Google Has Quietly Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking (2016)

They are simply the worst.

Chromium with built in adblocker, it also has native mobile versions.

As for the incentives, it's a logical argument:

1) Google is a large, powerful entity.

2) Powerful entities benefit from a preservation of the status quo.

3) Powerful entities must stay on the good side of governments.

4) Social upheaval is a threat to Google's business model.

5) Google's ad business has led to tools that are superior to those built by governments.

Thus, the sales team realizes the opportunity to sell the proprietary tech to government entities. Once this business relationship begins the team effort to suppress some ideas and amplify others, to militarize the core technology, becomes impossible to stop.

Google is at this point a defense contractor to many governments. There has recently been hubbub about Google behaving in this way toward the Chinese government, but what people are missing is that the core service google offers is desired by all governments. Put succinctly, governments all want a great firewall and a social credit score. This is what Google and Facebook sell.

Consider that in the US it's conceivable that a search interface could be built for private user data that also includes the feature of automatically submitting and obtaining a warrant so that all searches performed are legal. The friction associated with needing to obtain a warrant has been removed completely in the US, and likely never even existed under other regimes. In either case, Google is happy to militarize all of the data and technology that it has built.

AI (Google's main thrust) is a particularly insidious form of this because a "trained" AI is a unique combination of data and algorithm. In essence, the data set is baked into the algorithm. So Google can (for example) train a gait analysis algorithm intended to predict violent acts on citizens of one regime, and sell the resulting "trained" product to other regimes.

Governments have a strong need for information about thought crimes and evidence for premeditation of all sorts of antisocial acts. Google and Facebook have created trillions in market value for firms by doing the same thing for consumer behavior but it's worth many more Trillions when applied to criminality and the softer sister definition, "anti-social" behavior.

When will learning about a third party candidate be viewed as an antisocial act by Google and Facebook? Quite likely this happened in 2017.