Several members of Congress continued to express reservations about Google's new privacy policy after a closed-door meeting on Thursday, with one House member saying that Google's handling of sensitive medical searches may violate HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Members of the House Energy and Commerce committee grilled Pablo Chavez, Google's director of public policy, and Google attorney Michael Yang for about two hours. After the meeting, several of the Representatives expressed their unhappiness with Google's answers on a variety of privacy issues -- quest [...]

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As promised, Google has announced a way for WiFi router owners to stop Google from including them in the company's location database. The opt-out requires a change in the name of the wireless network (the SSID) to include _nomap at the end of the name. In other words, if your wireless network is named "McGeehome," you'd need to rename that to "McGeehome_nomap." (And frankly, I'd prefer you use your own last name while you're at it.) Google says this method "provides the right balance of simplicity as well as protection against abuse. Specifically, this approach helps protect against ot [...]

Related Topics: Google: Privacy | Google: Street View | Legal: Privacy

According to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal the world's largest social network is nearing a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that will subject the company to 20 years of "privacy audits." A nearly identical punishment was imposed earlier this year on Google over "deceptive privacy practices in Google’s rollout of its Buzz social network." The complaint against Facebook stems from sweeping changes to privacy settings in 2009. Several privacy advocacy groups including EPIC complained to the FTC about Facebook's actions, which made much of users' profile data [...]

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Likely sensing an opportunity after Google's recent encrypted search announcement, Ixquick -- a tiny and widely unknown search engine -- has announced that it will make SSL encryption the default on all searches. Ixquick says it became the first search engine to offer encrypted search back in 2009. In its announcement, Ixquick notes that the major search engines have recently begun to offer SSL encrypted searching. Other search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have begun to follow Ixquick's lead by offering SSL encryption. However, the privacy benefits of using SSL with other major se [...]

Related Topics: Legal: Privacy | Search Engines: IxQuick & Startpage

Google caused a major stir in the search marketing community today with the news that it will begin encrypting searches and outbound clicks by default in some situations. The move means that valuable keyword referral data will not be passed to analytics programs (including Google Analytics) when a logged-in Google user searches from Google.com. Although Google says the change will impact less than 10 percent of searchers, that's still a significant amount of keyword referral data that will now be hidden from website owners. Well, it won't be hidden if those searchers click on one of Goog [...]

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