Dr. Mercola Interviews the Experts

This article is part of a weekly series in which Dr. Mercola interrogations numerous experts on a variety of health controversies. To appreciate more professional interrogations, click here.

Robert Epstein, who had obtained his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1981 and performed as the onetime editor in chief at Psychology Today, is now a elderly study psychologist for the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology, where for the last decade he has helped expose Google’s manipulative and misleading rehearses. He explains what got him interested in investigating the internet search monopoly in the first place:

“In 2012, January 1st, I received some emails from Google saying my website contained malware and that they were somehow blocking access. This intends I had come onto one of Google’s blacklists.

My website did contain some malware. It was pretty easy to get rid of, but it turns out it’s hard to get off of a Google blacklist. That’s a big problem. I started looking at Google precisely a little differently.

I wondered, first of all, why they were notifying me about this rather than some government agency or some nonprofit organization? Why was a private firm notifying me?

In other words, who reached Google sheriff of the internet? Second, I learned they had no customer service department, which seemed very strange, so if you have a problem with Google, then you have a problem because they don’t help you solve the problem.

I learned too that although you can get onto a blacklist in a split second, it can take weeks to get off a blacklist. There ought to have enterprises that have gotten onto their blacklists and have gone out of business while they’re trying to straighten out the problem.

The thing that really caught my eye — because I’ve been a programmer my totality life — was I couldn’t figure out how they were blocking access to my website , not only through their own concoctions … Google.com, the search engine, or through Chrome, which is their browser, but through Safari, which is an Apple product, through Firefox, which is a browser run by Mozilla, a nonprofit organization.

How was Google blocking access through so many different means? The moment is I time started to get more strange about the company, and later in 2012, I happened to be looking at a ripening literature, which was about the dominance of exploration ranks to impact marketings.

This was in the marketing plain and it really was startling. In other names, if you could push yourself up one more notch in their search results, that could manufacture the difference between success or default for your firm; it could mean a lot more income.

It turns out that this initial research used to say that parties really trust those higher ranked search results. I simply expected a question. I was questioned whether, if beings rely those higher rank search results, I could use search results to influence people’s beliefs, maybe even their votes.”

What Epstein discovered through his subsequent research, which started on 2013, is that yes, biased search results can indeed be used to influence public opinion and sway undecided voters. What’s more, the strength of that influence was shocking.

He likewise eventually detected how Google is able to block website access on browsers other than their own. His findings was released in 2016 in U.S. News& World Report. 1

Google’s Powers Pose Serious Threats to Society

Google’s superpowers constitute three specific threats to society 😛 TAGEND

1. They’re a surveillance organization with significant yet disguised surveillance strengths. As pointed out by Epstein 😛 TAGEND

“The search engine … Google Wallet, Google Docs, Google Drive, YouTube, these are surveillance programmes. In other names, from their perspective, the value these tools have is they give them more information about you. Surveillance is what they do.”

2. They’re a ban organization with the ability to restrict or block be made available to websites across the internet, thus deciding what people can and cannot consider. They even have the ability to block access to entire countries and the internet as a whole.

The most vanquishing difficulty with this kind of internet censorship is that you don’t know what you don’t know. If a certain type of information is removed from search, and you don’t know it should exist somewhere, you’ll never “re looking for” it. And, when searching for information online, how would you know that specific websites or sheets have been removed from the search results in the first place? The answer is, you don’t.

For example, Google has been investing in DNA storehouses for quite a long time, and are adding DNA information to our profiles. According to Epstein, Google has taken over the national DNA repository, but commodities about that — which he has cited in his own writings — has already been faded.

3. They have the power to manipulate public opinion through exploration rankings and other means.

“To me, that’s the scariest orbit, ” Epstein says, “because Google is forming the rulings, reputing, ideas, attitudes, acquisitions and polls of millions of parties around the world without anyone knowing that they’re doing so … and perhaps even more shocking, without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.

They’re expending new techniques of manipulation that have never existed before in human history and they are for the most part, subconscious … but they don’t induce minuscule alterations.

