The title of this post is the headline from a story in today's Wall Street Journal (non-firewall version here), detailing how the largest web search engines are starting to make changes to how they handle the data collected from their…
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Facebook Forces You to Describe Your Friendships (with 14 convenient labels)
Over the past few months, I've grown to be a fan of Facebook (here's my public profile). I'm not sure why, but there seems to be quite a few of my professional colleagues on this social network, and I've come…
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Google’s Chief Privacy Counsel: “Don’t trust fat businessmen”
I'm paraphrasing from this odd letter Peter Fleischer sent to the Financial Times in response to a fashion article about men's suits & ties. The key passage: Men should lose their "business attire" and wear T-shirts to work. Wouldn't you…
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Ask.com To Allow Users to Control Data Retention
In a bold, unilateral move, the web search engine Ask.com has announced it will soon be implementing a new product called AskEraser which promises to allow users to erase their search history: With AskEraser, people can ensure that their search…
SDP2007 Presentation: The Quest for the Perfect Search Engine
Today I gave an abbreviated presentation of my dissertation research at the OII Summer Doctoral Programme hosted by the Berkman Center. (PDF of slides) Along with a summary of the diss, my talk included a brief meta-discussion of both the…
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Microsoft Seeks to Use Application and Hard Drive Data to Sell Ads
Taking contextual advertising to the next logical level, it has been reported that a recent patent filing indicates Microsoft want to develop an advertising framework that uses applications and data on one's computer, rather than one's actions on the Web,…
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Google’s Cookie to have 2 Year Expiration (Because it is of little value after that time)
Google announced today they are changing the expiration date of their cookie from 2038 (the latest possible date) to a rolling 2 year period. Once put into action, users who visit Google today, for example, will receive a cookie that…
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More of Peter Fleischer Misleading on Google Data Retention
Google's Peter Fleischer is (again) trying to provide justifications for Google's retention of users' search activities. He (again) is misleading. I don't have a lot of free time right now for an in-depth response, (my analysis is here) which is…
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Social Network Migration, Aggregation, and SocialStream
There's been an interesting thread on the AoIR mailing list lately about the possibilities of social network migration and aggregation. One list member longed for aggregation: I wonder if we would see a sort of a social network aggregator developed…
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Map of Google Products
Philipp Lenssen points to this amazing visualization of the interconnections among Google's diverse products and services. I think the connections are meant to denote how various products interact (you can create Google Alerts from within Google News) or otherwise support…
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