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A normal company would have had (...) Alphabet (or Google) is not a normal company. According to Alphabet's[0] website: As Sergey and I wrote in the origina

A normal company would have had (...) Alphabet (or Google) is not a normal company. According to Alphabet's[0] website: As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.” From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have. [0] - https://abc.xyz https://abc.xyz

Lammy 4y ago
Alphabet couldn't be a more appropriate name for such an "abnormal" company https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/ https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
- throwaway29303 4y ago
  Indeed. And I find it interesting how this The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called “birds of a feather:” Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online. (...) ties up nicely with Google's FLoC[0]: FLoC provides a privacy-preserving mechanism for interest-based selection of ads and other content. As a user moves around the web, their browser uses the FLoC algorithm to work out its "interest cohort", which will be the same for thousands of browsers with a similar recent browsing history. The browser recalculates its cohort periodically, on the user's device, without sharing individual browsing data with the browser vendor or anyone else. And the name makes the whole thing even funnier. Pretty interesting coincidence. ;-) [0] - https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/floc/ https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/floc/

Lammy 4y ago

Alphabet couldn't be a more appropriate name for such an "abnormal" company https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/ https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

throwaway29303 4y ago
Indeed. And I find it interesting how this The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called “birds of a feather:” Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online. (...) ties up nicely with Google's FLoC[0]: FLoC provides a privacy-preserving mechanism for interest-based selection of ads and other content. As a user moves around the web, their browser uses the FLoC algorithm to work out its "interest cohort", which will be the same for thousands of browsers with a similar recent browsing history. The browser recalculates its cohort periodically, on the user's device, without sharing individual browsing data with the browser vendor or anyone else. And the name makes the whole thing even funnier. Pretty interesting coincidence. ;-) [0] - https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/floc/ https://developer.chrome.com/docs/privacy-sandbox/floc/