They raise immense alters in people’s thinking, very rapidly. Some of the techniques I’ve detected are among the largest behavioral outcomes ever was found in the behavioral sciences.”

While surveillance is Google’s primary business, their revenue — which outdoes $ 130 billion a year — comes almost exclusively from marketing. All that personal information you’ve specified them through their many makes is sold to advertisers looking for a specific target audience.

How Google Can Shift Your Perception Without Your Knowledge

Epstein’s insured, randomized, double-blind and compensated experiments have discovered a number of different ways in which Google can shift public knowledge. The first upshot he detected is called SEME, which stands for search engine manipulation effect. For a full description of the basic experiment used to identify this influence, please listen to the interview.

In summary, the aim of his experimentation was to see whether search results biased toward a particular political candidate would be capable of shifting users’ political sentiment and bents.

“I had prophesied, when we firstly did this, that we would get a shift, ” Epstein says, “because … parties do trust higher ranked search results, and of course we had biased the search results so that, if in that first group, someone was clicking on a high-ranking search result, that would connect them to a webpage which spawned one candidate look much better than the other …

I prophesied we could get a shift in voting penchants of 2% to 3 %. I was way off. We get … a transformation of 48 %, which I meditated must be an error because that’s crazy …

I should note that in almost all of our experimentations, especially those early ones, we intentionally employed undecided voters. That’s the key. You can’t readily push the rulings or electing preferences of people who are partisan, who are strongly committed to one party or the other, but people who are undecided, those are the people who are very vulnerable. In our experimentations, we ever find a way to use undecided voters.

In these early experimentations, the style we be ensured that our voters were undecided was by employ beings from the U.S. as our members, but the election we chose was the 2010 referendum for the prime minister of Australia.

They’re real nominees, a real election, real search results, real webpages, and of course, because our players were from the U.S. they were not familiar with the candidates.

In fact, that’s why, before they do the search, we get this almost perfect 50/50 divide seeing who they’re going to vote for, because they don’t know these candidates. The knowledge they’re getting from the search, that, presumably, is why we get a shift.”

Simple Trick Effectively Masks Search Bias

Another thing Epstein noticed was that very few seemed to realize they were hear biased search results. In other paroles, the manipulation extended virtually undetected.

In a second experiment, they were able to achieve a 63% switch in voter preference, and by masking the bias — simply by inserting a pro-opponent result here and there — they were able to hide the bias from almost everyone.

“In other statements, we could get gargantuan shiftings in minds and voting predilections with no one being able to detect the bias in the search results we were showing them, ” Epstein says. “This is where, again, it starts to get terrifying. Scarier still is when we moved on to do a national study of more than 2,000 beings in all 50 states.”

What this large-scale investigation discovered is that the few who actually notice the bias are not protected from its effects. Curiously, they actually shift even further toward the bias, rather than away from it.

As evidenced by other studies, the pattern of clinks is crucial that does research bias so powerful: 50% of all pursuing selections go to the top two parts and 95% of all clicks go to the firstly sheet of search results.

“In other terms, beings deplete most of their time clicking on and construe material that comes from high-ranking search results. If those high-ranking search results favor one candidate, that’s pretty much all they ensure and that impacts their opinions and their voting preferences, ” Epstein says.

Subsequent ventures revealed that this click pattern is the result of conditioning. Most of the things people search for are simple matters such as local brave or the capital of a country. The most appropriate and correct answer is always at the very top. This provisions them to assume that the best and truest answer is always “the worlds largest” high-ranked listing.

Google May Have Shifted Millions of Poll in 2016 Ballots

The ramifications of the search engine manipulation effect can be immense. Of direction, having strength to change public opinion is one thing; actually consuming that power is another. So, Epstein’s next target was to determine whether Google is using its capability of force or not.

“Early 2016, I set up the first-ever monitoring system, which allowed me to look over the shoulders of people as they were conducting election-related pursuits on Google, Bing and Yahoo in the months leading up to the 2016 general elections. I had 95 province negotiators( as we call them ), in 24 states.

