As well as being data gatherer, Google also opened up the world of data to every user of the
internet through Google Maps, YouTube and more. But suddenly, Google decided to diversify into the biotech industry. Around 2015,
“We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at
the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google
Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And we haven’t stopped there. We are still
trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited
about.”
He went on to explain how all of Google’s business interests would be grouped under a new
holding called Alphabet:
“… we are creating a new company, called
Alphabet. I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my
capable partner, Sergey, as President.
What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a
collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer
Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of
our main internet products contained in Alphabet instead. What do we mean by
far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on
the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity).
We liked the name Alphabet because it means a
collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important
innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like
that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark)…”
True to
form, Alphabet wasted no time setting up a number of biotech companies, each
with one or more interesting partners. Let’s take a look:
Calico
From the Calico website:
"Calico is a research and development company
whose mission is to harness advanced technologies to increase our understanding
of the biology that controls lifespan"
“We’re
tackling aging, one of life’s greatest mysteries.”
Calico is run by
Art Levinson, a biotech insider from the world of gene technology. He also sat
on the board of the original Google and of Apple. See here
and here. As former CEO
of Genentech which produces cancer medicines, Levinson is not exactly known as an executive with
empathy for the sick:
"The cancer industry preys upon the fear
of society's most vulnerable patients, transforming human beings into
profit-generating machines, even as their drugs usually offer no measurable
benefit whatsoever"
according
to consumer health advocate Mike
Adams, naming Genentech in this critique.
New trove of data for Calico: Ancestry.com
To provide the researchers with DNA, Calico partnered with AncestryDNA, a company specialising in analysing their customer's DNA and searching their data for living relatives. This has drawn some justified criticism: how far will Google go in their quest for data? Russia TV:
AncestryDNA has genotyped DNA sequences of more than one million of Ancestry.com's customers, according to Re/code, and has around two million active subscribers.Ancestry.com CEO Tim Sullivan said that many medical research companies have long requested access to Ancestry.com's trove of data."We have a lot of business deals with Google," CEO Tim Sullivan hinted to RT.
Ancestry.com revealed AncestryHealth this month as a platform for customers to track personal health in order to combine that information with their genetic data.
The article goes on to name other DNA-related companies that have been sucked up by the big Google data hoover.
To be fair, AncestryDNA.com as they are now called promise carefully guarded confidentiality:
Your privacy is important to us. We use industry standard security practices to store your DNA sample, your DNA test results, and other personal data you provide to us. In addition, we store your DNA test results and DNA sample without your name or other common identifying information. You own your DNA data. At any time, you can choose to download raw DNA data, have us delete your DNA test results as described in the AncestryDNA Privacy Statement, or have us destroy your physical DNA saliva sample. We do not share with third parties your name or other common identifying information linked to your genetic data, except as legally required or with your explicit consent.
But there are too many organisations that think they can unilaterally change their confidentiality clauses. They know full well that once a customer has made an effort to commit their information to the system, they are not likely to withdraw their consent when the small print has changed.
So the question is still: what does Google want to do with all these data? And why the human body? When we take a look at the other companies Google has invested in, we'll see a pattern emerge.
Postscript: from the comment section of ZeroHedge's One Statisitcs Professor was Just Banned From Google:
Postscript: from the comment section of ZeroHedge's One Statisitcs Professor was Just Banned From Google:
Google has a virtual agent representing all the entities it has successfully identified as human. Each agent is a network node, the edges being all interactions between agents. Each agent has extensive metadata which essentially forms a psychological profile of the user. Every action a user performs, that in any way touches a Google product, logs a connection and all of these data are regularly fed into Google's core correlation infrastructure. Here's where the data scientists have all the fun, letting loose their machine-learning experiments to convert agent profiles and interactions into actionable behavior prediction, historically used for targeted advertising but inevitably finding darker uses.
All of this makes it rather trivial to map the human topology of political networks and identify the key influencers. Those influencers are often not obvious at all to wider society, choosing to maintain a low-key media and social media profile. But the machine knows who they are.
Let's hope there's still room on Google for this blog.The machine is applying the ideology of its masters, which sure as shit paints a target on everyone here.
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