Instead of following the world’s rants against President Donald Trump and his campaign’s use of Big Data, let’s look at his predecessor’s relationship with Google.

On April 22, 2016, The Intercept published ‘Google’s Remarkably Close Relationship With the Obama White House, in Two Charts’. David Dayen’s article is an eye-opener. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

Dayen pointed out the unusually close relationship between Obama’s White House and the Silicon Valley giant which benefited both parties:

Over the past seven years, Google has created a remarkable partnership with the Obama White House, providing expertise, services, advice, and personnel for vital government projects.

Precisely how much influence this buys Google isn’t always clear. But consider that over in the European Union, Google is now facing two major antitrust charges for abusing its dominance in mobile operating systems and search. By contrast, in the U.S., a strong case to sanction Google was quashed by a presidentially appointed commission.

There was no transparency about this relationship:

It’s a relationship that bears watching. “Americans know surprisingly little about what Google wants and gets from our government,” said Anne Weismann, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog organization. Seeking to change that, Weismann’s group is spearheading a data transparency project about Google’s interactions in Washington.

The Intercept and the Campaign for Accountability teamed up to find out how many times Google executives visited the White House and how this relationship worked.

The charts are at the bottom of the article. There was a lot of Google footfall during Obama’s two terms in office. The visitor data are from 2009 to 2015 and show:

White House meetings involving employees from Google, Eric Schmidt’s investment vehicle Tomorrow Ventures, and Civis Analytics, a company whose sole investor is Schmidt.

Between January 2009 and October 2015, Google staffers gathered at the White House on 427 separate occasions. All told, 182 White House employees and 169 Google employees attended the meetings, with participation from almost every domestic policy and national security player in the West Wing.

The frequency of the meetings has increased practically every year, from 32 in 2009 to 97 in 2014. In the first 10 months of 2015, which is as far as the study goes, there were 85 Google meetings.

The most frequent visitor is Johanna Shelton, one of Google’s top lobbyists in Washington — officially its director of public policy. Shelton attended meetings at the White House on 94 different occasions.

The article points out that Shelton was actually there on 128 different occasions. The discrepancy is accounted for as the visits excluded from the graph are social occasions, such as state dinners (!) and tours.

Judging from the people who went and the White House officials with whom they met:

Google’s presence as an economic force and a communications tool gives the company an interest in virtually every aspect of public policy.

Google employees met with everyone who had influence:

And they met with the president of the United States 21 separate times — five times in the first term and 16 times in the first two-plus years of the second term. Even Jill Biden and Michelle Obama have taken meetings with Google employees.

The Intercept says that the reasons for so many visits were for lobbying purposes and consulting projects.

The article says that Google did not get involved with the White House or Washington until Obama took office. The tech giant became a huge player:

It spent $16.7 million in lobbying in 2015, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and has been at or near the top of public companies in lobbying expenses since 2012.

But direct expenditures on lobbying represent only one part of the larger influence-peddling game. Google’s lobbying strategy also includes throwing lavish D.C. parties; making grants to trade groups, advocacy organizations, and think tanks; offering free services and training to campaigns, congressional offices, and journalists; and using academics as validators for the company’s public policy positions. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was an enthusiastic supporter of both of Obama’s presidential campaigns and has been a major Democratic donor.

I’m looking forward to finding out the real reason Eric Schmidt resigned a few months ago. But I digress.

The article says that the White House received consulting from Google gurus:

In just the past few years, Google has provided diplomatic assistance to the administration through expanding internet access in Cuba; collaborated with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to bring Google Fiber into public housing; used Google resources to monitor droughts in real time; and even captured 360-degree views of White House interiors …

White House officials have publicly asked Silicon Valley for aid in stopping terrorists from recruiting via social media, securing the internet of things, thwarting cyberattacks, modernizing the Defense Department, and generally updating all their technology. We can reasonably expect yet more things are being asked for behind closed doors.

I shudder to think what. Thank goodness Trump won.

Google was also an elaborate IT fixer for the Obama administration, available on demand. The article discusses the difficulties with the 2013 HealthCare.gov site:

Within weeks of the site going live, Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, his top deputy Nicole Wong (a former Google deputy general counsel), and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough held meetings with Google personnel.

In Time magazine, Steven Brill detailed one of those meetings, between Park and Gabriel Burt, the chief technology officer at Eric Schmidt’s Civis Analytics. Civis was already working on Obamacare as a vendor for Enroll America, a nonprofit tasked with getting people subscribed on the insurance exchanges. Civis used reams of data to target communities with high levels of uninsured Americans so Enroll America could contact them. But now the site where they were supposed to sign up wasn’t working. So the White House turned to Civis for help with that as well.

Eventually, Mikey Dickerson, a site-reliability engineer with Google who previously worked on the Obama campaign, got hired to fix the site. Burt and Dickerson worked together to “form a rescue squad” for HealthCare.gov, according to Time. And most of the recruits came from Google. Later, Dickerson led the U.S. Digital Service, a new agency whose mission was to fix other technology problems in the federal government. Ex-Google staffers were prevalent there as well. Dickerson attended nine White House meetings with Google personnel while working for the government between 2013 and 2014.

Meetings between Google and the White House, viewed in this context, sometimes function like calls to the IT Help Desk. Only instead of working for the same company, the government is supposed to be regulating Google as a private business, not continually asking it for favors.

Anne Weismann, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, said she hopes this information:

will help the public learn more about the company’s influence on our government, our policies, and our lives.

On April 23, 2016, the Daily Mail summarised The Intercept article and reported Google’s response to it:

Of course we’ve had many meetings at the White House over the years.

Google’s response sounded most altruistic in describing the various projects that they discussed with the Obama team, among them STEM education.

One thing is for certain. Google’s censorship campaign is alive and well, including on YouTube. Google also generates social media bots, then falsely accuses conservatives of that.

A litany of transgressions can be raised against the company. For these reasons, I hope people rethink their Google use.