We stopped their identities secret, which took a lot of work. And “its exactly”, by the way, what the Nielsen company does to generate ratings for video testifies. They have various thousand homes. Their names are secret. They equip the families with special containers, which earmark Nielsen to tabulate what curricula they’re watching …

Inspired by the Nielsen model, we banked our battlefield workers, we furnished them with habit passive application. In other texts , no one could detect the fact that the government has the software in their computers. But that software allowed us to look over their shoulders as they attended poll pertained examinations …

We purposed up perpetuating 13,207 election-related examines and the nearly 100,000 webpages to which the search results relation … After the election, we rated the webpages for bias, either pro-Clinton or pro-Trump … and then we did an analysis to see whether there was any bias in the search results parties were viewing.

The makes we got were crystal clear, highly significant statistically … at the 0.001 degree. What that says is we can be confident the bias we were seeing was real, and it didn’t occur because of some random factors. We ascertained a pro-Clinton bias in all 10 pursuit situates on the first sheet of Google search results, but not on Bing or Yahoo.

That’s very important. So, there was a significant pro-Clinton bias on Google. Because of the experiments I had been doing since 2013, I was also able to calculate how many elects could only changed with that level of bias … At bare minimum, about 2.6 million[ undecided] votes would have shifted to Hillary Clinton.”

On the high-pitched outcome, Google’s biased search results may have altered as many as 10.4 million undecided voters toward Clinton, which is no tiny stunt — all without anyone realizing they’d been influenced, and without leaving a draw for the authorities to follow.

According to Epstein’s plannings, tech business, Google being the main one, can change 15 million polls leading up to the 2020 election, which means they have the potential to select the next president of United States.

Google Has the Power to Determine 25% of Global Ballot

Many who look at Epstein’s work end up focusing on Google’s ability to influence U.S. politics, but the problem is much bigger than that.

“As I interpreted when I certified before Congress, the reason why I’m speaking out about these issues is because, first and foremost, I … think it’s important that we prolong democracy and cure the free and fair election. To me, it’s fairly straight forward.

But the problem is much bigger than elections or democracy or the United States. Because I calculated back in 2015 that … Google’s search engine — because more than 90% of explorations worldwide are conducted on Google — was establishing the outcomes of upwards of 25% of the national elections in the world.

How can that be? Well, it’s because a lot of elections are very close. And that’s the key to understanding this. In other words, we actually looked at the winning perimeters in national elections various regions of the world, which tend to be very close. In that 2010 Australian election, for example, the prevail perimeter was something like 0.2% …

If the results they’re getting on Google are biased toward one candidate, that alters a lot of referendums among undecided parties. And it’s very, very simple for them to flip an election or … rig an election … It’s particularly, quite simple for Google to do that.

They can do it intentionally, which is kind of scary. In other statements, some top executives at Google could decide who they want to win an election in South Africa or the U.K. or anywhere. It “couldve been” time a crook hire at Google who does it. You may think that’s inconceivable …[ but] it’s improbably simple …

[ A] senior software engineer at Google, Shumeet Baluja, who’s been at Google virtually since the very beginning, produced a novel that no one’s ever heard of called ‘The Silicon Jungle’ … It’s fictional, but it’s about Google, and the strength that individual employees at Google have to induce or end any company or any individual.

It’s a fantastic fiction. I queried Baluja how Google let him “re going away” with publishing it and he said, ‘Well, they started me predict I would never promote it.’ That’s why no one’s ever heard of this book.”

A Dictator Unlike Anything the World Has Ever Known

Another, and even more frightening possibility, is that Google could allow its biased algorithm to favor one candidate over another without caring about which candidate is being favored.

“That’s the scariest possible, ” Epstein says, “because now you’ve got an algorithm, a computer program, which is an idiot … end who patterns us. It’s crazy.”

