Tag Archives: Google

News

Can Google get foreign countries to embrace gay rights?

Google, of Mountain View, California is on a worldwide campaign to “change the hearts and minds” in support of gay rights.

Google calls it “Legalize Love” and they announced it at a Global Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) Workplace Summit recently in London.  Anna Peirana who is from 429 Magazine, first reported this mission.  She describes it as an effort to legalize gay marriage.  Google expands this and states their mission is broader and is meant to include every country in its operations.  Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe states “It is obviously a very ambitious piece of work”.

For further teaching on corporate missions see prophet.tv.

See this link for the source article. Can Google get foreign countries to embrace gay rights? – The Week.

News

Google Slapped With $22.5 Million Fine for Privacy Violation

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On Monday the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) levied the largest fine to date on Google for a privacy violation.  The slap was worth $22.5 million.

Google had been attempting to work around Apple’s Safari on its mobile devices.  They were watching mobile users’ browsing habits, even if those same users had believed they had blocked that access.

This isn’t Google’s first interaction with the FTC.  In fact, in addition to Google, Facebook and Twitter have also been charged with privacy violations before.

Interestingly enough, if you have been a regular listener to prophet.tv this would not have taken you off guard.  Tune in to prophet.tv to ‘see the news before it happens’.

Taken from Google Slapped With $22.5 Million Fine for Privacy Violation: SFist.

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GOOGLE COLLECTED PERSONAL DATA FROM HOUSEHOLD WIFI

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A few years ago, Google sent out an army of cars with cameras on top, to photograph images of streets at eye level, no matter how remote or obscure. To date they have covered an impressive area.

At the time, some believed Google were also collecting private data from residents wi-fi connection. Like emails and passwords.

However, Google denied it.

But now, an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has found that Google cars did carry software, which harvested data being transferred from unsecured wifi networks, as their cars passed by.

According to the reports, the cars could collect 250 kb of data per router, or 25 emails each.

Some have said, this is the fault of the residents for not securing their wifi networks.

But why would Google allow software to be installed in a car meant to be just taking photographs?

If I walked into your front door, even if you had left it open, and opened your mail and read it, would you not be mad? Is that not illegal?

Is this so different?

And what now? Are street view cameras still harvesting our data? Do they still have this data stored, along with all the other data they harvest from their customers every second of every day?

And how are they using it?

News

Google’s New Privacy Policy

March 1st has seen the launching of Google’s new privacy policy. The policy is aimed at consolidating the privacy policies for all their services, around 70 in all into one much simpler agreement. Regulators have wanted Google to simplify their privacy policies for a along time. However, the new policy is concerning a number of people in the US as well as in Europe.

The new GOOGLE policy links the information stored about a person, from all the google platforms into one profile. So if you have a gmail account, a blogger account and a youtube account, for example, google will store all the information about you from these different services together, regardless of how you use them.

The French internet regulatory body CNIL and EU data  authorities believes the move breaches EU data protection laws. Furthermore a coalition of agencies from Europe and America have written the the chief executive of Google urging him to delay the changes, Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) have said, “This move has been widely criticized by US lawmakers, US Attorneys General, European lawmakers, European privacy officials, technical experts, and privacy organisations”.

Currently Google and other organisation harvest user data and store them on their servers. Google has logged every search ever conducted by their users. This information is highly valuable commercially. By building a profile up of their users using all the available data they will know you intimately. Do we really want corporations having access to that level of data about us?