Leslie Burger, the president of the American Library Association is helping Google celebrate Banned Books Week, taking place this year Sept. 23-30. Her post at Google's blog encourages us to visit google.com/bannedbooks, where we can use Google Book Search to…
Read More Google Celebrates Your Freedom to Read, Unless, of Course, You’re in China
Wikipedia has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive entries. Jimmy Wales also challenged other Internet companies, including Google, to justify their claim that they could do more good than harm by co-operating with…
Read More Wikipedia Defies China’s Censors; Challenges Google
Here's a good example of the kind of information Google collects from users of its non-search products: The Washington Post is reporting that Google will comply with a Brazilian court order to release data on users of its Orkut social…
Blogging has been light lately as I'm busy (a) finalizing details for the Identity & Identification in a Networked World symposium at NYU, (b) working out the logistics for my upcoming research trip to Europe (which now also includes a…
John Battelle repeats an important concern regarding the extensive profiles search engine providers, like Google, are amassing on each user. He quotes Greg Linden's reaction to a Google paper on Bigtable, a distributed storage system: One tidbit I found curious…
Read More Google Personalized Search: Who Owns the Profiles?
A group of computer scientists from the University of Minnesota recently presented a fascinating paper "You are what you say: privacy risks of public mentions," Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information…
Read More You Are What You Say: Privacy Risks of Public Mentions
Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People For Internet Responsibility and the moderator of the PRIVACY Forum, has made an impassioned call for the formation of a working group to tackle issue of search engine history data retention, mining and sharing policies:…
Read More Lauren Weinstein Calls for Search Privacy Working Group
As concerns about the privacy of one's search engine history steadily increase, various solutions have been offered to help avoid the wholesale surveillance and aggregation of one's search queries. While most solutions rely on attempts to cloak one's IP address,…
Read More TrackMeNot Firefox Extension Obfuscates Your Search History
This San Jose Mercury News article summarizes the privacy and surveillance threats of search engines, focusing on the fact that much of the "massive amounts of data these companies collect, which can include records of the searches you make, the…
Read More What do Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft’s MSN know about you?
Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal has an extensive look at how Google might leverage their acquisition of Neven Vision to help identify and inter-connect users' various web products (blogs, forums, social networking sites, etc) that might not otherwise be…
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