While this sounds like it should be illegal, it’s not, because there are no laws or regulations that restrict or prescribe how Google must grade its search results. Courtrooms has already been concluded that Google is simply exercising its right to free speech, even though they are that conveys destroying the businesses they reduce in their examination enumerates or black listings.

The only way to protect ourselves from this kind of hidden influence is by setting up monitoring programs such as Epstein’s all over the world. “As a species, it’s the only way we can protect ourselves from new types of online engineerings that can be used to influence us, ” he says. “No dictator anywhere has ever had even a small fraction of the ability that this company has.”

Epstein is also pushing for government to do the Google search index a public commons, which would enable other companies to create participating search platforms squandering Google’s database. While Google’s search engine cannot be broken up, its monopoly would be impeded by impel it to hand over its index to other rummage pulpit developers.

The Influence of Search Suggestions

In 2016, Epstein too discovered the impressive force of search suggestions — the suggested explorations shown in a drop-down menu when you begin to type a search term. This aftermath is now known as the search suggestion effect or SSE. Epstein clarifies 😛 TAGEND

“Initially the idea was they were going to save you period. That’s the action they presented this new feature. They were going to anticipate, based on your history, or based on what other parties are sought for, what it is you’re looking for so you don’t have to type the whole thing. Just click on one of the suggestions. But then it changed into something else. It changed into a tool for manipulation.

In June 2016, a small news organization … discovered that it was virtually impossible to get negative hunting suggestions related to Hillary Clinton, but easy to get them for other beings including Donald Trump. They were very concerned about this because maybe that could influence parties somehow.

So, I tried this myself, and I have a wonderful image that I continued establishing this. I typed in ‘Hillary Clinton is’ on Bing and on Yahoo, and I get those long listings, eight and 10 items, saying, ‘Hillary Clinton is the devil. Hillary Clinton is sick’ … all negative things that parties have effectively sought for.

How do I know that? Because we checked Google tends. Google directions shows you what people are actually sought for. Sure fairly, people have effectively searching for all these negative things related to Hillary Clinton. Those[ were] the most popular search periods.

So, we tried it on Google and we got, ‘Hillary Clinton is winning, Hillary Clinton is awesome.’ Now you check those mottoes on Google trends and you find no one is searching for ‘Hillary Clinton is awesome.’ Nobody. Not one. But that’s what they’re showing you in their rummage suggestions.

That again got my research paraphernaliums flowing. I started doing experiments because I said, ‘Wait a hour, why would they do this? What is the point? ‘

Here’s what I is located within a series of ventures: Just by manipulating scour suggestions, I could turn a 50/50 separate among undecided voters into a 90/10 split — with no one having the slightest doctrine that they’ve been manipulated.”

YouTube’s Up Next Algorithm

YouTube, which is owned by Google, also has gargantuan force on public opinion. Harmonizing to Epstein, 70% of the videos parties deem on YouTube are suggested by Google’s top secret Up Next algorithm, which recommends videos for you to view whenever you’re watching a video.

Just like the search suggestions, this is a phenomenally effective ephemeral manipulation tool. There’s no record of the videos recommended by the algorithm, yet it can take you down the proverbial rabbit flaw by feeding you one video after another.

“There are documented lawsuits now in which beings have been converted to extreme Islam or to white supremacy, literally because they’d been attracted down a rabbit loophole by a string of videos on YouTube, ” Epstein says.

“Think of that dominance. Again, it’s not powerful for people who already have strong minds. It’s powerful for the people who don’t, the people who are vulnerable, the people who are undecided or uncommitted. And that’s a lot of people.”

The Creepy Line

Most beings now have Amazon Prime. If you are one of those who do, you can watch the following documentary for free on Prime. It is well worth your time to do so. Epstein and many other experts cater a exceedingly impelling overview of the dangers that we discuss in our interrogation. In my opinion, this is a must-watch and one to recommend to your friends and family.

A question Epstein grows is, “Who devoted this private company, which is not accountable to any of us, the ability to determine what billions of beings around the world will see or will not see? ”

That is perhaps one of the biggest topics. Epstein and others attempt to answer this question in this documentary, “The Creepy Line, ” which is a direct quote from Google’s manager chairperson Eric Schmidt.

