicing their opinions.”

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Perhaps appearing laudable on its surface — at least to some degree — as Assange pointed out, there is a self-mischaracterization by the American and other Western governments and inaccurately-monikered ‘non-governmental organizations’ that their interests in other nations’ affairs are innately good.

This cult of government and non-government insiders have a firm belief their goals should be the unassailable, unquestionable motivator for American imperialism — whatever the U.S. thinks best as a “benevolent superpower,” so should the rest of the ‘non-evil’ world.

“They will tell you that open-mindedness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them,” Assange wrote in When Google Met Wikileaks. “This is the impenetrable banality of ‘don’t be evil.’ They believe that they are doing good. And that is a problem.”

READ MORE:  AI Warfare is Here -- US & Israel Unveil Autonomous Killing Machines
Cohen, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the notorious Council on Foreign Relations, lists his expertise in “terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran,” and has worked for both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton at the Department of State. Fortune, calling Cohen a “fascinating fellow,” noted that, in his book Children of Jihad, the young diplomat and technology enthusiast “advocates for the use of technology for social upheaval in the Middle East and elsewhere.”

Under the auspices of discussing technological aspects at Wikileaks’ disposal for the upcoming book, Schmidt; Cohen; Lisa Shields, a CFR vice president at the time; and Scott Malcomson — who would shortly afterward be appointed Rice’s lead speech advisor for her role as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations — descended on Assange’s safe haven in Norfolk, outside London.

It wasn’t until weeks and months after this gathering Assange fully realized how closely Google operates in tandem with the government of the United States — and how perilous the innocent mask of its public intentions truly is in light of such cooperation.

Ironically enough, in Wikileaks’ publishing three years later of the Global Intelligence Files — internal emails from private security firm, Stratfor — Cohen’s and Google’s true depth of influence became strikingly apparent. Assange wrote:

“Cohen’s directorate appeared to cross over from public relations and ‘corporate responsibility’ work into active corporate intervention in foreign affairs at a level that is normally reserved for states. Jared Cohen could be wryly named Google’s ‘director of regime change.’ According to the emails, he was trying to plant his fingerprints on some of the major historical events in the contemporary Middle East. He could be placed in Egypt during the revolution, meeting with Wael Ghonim, the Google employee whose arrest and imprisonment hours later would make him a PR-friendly symbol of the uprising in the Western press. Meetings had been planned in Palestine and Turkey, both of which—claimed Stratfor emails—were killed by the senior Google leadership as too risky. Only a few months before he met with me, Cohen was planning a trip to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan to ‘engage the Iranian communities closer to the border,’ as part of Google Ideas’ project on repressive societies.”

However, most significantly, Stratfor vice president for intelligence Fred Burton, also a former official with the State Department, wrote in one of those emails:

“Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do . . . [Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag.”

Of course, the massive company — its various facets now under the umbrella of Alphabet, Inc. — has never been fully absent government involvement. Research for what would become ultimately become Google had been undertaken by company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in cooperation with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — the strictly secretive technological testing and planning arm for the Department of Defense.

Indeed Google’s continued coziness with the diplomacy, military, and intelligence wings of the United States government should not be, though perpetually are, ignored.

Political establishment bulldogs on both sides of the aisle and their cheerleader corporate media presstitutes will continue for months or years to debate the failed presidential bid of Hillary Clinton and the apparently-shocking rise and election of Donald Trump, but technology played a starring role in those events. Several reports last year cautioned Google’s algorithms could swing the election — and not only the American election, but national elections around the globe.

READ MORE:  As US Forces Ramp Up in Afghanistan, Bitter Enemies, Taliban and ISIS -- Join Forces
“We estimate, based on win margins in national elections around the world,” said Robert Epstein, a psychologist with the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and author of one of the studies, “that Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 percent of all national elections.”

Considering lines between the tech giant and the government have essentially been abandoned, this revelation puts power and influence into acute, if not terrifying, perspective.

Google’s ties with the Pentagon and intelligence communities never ceased. Revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request cited by Assange, Google founder Brin, together with Schmidt, corresponded casually by email with National Security Agency chief Gen. Keith Alexander in 2012, discussing a program called the “Enduring Society Framework.” Alexander wrote to Brin:

“Your insights as a key member of the Defense Industrial Base are valuable to ensure ESF’s efforts have measurable impact.”

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Industrial Base is “the worldwide industrial complex that enables research and development, as well as design, production, delivery, and maintenance of military weapons systems, subsystems, and components or parts, to meet U.S. military requirements .”

It also provides “products and services that are essential to mobilize, deploy, and sustain military operations.”

Although Schmidt and Cohen ultimately watered down their book title The Empire of the Mind into the more palatable and less blatantly imperialistic, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business, its message amounted to self-congratulatory justification for broader foreign policy goals. Nefarious warmonger Henry Kissinger, for one, praised the work, which included telling lines by the Google execs, such as:

“What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.”

READ MORE:  WATCH: Pentagon Testing Top-Secret Swarming 'Micro-Drones' Launched from Fighter Jets
So ubiquitous has Google become, its presence — like similarly U.S. government-connected Facebook — is nearly indispensable in the daily lives of hundreds of millions worldwide.

However well-known is the government intelligence framework in such platforms, it would be ill-advised to ignore the far darker Machiavellian aspects of private corporate technology’s intersection with global political agendas — and the force that coalition wields around the planet.

Whether or not the American establishment’s empire suffered a blow in the election of Donald Trump will be a debatable point for some time, but it’s a veritable guarantee its cogs — seeing themselves as the planet’s saviors — have planned in advance for just such an occasion.

“If the future of the internet is to be Google,” Assange noted, “that should be of serious concern to people all over the world—in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union, and even in Europe—for whom the internet embodies the promise of an alternative to US cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony.”

Empire will remain empire until its dying breath — particularly if it functions under the obstinate belief it, alone, can save the world. Julian Assange should be praised for the transparency and insight he and Wikileaks have readily given the world, instead of excoriated and blamed for faults which lie in the establishment framework — it is this political, intelligence, and military web deserving of a pointed finger.