On March 29, 2019, CfA released a new report, Google’s Diplomatic Edge, documenting how Google selfishly – and perhaps misleadingly – involved itself in some of America’s thorniest foreign policy engagements for the apparent purpose of opening new markets for its products.
On February 25, 2019, CfA released a new report, Academic for Hire, revealing that a lawyer for the payday lending industry, Hilary Miller, funded, designed, and edited an academic study defending the payday lending industry. Mr. Miller, the chairman of the Consumer Credit Research Foundation worked closely with Kennesaw State University Professor Jennifer Priestley to develop a study for the payday lending industry to use to lobby against government regulations that would have protected consumers from payday lenders.
On January 16, 2019, CfA released a new report, Capturing the Classroom: How Google Sidestepped School Authorities to Push its Products into Schools, documenting how Google’s products invaded the American K-12 education system with the help of teacher-evangelists, the EdTech industry, and taxpayer dollars.
On December 10, 2018, CfA released a new report, Quitting Google, showing it is virtually impossible to avoid Google’s omnipresent tracking despite the company’s claims that “competition is just a click away.” In conjunction with the report, CfA released a new browser extension that alerts users when Google products are tracking them online.
On September 26, 2018, CfA released a new report, "The New Corporate Colonialism," which comprehensively documents BlackRock’s efforts to expand its infrastructure business in Mexico through aggressive courtship of Mexican political leaders and organizations mired in corruption and conflict of interest scandals.
On September 4, 2018, CfA released a report documenting how CfA bought politically divisive ads on Google using Russian rubles and a Russian IP address. CfA posed as the infamous Russian troll farm, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), and bought ads using similar language and the same images that the IRA deployed during its 2016 influence campaign. The ads ran on major U.S. media websites and their YouTube channels.
On August 27, 2018, CfA released a new report detailing how BlackRock – the world’s largest asset manager – appears to have been intimately involved not only in advising the Trudeau government about the creation of its Canada Infrastructure Bank, a government-backed financial institution championed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but also in the government’s appointment of key Bank personnel and staff. The new revelations add to the growing conflict of interest concerns surrounding the Bank’s creation and provide new evidence for those calling for a full investigation of BlackRock’s advisory role with the Trudeau government.
On August 14, 2018, CfA released a new report, “Partisan Programming,” detailing how political campaigns utilize embedded staffers from Facebook and Google to help run their campaigns – an arrangement that provides companies with unique access to top politicians.
On June 26, 2018, CfA released the results of a new poll showing voters support increased regulation of internet and technology companies. The poll also found that Americans believe internet and technology companies have a negative impact on many aspects of society, particularly privacy.
On May 30, 2018, CfA released a new report, “The Lobbyist in the Garage,” revealing that Engine, a San Francisco-based nonprofit claiming to represent the “voice of startups in government,” is little more than an apparent AstroTurf lobbying group created by current and former Google employees to advance Google’s interests.