“Traditional media have very serious constraints placed on them, but Google, which is far more penetrating and much more effective at influencing beings, has none of these constraints, ” Epstein says.

“There are lots of good beings in[ ‘The Creepy Line’ ], lots of good data, and it excuses my study very clearly, which is wonderful. It excuses my research better than I illustrate my study. ‘The Creepy Line’ is available on iTunes and on Amazon. I think it costs$ 3 or$ 4 to watch … If you’re an Amazon Prime Member it’s free. It’s an excellent film.”

Google Runs a Total Surveillance State

In his article2 “Seven Simple Steps Toward Online Privacy, ” Epstein delineates his recommendations for protecting your privacy while surfing the web, the majority of members of which don’t expensed anything. You can access the section at: MySevenSimpleSteps.com

“My first sentence is ‘I have not received a targeted ad on my computer or mobile phone since 2014. ‘ Most beings are scandalized by that because they’re bombarded with targeted ads constantly.

More and more parties are telling me that they’re only having a conversation with person, so they’re not even doing anything online per se, but their phone is nearby — or they’re having a conversation in their home and they have Amazon Alexa or Google Home, these personal assistants — and the next thing they know they start get targeted ads related to what they were talking about.

This is the surveillance question … The spot is that there are ways to use the internet, tablets and mobile phones, to preserve or protect your privacy, but almost no one does that. So, the fact is that we’re now being surveilled 24/7, generally speaking, with no awareness that we’re even being surveilled.

Maybe some people are aware that when they do inquiries on Google the search history is preserved forever … But it goes so far beyond that because now we’re being surveilled through personal assistants, so that when we speak, we’re being[ surveilled ].

It goes even beyond that, because a few years ago Google bought the Nest company, which makes a smart thermostat. After they bought the company, they threw microphones into the smart thermostats, and the latest versions of the smart thermostats have microphones and cameras.

Google has been issued patents in recent years, which give them, basically, ownership rights over ways of analyzing dins that are picked up by microphones in people’s residences.

They can hook you up with dentists, they can hook you up with copulation therapists, with mental health services, affair instructs, et cetera. So, there’s that. Location tracking has also gotten totally out of hand. We’ve learned in recent months that even though you disable location tracking … on your mobile phone, you’re still being tracked.”

This is one of the reasons I strongly recommend that you use a VPN on your cellphone and computer, as this will foreclose virtually anyone from moving and targeting you. There are many out there but I am squandering the one Epstein recommends, Nord VPN, which is only about$ 3 per month and you can use it on up to six inventions. In my view, this is a must if you seek to preserve your privacy.

How Google Tracks You Even When You’re Offline

You can learn a lot about a person by tracking their fluctuations and whereabouts. Most of us are very naive about these things. As explained by Epstein, location tracking technology has become incredibly sophisticated and aggressive.

Android cellphones, for example, which are a Google-owned operating system, can track you even when you’re not connected to the internet, whether you have geo tracking enabled or not.

“It precisely gets creepier and creepier, ” Epstein says. “Let’s say you pull out your SIM card. Let’s say you disconnect from your mobile “providers “, so you’re perfectly isolated. You’re not connected to the internet. Guess what? Your phone is still tracking everything you do on that phone and it’s still moving your location.”

As soon as you reconnect to the internet, all that information stored in your phone is sent to Google. So, even though you may think you’ve simply expended the day incognito, the moment you reconnect, every step you’ve drew is shared( specified you had your phone with you ).

In terms of online tracking, it’s also important to realize that Google is moving your motions online even if you’re not applying their makes, because most websites use Google Analytics, which ways everything you do on that website. And, you have no way of knowing whether a website exercises Google Analytics or not.

Steps to Protect Your Online Privacy

To protect your privacy, Epstein recommends taking the following steps, seven of which are outlined in “Seven Simple Steps Toward Online Privacy.” The last one, Fitbit, is a recently released concern.

