Google Dashboard Offers New Privacy Controls

Google has launched a new privacy dashboard -- technically just called Google Dashboard -- that gives users quicker access to, and more control over, the personal information stored in Google's databases. The dashboard is a one-stop shop for managing this data and the settings that are associated with the Google products you use when signed in to your Google account. "We recognize how important our users' trust is, so we're looking for ways to be more transparent," says Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google's Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety. "Over the last 11 years we've launched a [...]

Filed in: Google: Critics, Google: Dashboard, Legal: Privacy, Top News


Twitter Not Giving Access To Private Tweets

Is Twitter allowing search engines access to protected tweets or not? Not, Twitter tells me, though the company probably needs to do a bit more to prevent this type of confusion in the future. The LA Times reported yesterday about a "Twitter hole" that it believed allowed Google special access to protected tweets, tweets made from Twitter accounts where owners have deliberately chosen not to have their tweets be made public. Not so, said TechCrunch. The so-called protected tweets that the LA Times was finding in Google looked to be those made from before particular account holder [...]

Filed in: Features: General, Legal: Crawling & Indexing, Legal: Privacy, Top News, Twitter


Report: Most People Don’t Want Online Tracking Even If It Means Relevant Ads Or Savings

Get ready marketers: a credible new report with sweeping implications from the University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley is likely to be the nail in the coffin of self regulation of online advertising. Specifically I'm talking about behavioral targeting, which largely concerns online display advertising but does marginally touch search at Yahoo and Google. The NY Times discussed the report, released today: The study’s authors hired a survey company to conduct interviews with 1,000 adult Internet users. The interview, which lasted about 20 minutes, included questions like “Please tell [...]

Filed in: Google: Legal, Google: Web History & Search History, Legal: General, Legal: Privacy, Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting, Yahoo: Legal


Is Google Using A Privacy Double Standard?

There is a much longer post to be written on Google's privacy policies and its history of combatting or complying with government requests for information and those of third parties using the courts to get access to user data. But I'll take two recent items to illustrate the complexity and potential contradictions here. Google was just ordered to turn over the identity of some Gmail users pursuant to a defamation lawsuit between a Miami-based developer and a newspaper publication that tied the developer to government corruption in the Turks and Caicos Islands. According to an AP article: [...]

Filed in: Google: Legal, Legal: Privacy


Google Now Using You To Provide Traffic Data To Maps

Google is now using location-enabled mobile phones that have Maps for mobile installed to improve its real-time traffic data. According to the Google Blog: If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that's exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. [...]

Filed in: Google: Maps & Local, Google: Mobile, Google: Outside US, Legal: Privacy, Top News


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