The collaborators at the important "On the Identity Trail" project in Canada were kind enough to ask me to write an essay for their blog. Here is an excerpt:Surveillance in Spheres of Mobility: Privacy, Technical Design and the Flow of…
Category: Search Engines
Deleted Gmail Subpoenaed
Michael Froomkin links to a story about a Federal Trade Commission subpoena sent to Google for the complete contents of a Gmail account, including deleted e-mail messages. (This is unrelated to the DOJ's subpoena to Google for search terms and…
Partial Victory for Google; Larger Victory for Search Engine Privacy
The court issued a decision Friday on Gonzales v. Google, the case involving a DOJ subpoena for Google search queries. (Dan Solove has excellent coverage here.) In short, the judge ruled partially in favor of the government, ordering Google to…
Read More Partial Victory for Google; Larger Victory for Search Engine Privacy
Google Won’t Let AOL Game PageRank
When the deal between Google and AOL was first announced, I (among others) complained that Google was introducing bias into their search engine results by teaching AOL how to “game” the system in order to optimize the placement of AOL…
Google’s Schmidt: “Google knows a lot about the person surfing”
At a roundtable lunch with reporters, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt remarked that he "expects advertising will be the growth engine of Google for a very long time," noting specifically that "Google ads are very targetable, because Google knows a lot…
Read More Google’s Schmidt: “Google knows a lot about the person surfing”
Podcast discussing my work
We're lucky to have Anders Albrechtslund visiting the Dept of Culture & Communication for the next week. Anders is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at Aalborg University in Denmark, where he is engaged in research on surveillance…
Google wants to “Store 100% of User Data”
Google's drive to "organize all the world's information" is no joke, and they want that to inlucde all "100% of user data" according to notes from a Google presentation found by Greg Linden: Theme 2: Store 100% of User Data…
Google Calendar Near?
It has been over a year since a Google Calendar service was first hinted at, but it seems they have now started beta-testing a product called "CL2" (screenshots here). To repeat my original privacy-related concerns, Google is moving more and…
Google moving search records out of China
At Monday's panel on “The Ethics and Politics of Search Engines”, Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, stated that Google is moving the databases they keep of Chinese searches outside of the country in order to prevent China's government from…
Poll: 60% Oppose Companies Permanently Storing Users’ Search Behaviors
A University of Connecticut Poll on Government Investigation of Internet Search Engines reveals that 60% of respondents oppose search engine companies permanently storing users’ search information. Additionally, 0nly 13% feel “extremely” or “very” confident that the search behavior collected will…
Read More Poll: 60% Oppose Companies Permanently Storing Users’ Search Behaviors
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