It’s something that everyone who works in the tech space will be thinking about. What will Google be expending its energy on in 2015. Search, robotics, and internet connectivity are givens, but it’ll also spend a lot of time trying to reform surveillance.
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The internet giant has launched a special page on its Take Action hub, asking people to sign a petition aimed at making the internet more secure for everyone.
“At the end of 2014,” it says, “surveillance reform came very close to passing in the US Congress. The voices of Take Action helped get us this far”.
Read more: Edward Snowden: we all need to fight government surveillance [SXSW]
Next year, Goole says, it’s looking to take on some forms of invasive legislation which have been in place since the September 11 attacks of 2001:
In June of 2015, we have a huge chance to protect Americans from mass surveillance when a key part of the USA PATRIOT Act is set to expire. That means we need to be ready to take action this coming year.
As TechCrunch notes, Google has seriously ramped up its political efforts in recent years and is now one of the biggest poltical spenders in the US.
From a PR perspective, taking on surveillance is also pretty good move by Google. Its image took a serious dent in the wake of revelations by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden which suggested that it, along with other major US tech companies including Facebook and Microsoft, had handed over information on its users to the US intelligence agency.
