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Several weeks, ago, Austria declared Google Analytics to be non-compliant with its data protection legislation.

Now France has followed suit.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission says that "Google’s dominance in ad tech supply chain harms businesses and consumers."

We had an e-mail this morning from Google about our Adsense account. That was a rabbit hole we thought we'd escaped from. But they said they owed us money so we thought we'd claim it.

That's when it all started to go very, very badly wrong.

Google is threatening to kill Android phones if users do not provide personal information.

There are several versions of the threat issued by Google where its persuasion has failed.

Google is facing two problems: first, its own message demands the information and then says it will be used to the customer's detriment and secondly, people no longer trust it.

It's pretty much an established truth that Mark Zuckerberg and his senior team cannot be trusted but their latest wheeze is of such monumental importance to everyone that's it's time every one left each and every one of various parts of the Facebook empire. Some parts will be more difficult than others, some things will involve value judgements as to the lesser evil but, at the end of the day, one keeps coming back to the fact that Facebook cannot be trusted and it's about to get worse. Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp are to become a unified surveillance and reporting tool and every user is the target.

It's the American dream: little lonely kid with only a handful of people who appear to like him talks with one or two of them and they come up with a geeky idea : let's put our college yearbook (a curiously American thing) into a database and let everyone in it tell everyone in it what they are doing, and let them read what everyone else is doing. Then, as the others, one by one, find out that the reason he's the little lonely kid is that he's a sociopathic egotistical self-absorbed autocrat, he ends up alone and somehow sitting on something that generates thousands of millions of dollars in share value. Then someone spills the saucer full of secrets and Americans are shocked out of their stupor and they don't like it.

There's a lot of dispute over exactly what constitutes "spam" with legislation influenced by the advertising and marketing industry often defining the term far more narrowly than the public at large. Whether it's legally spam or not, one thing happens far more than it should in unsolicited advertising. That thing is where the e-mail is dishonest in some respect ranging from fake senders through misleading content to out and out lies. The basic rule for recipients is simple: if a mail fails a simple test - "is it true?" - the only safe option is to bin it and block the sender.

When was the last time you logged onto Google +? With even Google's own search engine prioritising members' pages on Facebook, and G+ pages listed far, far away, if at all, one has to wonder if it's still there at all. But, apparently, it's not dead and it's not dying. It's just hovering in that netherland where MySpace, AoL and a handful of others still function at a viable level but will never (again) be stars. But it raises the question - why not run a niche service? And if you do, can you make it relevant to users instead of becoming a totalitarian environment?