Recently, Google notified one of our business admins to update our business listing on Google. When they went to update it, it popped up a questionnaire about COVID related updates to your business. Seemingly to help the public know what rules your business had in place. Generally pretty helpful (especially when looking for food): Most people probably feel that certain measures at restaurants are good and are willing to undertake the hassle to get good food. But are these measures applicable to all businesses? Let’s take a look at the options: These seem reasonable for most businesses. However, Ockom is 100% remote. In fact, almost all of our contracts and work is done remotely. Our employee’s are remote, our office gets rare use. And building and office management handle all of those requirements, not us. So thinking nothing of it, our admins selected the appropriate options and submitted changes. Then not less then 24hrs later, we receive notification and our listing was removed: So does this mean? What it boils down to is the largest search engine and business platform (and other things) in the world has control over what it decides to show the world. And ultimately, it can decided subjectively what it deems as “suspicious” or “disputed” and such. We see this now with Twitter, another reason Ockom moved to Parler. It’s not so much the control aspect, because by signing up, we relinquish control rights. But rather the subjective internet policing with overtones of doing what is best for society and not giving us the choice in what we the people deem wrong or bad. It simply makes that choice for us. And that is a scary place to be in www.2021. Who knows what happens in the future if one of these other attributes aren’t selected: Censored? Results conveniently obscured. Think about how people find information these days. They simply “Google it”. Billions of users use Google. So how much information is being distorted or obscured on Google (perhaps use DuckDuckGo to find out). One has better luck getting accurate and honest information from a set of “outdated” encyclopedias than they do from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia. These platforms have willing migrated into the laughable category. In case you wonder what platforms Ockom supports, take a look at our https://ockom.ghost.io/favourites/ [/favourites/]
