Google hit with €4.3bn Android fine from EU

The EU doesn't like success.

Pretty much. Most of our politics is "How do we punish people for being successful", rather than "How do we help other people be successful like them". The EU attitude is always about trying to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator.

The US is going the same way, slowly but surely.
 
The EU doesn't like success.

Guess they have to find a way to make money somehow, ridiculous fines are a traditional big government source of income, and the EU is really the epitomized model of big government.

What? A google phone with google as it’s default search engine, ohh the humanity lol
 
Pretty much. Most of our politics is "How do we punish people for being successful", rather than "How do we help other people be successful like them". The EU attitude is always about trying to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator.

Pretty funny. They point to Russia as the example of how to handle google. Yeah, that's the ticket, lets look to an authoritarian regime on how to control the market.

If you don't want to be married to google search, just buy an I-phone :rofl:.

The reality is european cell manufacturers are all but extinct, and its not because of google search. They just fell behind. Nokia, Ericcson, Siemens PN all made an excellent product, they all just missed the boat when smartphones came around.



The US is going the same way, slowly but surely.

Lets not go there. Bashing the EU is nonpartisan ;-)
 
Huh. Well, if their OS is going to cost them money in the EU, they should probably not allow it to be used there...that solves the problem, right?

They only have 2/3 of the market, what could go wrong if they went dark with their OS?
 
When fines like this are settled and the one being fined pays..... who is the recipient of the money and what is that money used for?
 
When fines like this are settled and the one being fined pays..... who is the recipient of the money and what is that money used for?

It pays for more fivolous lawsuits and enforcement action.
 
I'm ok with it as long as google raises their rates for whatever services they provide (only) in the countries that elected the idiots who imposed the fines.
 
Boy, this went downhill quick.

What I've always laughed at.

Microsoft received fines in their days of power for preferential practices.

Alphabet now gets fined for same.

And yet...

Apple has more proprietary requirements in their devices than anyone and no one bothers them. At least I don't recall ever hearing of them being fined.

(Spoken from a "users" perspective.)
 
Bribery is still illegal, whether in EU or the US. While prevalent, still not legal.
I agree that "everyone's doing it" but again, that doesn't make it legal.
Why Google of all? I assume that someone in the EU dislikes Google enough to launch this investigation, find some wrongdoig and impose fines.
I cannot blame them, I dislike (okay, actually hate) Google too, for various reasons, including f***in up a perfectly good mobile OS by turning it into spiOS. So yes, I am pretty biased here. :)
Though I am an equal-opportunity hater. So if someone fines crApple of Microsh*t for bribery, I won't cry either. :D

From a user perspective, I want to use my device for MY benefit, not for theirs (spying on me and selling my information). But I guess I live in the previous millennium because spying is the norm nowadays.

The old man has spoken. Howgh.
 
Apple and Google both could destroy multiple governments including ours, by just publishing what they know about the politicians using their devices.
 
Apple and Google both could destroy multiple governments including ours, by just publishing what they know about the politicians using their devices.

Destroy the government? I seriously doubt it, it would be a breath of fresh air and speed the draining of the swamp, ideally the electorate would vote them all out and start over now.
 
Destroy the government? I seriously doubt it, it would be a breath of fresh air and speed the draining of the swamp, ideally the electorate would vote them all out and start over now.

It wouldn’t survive people seeing the actual corruption.

There’s a reason they’re running private servers and destroying devices mechanically when they get caught. (And that’s not partisan, they’re all doing it.)
 
Bribery is still illegal, whether in EU or the US. While prevalent, still not legal.
I agree that "everyone's doing it" but again, that doesn't make it legal.
Why Google of all? I assume that someone in the EU dislikes Google enough to launch this investigation, find some wrongdoig and impose fines.
I cannot blame them, I dislike (okay, actually hate) Google too, for various reasons, including f***in up a perfectly good mobile OS by turning it into spiOS. So yes, I am pretty biased here. :)
Though I am an equal-opportunity hater. So if someone fines crApple of Microsh*t for bribery, I won't cry either. :D

From a user perspective, I want to use my device for MY benefit, not for theirs (spying on me and selling my information). But I guess I live in the previous millennium because spying is the norm nowadays.

