Google says it will end Chrome Sync support for browser versions more than four years old starting in early 2025. Users running outdated Chrome versions will see error messages prompting them to update their browsers to maintain access to synced data across devices. Those unable to update to newer versions will permanently lose the syncing feature, according to the firm.

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Google will take firmer action against British businesses that use fake reviews to boost their star ratings on the search giant's reviews platform. From a report: The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Friday that Google has agreed to improve its processes for detecting and removing fake reviews, and will take action against the businesses and reviewers that post them. This includes deactivating the ability to add new reviews for businesses found to be using fake reviews, and deleting all existing reviews for at least six months if they repeatedly engage in suspicious review activity. Google will also place prominent "warning alerts" on the Google profiles of businesses using fake reviews to help consumers be more aware of potentially misleading feedback. Individuals who repeatedly post fake or misleading reviews on UK business pages will be banned and have their review history deleted, even if they're located in another country.

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US President Donald Trump blasted European Union regulators for targeting Apple, Alphabet's Google and Meta, describing theircases against American companies as "a form of taxation." From a report: The EU has established a reputation globally for its aggressive regulation of major technology companies, often sparring with major social media platforms, such as Facebook and X, over content moderation, and the likes of Apple and Google over antitrust concerns. "These are American companies whether you like it or not," Trump said in comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "They shouldn't be doing that. That's, as far as I'm concerned, a form of taxation. We have some very big complaints with the EU." Trump specifically referenced a court case that Apple lost last year over a $14.4 billion Irish tax bill. The EU's Court of Justice in Luxembourg backed a landmark 2016 decision that Ireland broke state-aid law by giving Apple an unfair advantage, requiring Ireland to claw back the money that had been sitting in an escrow account pending the final ruling.

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Google will remove URL breadcrumbs from mobile search results globally, displaying only domain names instead of the full hierarchical path marked by ">" symbols, the company said. The change affects all smartphone and tablet searches while desktop results remain unchanged. The company said it made the change because of limited screen space, noting breadcrumbs often get cut off on smaller displays.

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In the aftermath of Israel's October 2023 ground invasion of Gaza, Google reportedly worked with the Israeli military to provide AI services while racing against Amazon for contracts. This comes despite publicly denying collaboration with the military and punishing employees protesting its involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing agreement with Israel. The Verge reports: In the weeks after Hamas's October 7th attack on Israel, employees at Google's cloud division worked directly with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) -- even as the company told both the public and its own employees that Google only worked with civilian government ministries, the documents reportedly show. Weeks after the war began, an employee with Google's cloud division escalated the IDF's military's requests for access to Google's AI technology, according to the Washington Post. In another document, an employee warned that Google needed to quickly respond to the military's requests, or else Israel would turn to Amazon for its cloud computing needs. In a November 2023 document, an employee thanks a coworker for handling the IDF's request. Months later, employees requested additional access to AI tools for the IDF.

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Alphabet's Google is backing AI developer Anthropic with a further $1 billion, building its stake in one of the most promising rivals to OpenAI. From a report: The new funding comes in addition to more than $2 billion that Google has already invested in Anthropic, according to a person familiar with the deal, who asked not to be named discussing a private matter. Google has a business agreement with Anthropic that covers the use of a suite of online tools and services. Amazon counts among its biggest backers. San Francisco-based Anthropic is best known for its Claude family of large language models, which compete with OpenAI's GPT. Like its peers, the company has been raising significant sums to sustain investment in expanding its computing capabilities and keep pace in a race to advance AI. The new deal comes weeks after Bloomberg News reported that Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners that would value the startup at $60 billion.

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In 2022 Google released a tool to easily scan for vulnerabilities in dependencies named OSV-Scanner. "Together with the open source community, we've continued to build this tool, adding remediation features," according to Google's security blog, "as well as expanding ecosystem support to 11 programming languages and 20 package manager formats... Users looking for an out-of-the-box vulnerability scanning CLI tool should check out OSV-Scanner, which already provides comprehensive language package scanning capabilities..." Thursday they also announced an extensible library for "software composition analysis" scanning (as well as file-system scanning) named OSV-SCALIBR (Open Source Vulnerability — Software Composition Analysis LIBRary). The new library "combines Google's internal vulnerability management expertise into one scanning library with significant new capabilities such as: Software composition analysis for installed packages, standalone binaries, as well as source code OSes package scanning on Linux (COS, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, and much more), Windows, and Mac Artifact and lockfile scanning in major language ecosystems (Go, Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, and much more) Vulnerability scanning tools such as weak credential detectors for Linux, Windows, and Mac Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) generation in SPDX and CycloneDX, the two most popular document formats Optimization for on-host scanning of resource constrained environments where performance and low resource consumption is critical "OSV-SCALIBR is now the primary software composition analysis engine used within Google for live hosts, code repos, and containers. It's been used and tested extensively across many different products and internal tools to help generate SBOMs, find vulnerabilities, and help protect our users' data at Google scale. We offer OSV-SCALIBR primarily as an open source Go library today, and we're working on adding its new capabilities into OSV-Scanner as the primary CLI interface."

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Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely-used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. From a report: In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to "better protect" Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, without JavaScript, many Google Search features won't work properly, and that the quality of search results tends to be degraded.

