Google gets £2.1 billion fine for hidigin ProtonMail in search results!

in #privacy7 years ago (edited)

ProtonMail is one of most know secure and not logging anything email services.

Since they were a company that never allowed their users data to leak Google started to not showing them in results for searches like "encrypted email" "secure email".

Now after year and court case - Google has to pay 2.1 billions pounds to this guys.

The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding ProtonMail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because ProtonMail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
When ProtonMail launched in Beta back in May 2014, our community rapidly grew as people from around the world came together and supported us in our mission to protect privacy in the digital age. Our record breaking crowdfunding campaign raised over half a million dollars from contributors and provided us with the resources to make ProtonMail competitive against even the biggest players in the email space.
By the summer of 2015, ProtonMail passed half a million users and was the world’s most well known secure email service. ProtonMail was also ranking well in Google search at this time, on the first or second page of most queries including “encrypted email” and “secure email”. However, by the end of October 2015, the situation had changed dramatically, and ProtonMail was mysteriously no longer showing up for searches of our two main keywords.
Between the beginning of the summer and the fall of 2015, ProtonMail did undergo a lot of changes. We released ProtonMail 2.0, we went fully open source, we launched mobile apps in beta, and we updated our website, changing our TLD from .ch to the more widely known .com. We also doubled in size, growing to nearly 1 million users by the fall. All of these changes should have helped ProtonMail’s search rankings as we became more and more relevant to more people.
In November 2015, we became aware of the problem and consulted a number of well known SEO experts. None of them could explain the issue, especially since ProtonMail has never used any blackhat SEO tactics, nor did we observe any used against us. Mysteriously, the issue was entirely limited to Google, as this anomaly was not seen on any other search engine. Below are the search rankings for ProtonMail for ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’ taken at the beginning of August 2016 across all major search engines. We rank on either page 1 or 2 everywhere except Google where we are not ranked at all.

So think twice before you think big G or big F dont track you or dont make you see world as they se fit.

ProtonMail im using since years it was alwas been amazing and i suggest you to join. Just now due to a lot of spam they need SMS verification.

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It's just showing how far are corporations ready to go. They are controlling the market, the media, governments, everything. Crypto and blockchain is the last stronghold of liberty online. Twitter and Facebook are also getting more and more censored. I'm glad I have switched my contacts and my interests to networks like this and the blockchain.

And... 2 billions is nothing for Google.

You see the world the way they want you to see it..

Crazy stuff. Thanks so much for taking the time to share information like this with the community! I think people's awareness for how influential big internet companies can be and what this means for their real lives needs to grow fast.

They manipulate wherever they can.

Google and Google+ have been censoring content for years. I'm sick of it, and that's one reason I'm on Steemit.

These types of tactics will not stop. 2 billion is nothing to Google. Plus they have several other cases stacked up against them for doing other damaging things.

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