The old man has spoken. Howgh.

It is possible to minimize the spying even without rooting the phone, but you also sacrifice some functionality.

Just from an annoyance perspective, Google has gotten to the point that they practically force you to disable their **** just to keep your sanity.

For example, I have Google Maps disabled because when it was enabled, I'd get prompted to write a review every time I went to a store. And that was with location history supposedly disabled. So goodbye Maps. Instead, I use Tom-Tom for navigation. It uses its own maps and doesn't seem to care that Google Maps is disabled. Tom-Tom may be spying on me too, for all I know. But at least they're not annoying.

I also have the Digital Assistant set to "none" and denied Google App access to the mic (and everything else) because I got tired of the Assistant chiming in every time I said something that sounded vaguely like "Google." So I denied Google App all permissions. The problem was that once I did that, I started getting notices nagging me to enable Google Assistant several times a day. I wound up having to disable Google App altogether to stop the notifications.

So now they slip the exhortations to enable Google Assistant into ads. Three out of every four Google ads I get are about Google Assistant. They even land me on the settings page where I could enable it if I wanted. They really, really want people using Google Assistant, which is all the reason I need to disable it. I figure if they're so eager for me to enable Google Assistant that they target ads about it to me, it must gather tremendous amounts of data.

I also had Chrome disabled. I forget what annoying behavior prompted that. But it kept re-enabling itself, so I denied it all permissions. That quieted it down. Interestingly, however, when I manually use it, it works fine despite being denied all permissions. I suppose if I tried to download and save something it would probably barf on the lack of permission to access files.

I also have the YouTube app disabled, but as with Chrome, I forget what annoying behavior led me to do that. I do know that several times a day I get the "Unfortunately, [annoying Google app] has stopped" error message. The disabled apps keep trying to start themselves, despite being disabled.

When the warranty on this phone expires, I'll probably root it and pull Google's crap spyware off of it altogether. Even if I didn't mind being spied on, the apps are just annoying.

Rich
 
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Guess they have to find a way to make money somehow, ridiculous fines are a traditional big government source of income, and the EU is really the epitomized model of big government.

Just what I was going to say. This is called 'funding'.
 
Pretty much. Most of our politics is "How do we punish people for being successful", rather than "How do we help other people be successful like them". The EU attitude is always about trying to drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator.

The US is going the same way, slowly but surely.
I believe the term you are looking for is "democratic socialism".
 
When the warranty on this phone expires, I'll probably root it and pull Google's crap spyware off of it altogether. Even if I didn't mind being spied on, the apps are just annoying.

The annoyance and the data hoarding is what pays for your cheap phone. That's like all the glossy print advertising that falls out of a Saturday paper. Without that, the $2.75 NY Times would be a $8 NY Times.

I wish there was still a professionally made phone, but since the demise of blackberry there isn't.
 
@RJM62 (if interested) there is a setting to disable the prompts for reviews based on location, and keep Google maps enabled. I did it recently. A quick Google search will provide the steps needed.o_O

Aside from that, regarding the spying, I'm not doing anything illegal so I really don't put too much effort into hiding. If I went to Walmart, as soon as I use my credit card I'm being tracked anyway, and also on their camera system. I could care less if Google knows I went. I actually did yesterday. Now the whole internet knows :eek:
I prefer not to have ads shoved in my face, but since they can't all be blocked, I actually prefer them to be based on my interests like flying, instead of random ads for something like tampons.

If someone:
has donated blood
goes annually for blood tests
is on file with FAA and many other organizations
has a passport
has given up finger prints
has given name and address on many shopping and other websites
has watched porn on their computer
texted on their phone
emailed someone
(the list goes on)
I'd say there is a pretty good chance they are on record and can be tracked/monitored...

I've done a couple of those things.

One day I might even get crazy and try some alcohol.
 