Use a virtual private network( VPN) such as Nord, which is only about$ 3 per month and can be used on up to six devices. In my view, this is a must if you seek to preserve your privacy. Epstein excuses 😛 TAGEND

“When you use your mobile phone, laptop or desktop in the usual way, your identity is simple for Google and other companies to see. They can see it via your IP address, but more and more, there are much more sophisticated roads now that they know it’s you. One is called browser fingerprinting.

This is something that is so disturbing. Basically, the kind of browser you have and the action you use your browser is like a fingerprint. You use your browser in a peculiar path, and really by the way you type, these companies now can instantaneously identify you.

Brave has some protection from a browser fingerprinting, but you really need to be using a VPN. What a VPN does is it routes whatever you’re do through some other computer somewhere else. It can be anywhere in the world, and there are hundreds of companionships offering VPN assistances. The one I like very good right now is called Nord VPN.

You download the application, set it, just like you install any software. It’s unbelievably easy to use. You do not have to be a techie to use Nord, and it shows you a delineate of the world and you mostly time click on a country.

The VPN basically forms it appear as though your computer is not your computer. It basically causes a kind of fake identity for you, and that’s a good thing. Now, very often I will go through Nord’s computers in the United Commonwealth. Sometimes you have to do that, or you can’t get certain things done. PayPal doesn’t like you to be in a foreign country for example.”

Nord, when used on your cellphone, will also mask your identity when using apps like Google Maps.

Do not use Gmail, as every email you write is permanently collected. It becomes part of your sketch and is used to build digital prototypes of you, which allows them to constitute projections about your wire of thoughts and every demand and longing.

Many other older email systems such as AOL and Yahoo are also being used as surveillance programmes in the same way as Gmail. ProtonMail.com, which applies end-to-end encryption, is a great alternative and the basic account is free.

Don’t use Google’s Chrome browser, as everything you do on there is surveilled, including keystrokes and every web page you’ve ever called. Brave is a great alternative that makes privacy gravely.

Brave is also faster than Chrome, and squelches ads. It’s based on Chromium, the same software infrastructure that Chrome is based on, so you can easily transfer your expansions, favorites and bookmarks.

Don’t use Google as your search engine, or any propagation of Google, such as Bing or Yahoo, both of which describe search results from Google. The same exits for the iPhone’s personal assistant Siri, which shows all of its answers from Google.

Alternative search engines suggested by Epstein include SwissCows and Qwant. He recommends shunning StartPage, as it was recently bought by an vigorous online market companionship, which, like Google, depends on surveillance.

Don’t use an Android cellphone, for all the reasons discussed above. Epstein uses a Blackberry, which is more secure than Android telephones or the iPhone. Blackberry’s upcoming model, the Key3, will be one of the most secure cellphones in the world, he says.

Don’t use Google Home designs in your home or apartment. These machines record everything that occurs in your home, both addres and sounds such as covering your teeth and simmering irrigate, even when they appear to be inactive, and mail that knowledge back to Google. Android phones are also always listening and recording, as are Google’s home thermostat Nest, and Amazon’s Alexa.

Clear your cache and cookies. As Epstein asks in his article: 3

“Companies and intruders of all sorts are incessantly setting invasive computer code on your computers and mobile devices, mainly to keep an eye on you but sometimes for more nefarious roles.

On a mobile invention, you can clear out most of this debris by going to the trains menu of your browser, selecting the ‘privacy and security’ option and then clicking on the icon that clears your cache and cookies.

With most laptop and desktop browsers, hold to three keys simultaneously — CTRL, SHIFT and DEL — takes you directly to the relevant menu; I use this technique multiple times a day without even “re thinking of” it. You can also configure the Brave and Firefox browsers to kill your cache and cookies automatically each time you close your browser.”

Don’t use Fitbit, as it was recently purchased by Google and will provide them with all your physiological information and activity levels, in addition to everything else that Google once has on you.

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