I don’t like Paxton, and I can’t imagine this is much more than performative railing against a strawman version of Big Tech, but this is a real issue, so I’m interested to see where it goes. link to ‘Texas Sues Google Over Use of Facial Images - WSJ’

Politicians need to better understand the internet. This is just as dumb (and perhaps more devious) than the nonsense the governor of Missouri was up to. link to ‘Arizona GOP Secretary Of State Candidate Insists ‘Deep State’ Google Is Blocking His Website; Turns Out He Requested It Not Be Indexed | Techdirt’

I knew my distrust of spellcheck would be validated one day! Seriously, though, this is bad news. link to ‘The Advanced Spellchecker in Chrome and Edge Saves Everything You Type—Even Passwords’

Ashamed to say I hadn’t ever thought about this possibility. link to ‘Trans Researchers Want Google Scholar to Stop Deadnaming Them | WIRED’

This is why the EFF and others have concerns about overreach of even clearly well intentioned content moderation. CSAM is clearly despicable, but automated content moderation can make mistakes, and consequences for those mistakes aren’t small. link to ‘A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal. - The New York Times’

Nooooo thank you. Don’t like this about Grammarly, don’t like this about Word, won’t like this about Google Docs. I am very skeptical of giving algorithms authority over style. link to ‘Google Docs will start nudging some users to write less dumbly - The Verge’

Speaking of the non-neutrality of platforms… Granted, Google has a difficult line to walk here, but this is still disappointing. link to ‘Google Ordered Translators to Replace References to Ukraine “War”’

Another reason to be wary of automated ad exchanges. [link to ‘How Steve Bannon Has Exploited Google Ads to Monetize Extremism — ProPublica’](https://www.propublica.org/article/how-steve-bannon-has-exploited-google-ads-to-monetize-extremism

Tech companies are often ad companies, and it behooves us to remember that. link to ‘Google and Facebook’s Ad Empires - The New York Times’

This is maybe the best example I’ve seen of app stores being a problematic model. Is there an Android app that could be sideloaded? Definitely isn’t for Apple, and that’s shameful. link to ‘Apple and Google Remove ‘Navalny’ Voting App in Russia - The New York Times’

If dozens of CAPTCHAs are any indication, Google’s working hard on traffic lights, crosswalks, and fire hydrants today. So proud of all I’m contributing to AI without compensation because it’s the only way to access this site.

Special thanks to Google Drive for breaking the iframes I’ve been using to set up annotation-enabled readings in Canvas this semester… during the week that students are reviewing readings for their final papers. Really appreciate it.

Paying for my third year of Posteo tonight and not missing Gmail at all. (Still haven’t kicked the Drive/Docs habit, though).