@RJM62 (if interested) there is a setting to disable the prompts for reviews based on location, and keep Google maps enabled. I did it recently. A quick Google search will provide the steps needed.o_O

Aside from that, regarding the spying, I'm not doing anything illegal so I really don't put too much effort into hiding. If I went to Walmart, as soon as I use my credit card I'm being tracked anyway, and also on their camera system. I could care less if Google knows I went. I actually did yesterday. Now the whole internet knows :eek:
I prefer not to have ads shoved in my face, but since they can't all be blocked, I actually prefer them to be based on my interests like flying, instead of random ads for something like tampons.

If someone:
has donated blood
goes annually for blood tests
is on file with FAA and many other organizations
has a passport
has given up finger prints
has given name and address on many shopping and other websites
has watched porn on their computer
texted on their phone
emailed someone
(the list goes on)
I'd say there is a pretty good chance they are on record and can be tracked/monitored...

I've done a couple of those things.

One day I might even get crazy and try some alcohol.

I haven't missed Google Maps (nor Google anything else), but thanks anyway.

The annoyance and the data hoarding is what pays for your cheap phone. That's like all the glossy print advertising that falls out of a Saturday paper. Without that, the $2.75 NY Times would be a $8 NY Times.

I wish there was still a professionally made phone, but since the demise of blackberry there isn't.

I thought BB10 was the best phone OS ever made. Unfortunately, both app developers and BlackBerry themselves pretty much gave up on it. Even simple things like the built-in Web browser got unstable toward the end.

Rich
 
I wish there was still a professionally made phone, but since the demise of blackberry there isn't.

There’s a new phone out from Blackberry. It’s crap, but they’re not dead yet. I guess. Kinda.
 
There’s a new phone out from Blackberry. It’s crap, but they’re not dead yet. I guess. Kinda.

All the new BB phones run on Google Android. BB10 is, for all intents and purposes, a dead OS. It's a shame. It was a good, stable, sleek OS. But Chen did his best to kill it. When he should have been offering to port apps (especially banking and financial apps) over to BB10 for free just to maintain compatibility and user base, he was laying off developers instead.

BlackBerry's Androids have some security and usability improvements over stock, but there's a difference between security and privacy. If the underlying OS is basically one big pile of spyware, there's no way to make that private. Google's still going to sell you to the highest bidder. And hardware-wise, the phones are overpriced compared to comparable hardware. Plus you never know how long BB is going to be in business to support the things.

Rich
 
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Glad you posted Rich. Yeah BB was good stuff back in the day. The BES software on Exchange was a total PITA but it kinda worked and was stable for a week or two.

I was thinking about the thread after Alphabet’s earnings release. This fine wasn’t even a pimple on their butt. LOL.
 
Glad you posted Rich. Yeah BB was good stuff back in the day. The BES software on Exchange was a total PITA but it kinda worked and was stable for a week or two.

I was thinking about the thread after Alphabet’s earnings release. This fine wasn’t even a pimple on their butt. LOL.

They're more concerned about the repercussions in terms of having to unbundle, as it were, than the fine. The bundled software collects a lot of data for them. The whole purpose of Android, from Google's perspective, is data-gathering. They stopped being an advertising company years ago. Now their business is datamining.

Rich
 
Pretty funny. They point to Russia as the example of how to handle google. Yeah, that's the ticket, lets look to an authoritarian regime on how to control the market.

If you don't want to be married to google search, just buy an I-phone :rofl:.

The reality is european cell manufacturers are all but extinct, and its not because of google search. They just fell behind. Nokia, Ericcson, Siemens PN all made an excellent product, they all just missed the boat when smartphones came around.





Lets not go there. Bashing the EU is nonpartisan ;-)
In two minutes, you can have Bing on your Android phone. As I did (as well as on my computers and tablet). I consider Microsoft to be the lesser of two evils.
 
In two minutes, you can have Bing on your Android phone. As I did (as well as on my computers and tablet). I consider Microsoft to be the lesser of two evils.

Duck Duck Go is getting better, which works out well because Google is getting worse. Not just in terms of their snooping and spyware, but in terms of relevancy.

I blame it mainly on Google's heavy use of AI to try to guess what the user really meant to search for rather than just returning the results for they actually did search for. Even "verbatim" hasn't really been verbatim in a long time. But the fact that they're falling way behind the SEO spammers has something to do with it, too.

Rich
 
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