A lot can happen in a year when you’re the worlds largest search engine. Here’s my Google Wrapped 2023 video showing you everything toxic they did in the last 12 months.
Aaand it’s a fucking video, do we already have bots that post video summaries?
The video’s summary is an actual summary, so clearly they took this into account.
Chapters -
📺 0:00 - Intro - Toxic Google Wrapped 2023
📺 0:06 - Jan - Google fired 12,000 staff including their head of health and wellbeing
📺 0:56 - Feb - Google said employees must come back to the office and share desks. Bard (Chat GPT competitor) launches.
📺 2:48 - March - Google gave data to the police to help prosecute abortion seekers after Roe vs Wade was overturned. And they fired multiple staff after giving birth.
📺 5:18 - April - Google announces cost-cutting measures including cutting back on staplers. Google, Meta and X propose an alliance to combat misinformation.
📺 7:54 - May - South Korea fined Google for anti-competitive practices and Google continued to sell climate disinformation ads (after promising to stop).
📺 9:35 - June - Google replaces it’s fired workers with “low-paid foreign workers” and donated to an anti-abortion Republican Committee
📺 10:29 - July - Google uses our data to train Bard and increases the cost of YouTube Premium.
📺 10:52 - Aug - Google offers staff an on-campus hotel room for $99 a night. And YouTube ads may have led to the online tracking of children.
📺 11:31 - Sept - Google Pixel Watches have no parts or repair program and Google Maps led a dad to his death over a collapsed bridge.
The bridge one is a little unfair. The directions were bad and the route hadn’t been updated for 9 years since the bridge collapsed, and that’s just Google’s shitty map algorithm not respecting corrections unless a bunch of people make them, but that man’s death was on local authorities for leaving a collapsed bridge completely accessable from the road without any barriers and warnings for 9 straight years. It was raining, it was dark, there was poor visibility, but Maps was never meant to be a substitute for your eyes.
📺 12:17 - Oct - Google’s AI consumes as much electricity as Ireland and Alphabet hired an underqualified man (who didn’t even apply for the job) over a woman.
📺 13:15 - Nov - Google backs out of building affordable housing in the Bay Area and spent $26 billion to be your default search engine.
📺 13:59 - Dec - Google caught putting ads on adult websites 🌽 and McDonalds is using Google AI to test if your fries are fresh.
📺 15:07 - Outro - thanks for watching!
I’d argue there’s not enough here, frankly. This is mostly corporate stuff, but there’s a lot of other toxic shit they’ve been doing on the technical end.
Trying to slip web integrity checking into Chrome, for one. Only to get pushed back and instead opt to shove it into Android for now.
Their all-out war on ad blockers as it deliberately degrades the experience of YouTube for everyone except Premium subscribers. (Remembering that increasing the ads degrades the experience for everyone even before you start arguing about how they target ad-blockers)
Manifest V3
It’s not getting a lot of attention but Play Integrity on Android has been getting vicious in the last few months as Google continues the push to punish users for wanting to use their hardware on their own terms.
So on and so on.
Thanks! I just really dislike having to watch a video for something that I can read in less time.
Seconded. I hate that information these days revolves around someone getting views or being spoon fed at their pace via video. I can read a list or a summary in a minute or two.
Holy shit google you scum
I’m already tired of google and I didn’t even know about more than half of that…
Someone complained about… Staplers?
I haven’t needed a stapler at work in tech for uh…at least 5 years.
Simon Caine makes the best videos revealing the crazy shit big tech does. I’m looking forward to the companion videos on Zuckbook and Twitter
