Posts Tagged with ‘privacy’

Recently Google has introduced to the world its latest and biggest change to the way we see search results - SearchWiki. This functionality allows any logged in Google user to vote sites up and down in search results, add notes (or comments) about certain sites and even add the results that are not there yet but should be (according to the opinion of this particular user). These actions are intended to create personalized search experience for this user when he [...]

Today we have seen the beginning of a new initiative on the Official Google Blog to predict the future of search based on opinions of top 10 Google experts. The series has started with a post by Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience.
Marissa begins with a confession that she is a search addict yet she performs about 20% of the total number of queries she could if search was constantly available. To prove that point she mentions a [...]

Google has been criticized for a long time about storing history of all the searches performed by a user on its servers for as long as it wanted along with the IP addresses associated with those search queries. This policy was changed in March 2007 to only store user’s information for 18 months - after which all the information was anonymized and could not be connected to any particular user. But it has never been considered enough so it really [...]

Yahoo! has just informed subscribers to corporate newsletter of the newly available “privacy choice for consumers”. This basically means that from the end of August we will be able to opt-out of customized advertising on yahoo.com if we believe it invades our privacy.
Actually Yahoo! had an opt-out available to users even before today: users could opt out of customized ads served by Yahoo! on third-party networks.
Today’s announcement expands this approach further and comes as a part of Yahoo! response to [...]

I have just received an announcement from a startup Arzoola that introduced Social Call!, the application that its creators brand as "the world's first Craigslist application". I am not sure if it is actually the first in the world but since it sounded too intriguing and we definitely get much more announcements for Facebook apps, I've decided to give Social Call! a go and see what it has to offer.
The service they offer is very simple [...]

Do you consider your interactions on social networking sites to be private?
Amanda Hudson is suing six U.K. newspapers based on the assumption that whatever happens on Bebo (or, by extension, other social networks) should stay on Bebo after a story her 15-year-old concocted and posted to the site was picked up by several newspapers. The big problem? Hudson's daughter's story involved underaged drinking, a visit from the police, and her mother punching her, which Hudson claims never happened. That didn't [...]

I have read and re-read Judge Stanton's decision in the Google/Viacom suit more times than I really should have. At first, I was as outraged as everyone else, assuming that Judge Stanton was one more government figure without a clue how the Internet even works.
So I called my mother, who works in the courts, and ran it by her, and she pointed out two things to me: one, any Judge has a stable full of much younger and savvier law [...]

There's nothing more depressing than watching a bear cub take a swipe at a gigantic, planet-eating corporation, but that's exactly what we saw today.
Ask.com took to its blog today with an open missive titled "Ask.com Makes More Moves on Privacy." In the post, Ask.com references the letter sent to Google from 14 privacy watchdog groups including the EFF and the ACLU demanding that Google add a link to its privacy policy on their home page to comply with the [...]

How much do most of us think about the search terms we enter into our search engine of choice? Are there times when you hesitate entering a word or phrase? Do you ever wonder if someone out there, either an employee of the company that runs your search engine or some faceless researcher who gains access to that data, is wondering exactly what sort of weirdo searches for such things?
A new play in Philadelphia called User 927 wonders as well. [...]