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According to Axios, Google has told the EU it will not add fact checks to search results and YouTube videos or use them in ranking or removing content, despite the requirements of a new EU law. From the report: In a letter written to Renate Nikolay, the deputy director general under the content and technology arm at the European Commission, Google's global affairs president Kent Walker said the fact-checking integration required by the Commission's new Disinformation Code of Practice "simply isn't appropriate or effective for our services" and said Google won't commit to it. The code would require Google to incorporate fact-check results alongside Google's search results and YouTube videos. It would also force Google to build fact-checking into its ranking systems and algorithms. Walker said Google's current approach to content moderation works and pointed to successful content moderation during last year's "unprecedented cycle of global elections" as proof. He said a new feature added to YouTube last year that enables some users to add contextual notes to videos "has significant potential." (That program is similar to X's Community Notes feature, as well as new program announced by Meta last week.) The EU's Code of Practice on Disinformation, introduced in 2022, includes several voluntary commitments that tech firms and private companies, including fact-checking organizations, are expected to deliver on. The Code, originally created in 2018, predates the EU's new content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), which went into effect in 2022. The Commission has held private discussions over the past year with tech companies, urging them to convert the voluntary measures into an official code of conduct under the DSA. Walker said in his letter Thursday that Google had already told the Commission that it didn't plan to comply. Google will "pull out of all fact-checking commitments in the Code before it becomes a DSA Code of Conduct," he wrote. He said Google will continue to invest in improvements to its current content moderation practices, which focus on providing people with more information about their search results through features like Synth ID watermarking and AI disclosures on YouTube.

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Google has partnered with Indian startup Varaha to purchase 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide removal credits by 2030, marking its largest deal in India and the largest involving biochar, a carbon removal solution made from biomass. TechCrunch reports: The offtake agreement credits will be delivered to Google by 2030 from Varaha's industrial biochar project in the western Indian state of Gujarat, the two firms said on Thursday. [...] Biochar is produced in two ways: artisanal and industrial. The artisanal method is community-driven, where farmers burn crop residue in conical flasks without using machines. In contrast, industrial biochar is made using large reactors that process 50-60 tons of biomass daily. Varaha's project will generate industrial biochar from an invasive plant species, Prosopis Juliflora, using its pyrolysis facility in Gujarat. The invasive species impacts plant biodiversity and has overtaken grasslands used for livestock. Varaha will harvest the plant and make efforts to restore native grasslands in the region, the company's co-founder and CEO Madhur Jain said in an interview. Once the biochar is produced, a third-party auditor will submit their report to Puro.Earth to generate credits. Although biochar is seen as a long-term carbon removal solution, its permanence can vary between 1,000 and 2,500 years depending on production and environmental factors. Jain told TechCrunch that Varaha tried using different feedstocks and different parameters within its reactors to find the best combination to achieve permanence close to 1,600 years. The startup has also built a digital monitoring, reporting and verification system, integrating remote sensing to monitor biomass availability. It even has a mobile app that captures geo-tagged, time-stamped images to geographically document activities, including biomass excavation and biochar's field application. With its first project, Varaha said it processed at least 40,000 tons of biomass and produced 10,000 tons of biochar last year.

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Google is bundling its AI features into Workspace at no extra charge while raising the base subscription price by $2 to $14 per user monthly, the company said Wednesday. The move eliminates the previous $20 monthly fee for Gemini Business plan that was required to access AI tools in Gmail, Docs and other Workspace apps.

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Google is reintroducing "digital fingerprinting" in five weeks, reports Mashable, describing it as "a data collection process that ingests all of your online signals (from IP address to complex browser information) and pinpoints unique users or devices." Or, to put it another way, Google "is tracking your online behavior in the name of advertising." The UK's Information Commissioner's Office called Google's decision "irresponsible": it is likely to reduce people's choice and control over how their information is collected. The change to Google's policy means that fingerprinting could now replace the functions of third-party cookies... Google itself has previously said that fingerprinting does not meet users' expectations for privacy, as users cannot easily consent to it as they would cookies. This in turn means they cannot control how their information is collected. To quote Google's own position on fingerprinting from 2019: "We think this subverts user choice and is wrong...." When the new policy comes into force on 16 February 2025, organisations using Google's advertising technology will be able to deploy fingerprinting without being in breach of Google's own policies. Given Google's position and scale in the online advertising ecosystem, this is significant. Their post ends with a warning that those hoping to use fingerprinting for advertising "will need to demonstrate how they are complying with the requirements of data protection law. These include providing users with transparency, securing freely-given consent, ensuring fair processing and upholding information rights such as the right to erasure." But security and privacy researcher Lukasz Olejnik asks if Google's move is the biggest privacy erosion in 10 years.... Could this mark the end of nearly a decade of progress in internet and web privacy? It would be unfortunate if the newly developing AI economy started from a decrease of privacy and data protection standards. Some analysts or observers might then be inclined to wonder whether this approach to privacy online might signal similar attitudes in other future Google products, like AI... The shift is rather drastic. Where clear restrictions once existed, the new policy removes the prohibition (so allows such uses) and now only requires disclosure... [I]f the ICO's claims about Google sharing IP addresses within the adtech ecosystem are accurate, this represents a significant policy shift with critical implications for privacy, trust, and the integrity of previously proposed Privacy Sandbox initiatives. Their post includes a disturbing thought. "Reversing the stance on fingerprinting could open the door to further data collection, including to crafting dynamic, generative AI-powered ads tailored with huge precision. Indeed, such applications would require new data..." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the news.

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