and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.

My slightly vague recollection was that they were basically feeding “enterprise customers” a load of information including stuff that could be used for union busting, monitoring protests etc. Their enterprise plan has

Feedly AI Advanced Skills: Market intelligence Threat intelligence Biopharma research Competitive intelligence

as features. So yeah, creepy as fuck. And they said at the time that this was all done using “AI”.

I stopped using Feedly after all the creepy AI stuff. Reeder synced over iCloud with an OPML export every now and then keeps it so I’m not reliant on a central service and can run it all locally should I choose.

Anyone using Feedly, or equivalent, hasn’t learnt the lessons of Google Reader. Manage it yourself, don’t rely on a central service that’s going to do creepy monitoring on you to power their AI model.