Google

Google

Basic information
Founded	1998
Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Technology
Official website	https://google.com/

Google LLC, founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is one of the most influential and dominant technology companies in the world.^{[citation needed]} Originally developed as a search engine to organize and index the growing amount of information on the internet, Google has since expanded into a wide range of services and products, becoming a central player in digital advertising, software, hardware, and cloud computing.^{[citation needed]}

Google's search engine remains its most well-known service, but the company has significantly diversified its offerings.^{[citation needed]} Key products include the Android operating system, the Google Chrome web browser, Google Drive for cloud storage, Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Play.^{[citation needed]} Additionally, the company provides digital advertising services through Google Ads, generating the majority of its revenue.^{[citation needed]} In recent years, Google has also developed hardware products such as the Pixel smartphone and Nest smart home devices.^{[citation needed]}

Google has faced ongoing scrutiny related to data privacy, competition, and its dominant position in the market, such concerns have stretched as far back as 2012. The company has been the subject of various legal and regulatory challenges, particularly concerning antitrust issues, the use of personal data, and its impact on consumer choice.^{[citation needed]} The US government is currently engaged in an antitrust lawsuit against Google, with a decision expected early 2025.

In December 2024, "Google announced to organisations that use its advertising products, that from 16 February 2025, it will no longer prohibit them from employing fingerprinting techniques."

Google Play Music shutdown

Google Play Music was a service that allowed users to purchase music, listen via streaming, and download to the local device; alternatively users could pay for a subscription to listen to all music available through streaming. It was publicly launched on the 16th November 2011 and later shutdown in December 2020. Google Play Music further allowed users to upload their own songs to listen on all their devices, with a limit of up to 50,000 files. Users were able to purchase songs individually or buy whole albums that they could then download and listen to, or stream through the internet.

In October 2020, Google announced that they would be shutting down Google Play Music, with it being fully shut down by December. This went ahead with a warning to their users to begin migrating to YouTube Music, and that they would be losing access to their purchased songs. Google recommended users should download their purchased songs before the service would shut down.

After the shut down, users lost access to the music they paid for, with no way to download them. Google justified this by transferring all playlists and purchase history to YouTube Music, and only refunding songs that were not directly available, with no guarantee that the songs will remain available through the new service. Users found that their purchased songs were no longer able to stream at 320kbps on YouTube Music compared to Google Play Music unless they paid for the monthly subscription. If a user failed to initiate the transfer of their music library or locally download their songs by 24th February 2021, then they lost all access and all data associated with Google Play Music. YouTube Music does not provide the option to download songs as MP3s, with local downloads requiring an internet connection every 30 days to stay up.

Google Stadia shutdown

In January 2023, Google announced the shutdown of its cloud gaming service, Stadia, which was launched in November 2019. Stadia required users to purchase games individually, unlike other gaming platforms that offer subscription-based access. Upon the service's closure, Google promised to refund consumers for their purchases, including both games and hardware. The refunds for games and software were issued automatically, and if the refund failed to transfer, then you would've needed to contact your bank.

Stadia users were effectively renting access to games, as the platform did not allow for traditional ownership or offline play. With the service discontinued, consumers were left without access to the content they had purchased. Stadia users who had bought controllers and other peripherals for the service were also impacted by the shutdown. While Google offered refunds to customers, many Stadia consumers were left with equipment that no longer performs the advertised functions and limited recourse for repurposing or reselling their devices.

Google Stadia controllers were limited to Wi-Fi connectivity, however upon shut down they started offering an update to allow them to connect through Bluetooth, the update service website was scheduled to shut down on the 31st December 2023.

reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA was acquired by Google in 2009 and has since been used to protect websites from botting, crowdsource transcription work, and to mass train Google's other technical ventures such as artificial intelligence. Google faced criticism over this crowdsourcing and training for using unpaid labor from millions of daily users around the world, even sparking an ultimately unsuccessful class action lawsuit in Massachusetts in 2015, with the court dismissing the amount of time spent by each user completing a CAPTCHA as "something for which [no] reasonable consumer would expect to receive compensation".

A video published by YouTube channel CHUPPL sparked renewed controversy with a video released in December 2024. The video cites and details how reCAPTCHA doxxes users and how resulting user data can end up in the hands of the US government for unknown purposes, claiming exploitation of an intentional loophole in Google's terms of service allowing them to transmit user device and application data under the guise of "general security purposes." User data allegedly began being collected in 2014, when Google deployed reCAPTCHA v2, specifically the “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” i.e. "the checkbox CAPTCHA," which primarily uses cookies to whitelist users who reCAPTCHA identifies as humans. This opens up additional security vulnerabilities as once a user is identified as a human, a bot can take over and be given unrestricted access to all sites using reCAPTCHA without having to fill a CAPTCHA itself.

The type of cookies collected includes, but is not limited to:

• Screen size and resolution, date, language, browser plug-ins, and all Javascript objects
• IP address
• CSS information from the page you are on
• A count of mouse and touch events

This digital fingerprinting is nearly inescapable even for privacy focused consumers since, as of November 2024, reCAPTCHA is employed in 84% of all websites.

"The implication is that Google isn’t just looking to identify whether you’re a human with its No CAPTCHA, but potentially exactly which human you are." - Lara O'Reilly

A 2023 study collected data on newly admitted students to UC Irvine's School of Information & Computer Sciences over 13 months and concludes that reCAPTCHA does not provide real security for Google's client websites and has, over its 13 years of existence, cost users an estimated 819 million hours equating to nearly $6 billion USD in wages and 134 petabytes of bandwidth corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO₂. The study further estimated Google's direct profits from reCAPTCHA to be "$888 billion USD from cookies and $8.75-32.3 billion USD per each sale of their total labeled data set."

"It can be concluded that the true purpose of reCAPTCHAv2 is as a tracking cookie farm for advertising profit masquerading as a security service." - Searles, Prapty, and Tsudik

Google has also been accused of allowing reCAPTCHA to accept users running Chromium web browsers more frequently than alternatives.^{[citation needed]}