The IHT reports that the Europeans officials are souring on Google. When Google began hiring in Zurich for its new engineering center in 2004, local officials welcomed Google with open arms.
But almost five years into its expansion into Europe, Google is beginning to bump up against a web of privacy laws that threaten its growth.
In Switzerland, data protection officials are quietly pressing Google to scrap plans to introduce Street View, a mapping service that provides a vivid, 360-degree, ground-level photographic panorama from any address. Swiss privacy More»

Labels: google, Privacy, Search, streetview

Microsoft today released IE8 Beta 2 for public download. The newest iteration of the browser was created around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what we’ve called ‘trustworthy’ in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services).
The new browser promises an improved tab and navigation experience. When navigating to a web site in IE8, the smart address bar searches across Favorites, History, and RSS feeds More»

Labels: browsers, internet explorer, Microsoft, msft, Privacy, usability, user experience, web, web browsers

PBS aired a 50 minutes documentary that gives an in-depth look in the world of Google and search. The narrator asks, “What if all the world’s information would be available and easy to find? What if all the news, all books, all texts, photographs and videos would be collected in one place, and made available, always and everywhere?”
This is the goal of Google, and the company seems to be realising its core mission at an amazing speed: through its popular search engine, through Google Earth, with which users can find any More»

Labels: google, Online Advertising, Privacy

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Wow! This is scary. With every Google web search, LinkedIn connection, Netflix rental, blog post, online purchase and every photo you upload online you are creating a digital finger print that will be available in hundreds of places. “Anything you put on the Internet will be grabbed, indexed, cataloged, and out of your control before you know it,” said private investigator Steven Rambam. Information More»

Labels: google, Privacy

A European Commission advisory body on data protection has said that search engines should delete data held about their users within six months reports the BBC.
The proposed rule specifieds that “Search engine providers must delete or irreversibly anonymise personal data once they no longer serve the specified and legitimate purpose they were collected for.”
Google and Yahoo anonymise user data after 18 months and MSN does the same after 13 months. The body said search companies were not “clear enough” on their data protection policy and the recommendation More»

Labels: Microsoft, Online Advertising, personalization, Privacy, Search, Yahoo

Sears came under a lot of criticism recently for disclosing users’ purchases to the public.
Here’s how it works:1) From the Sears “Manage My Home” site, www.managemyhome.com, create an account and sign in.2) On the Home menu, choose “Home Profile”. In the Search Purchase History section, choose “Find Your Products”.3) Enter the name, phone number, and street address of the customer whose purchases you wish to view. Click “Find Products”.
And voila! Sears then displays all purchases for the specific customer.

Assistant Professor, Benjamin Edelman, at the Harvard Business School, wrote extensively about this. More»

Labels: Facebook, online security, Privacy

Ask.com is looking out for its users’ privacy. The search engine currently completely disassociates search history from a user’s IP address and User ID information after 18 months. Well now, Ask.com has enabled a privacy feature called “AskEraser” that allows its users to exercise greater control over their search query history. Users can turn on AskEraser at the top right hand corner of the Ask.com site from either the homepage or a SERP page to prevent their search activity data, which includes search terms, clicks, IP address and any user/session IDs assigned to users, from being saved and to More»

Labels: Privacy, Search, search engine

If you have been following the news recently, you would have caught the outcry from Facebook users and MoveOn.org regarding Facebook’s integration of users actions onto third party sites via a news feed. However, they made some changes which turned out to not be enough. Another incident is the protests which arose against Gmail for using the content of users’ emails to target ads. Users felt that their emails were no longer private as they should have been. These examples are just some specific cases of conflict that we may see again in future - that of targeted More»

Labels: Facebook, Online Advertising, Privacy

Online activist, MoveOn.org, has launched a campaign against Facebook citing the social networking site has violated the privacy of its users by making their transactions public. Facebook is accused of using web beacons to make users’ purchase information available on partner sites via their friends’ News Feeds which means that others can see your purchases from online retailers, movie rentals, etc. MoveOn has setup an online petition for people to sign and a Facebook group, Petition: Facebook, stop invading my privacy!, for users to show their displeasure with this practice. More»

Labels: Facebook, online security, personalization, Privacy

Donald Kerr is the Deputy Director of the USA Deptartment of Intelligence. He recently suggested:
Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that. … Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,”
Some time ago I noted that online privacy is now an oxymoron. Regardless of whether one feels privacy should protected online, it won’t be and in some ways it simply can’t be protected to the More»

Labels: internet, Privacy