"Don't be evil" was Google's motto for years. Now it's "Do the right thing." Evil is just evil.. but the "right thing" is more slippery. The right thing for whom? The shareholders or the user, forced to use Google software on their mobile phone unless it's an Apple i-Phone, or school-issued Chromebooks.
I use a Chromebook, because it's the safest computer available. The operating system cannot be hacked or modified, as it's on a protected partition, and is verified on every bootup. But in 2019, I reported a bug in Chrome where the time stamps on files moved from a phone are off by hours. The ISO 8601 standard for time stamps (for 40 years) is that time stamps are LOCAL time with a flag that shows the time difference from UTC or Greenwich Mean Time
<time> T141312-6 is 2:13 p.m. and 12 seconds LOCAL TIME and -6 shows that my LOCAL TIME is UTC minus 6 hours. But somebody at Google thought 2:13 p.m. was Greenwich Time and the time stamp needs to have 6 hours subtracted to be LOCAL TIME.
People have gone to prison for murder, or gone free - on time stamps on selfies and text messages. "Here is a selfie he made at home - with geolocation tag - he could not have POSSIBLY murdered a woman in Austin and be home in Dallas, 200 miles (320 km) away 15 minutes later" But he could in 6 HOURS and 15 minutes.
This is a big friggin deal in a few cases. 3 years ago, I noticed photos I made of items at an auction inspection were time stamped 6 hours before I got there. I reported this to Google (I have a business plan with phone support) The guy got his supervisor on and said "WOW, that's a serious bug" with highest priority and would be rolled out as an update as soon as it was fixed, without waiting for the next official release of Chrome. It was fixed in an update a few days later. But yesterday I was moving some photos to an archive, and noticed that photos obviously made in daytime were stamped as taken before sunrise, and it started doing this on everything after January 1, 2022
Today, Nov. 10, 2023 I took a test photo of the clock on my wall at 7:44 AM and the time stamp shows 1:44 AM. So this is giving 6 hour early timestamps for nearly 2 years. I looked on the official Chrome help pages, and there are DOZENS of people reporting this problem. This post from a user in India , 5 1/2 hours AHEAD of Greenwich time, reports time stamps 5 1/2 hours in the future, as if he were in Los Angeles. But look at the bottom...EVERY post reporting what a Google supervisor called "WOW That's a serious bug" has no answer from Google, and "This question is locked and replying has been disabled"
I have seen this, and DONE this at General Dynamics, on an automatic test station for the F-16 program. A test sequence I wrote was supposed to indicate a failure and go on to the next test. Instead it indicated a failure and STOPPED. An END where it should have been GOTO. That simple fix on the local copy of the software at Hill Air Force Base didn't get made to the source code, and the bug came back when they got master versions of the file. Embarrassing. But the day I got the report that the problem was back, I worked until 9 p.m. to get a new disk mastered and sent to Hill Air Force Base where they had it the next day. (These were HP removable hard disks the size of a large pizza...I think they held 20 MB)
But here we have people reporting this time stamp bug, and the discussion is shut down....This is not just an oversight -- it is their POLICY. I can only describe it as EVIL
99.99% of Chrome users don't notice this or care. Until you are suspected of a crime and the police start looking through your devices.
