German journalists urged to stop using Google and Yahoo

The union representing German journalists advised its members on Thursday to stop using Google and Yahoo because of reported snooping by US and British intelligence.

"The German Federation of Journalists recommends journalists to avoid until further notice the use of search engines and e-mail services from Google and Yahoo for their research and digital communication," the union said in a statement.

It cited "scandalous" reports of interception of both companies' web traffic by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain's GCHQ.

"The searches made by journalists are just as confidential as the contact details of their sources and the contents of their communication with them," said Michael Konken, head of the union which represents about 38,000 journalists. He said there were safe alternatives for both searches and email. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the NSA had tapped directly into communications links used by Google and Yahoo to move large amounts of email and other user information between overseas data centres. It said the program was operated jointly with GCHQ.

This comes after Deutsche Telekom said earlier this month that it wanted German companies to cooperate to shield local internet traffic from foreign intelligence services, Deutsche Telekom and its partner United Internet launched an initiative dubbed "E-mail made in Germany" to protect clients' email traffic.

To be honest im surprised that any self respecting journalist ANYWHERE would use google or yahoo email services, I mean c'mon, this has been common knowledge for while now has it not?

Link

Point is most people use them for mundane purposes, searches and content whatever.
What about AOL? they were cooperative or coerced, their browser is/was quite advanced and I've noticed they are now recconmending Google chrome. I tried it for a while when AOL's browser suddenly' became sluggish a year ago or so and their search engine was less responsive to certain keywords that I know I used in the past for certain unsaved pages.
What pisses with Google chrome is that they are too nosy, when I used it even writing a post like this, it was linking keywords highlighted in blue to whatever crap, was extremely annoying, as was looking at members posts which had words that were also highlighted and linked in the same way, and bearing in mind that members also do sometimes use a word link or hyperlink.
We have no real idea of anything being safe and secure on the internet, it clearly isn't, and even worse if you use wireless.
We know big time that NSA/NCTC was sweeping the 'net, from Snowden. Anyone who thought that it was ever about JUST about terrorists is a mug. Once the NSA was in the back door, they'll want to know every single bit of information about everybody...and never mind terrorism, that's money in the bank.

There are no alternatives, that's why they use them.


Have you done a search comparison with the different search engines out there? Im sorry to say that the results you get from most search engines are horrible, more full of ads, harder to read, and less accurate than google.

The truth is Google is everywhere because they are the best at providing easy to use services that do what people need them to do.

Need to tranfer documents? Google Drive
Need a map? Google Maps
Wanna look at an area you're moving to? Google Earth
Need to find that old document emailed to you 4 years ago? Google Mail


We are victims of laziness and well executed products built to server the basic needs of basic users, which is 70% of the population.

Google says, "Get trolled Noobs" and there isn't much most of us want to do about it.