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Google announced on Thursday that its acquisition of Fitbit was complete, saying the deal would bring more sophisticated devices to the wearables market. However, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) now says its investigation into the acquisition hasn’t yet wrapped. 

In a statement to various media outlets, the DOJ said it’s still looking into the possible effects of the deal. Regulators previously expressed concern that Google could use Fitbit’s large swath of user data to personalize ads. 

“The Antitrust Division’s investigation of Google’s acquisition of Fitbit remains ongoing. Although the Division has not reached a final decision about whether to pursue an enforcement action, the Division continues to investigate whether Google’s acquisition of Fitbit may harm competition and consumers in the United States.” 

The agency added that it is “committed to conducting this review as thoroughly, efficiently, and expeditiously as possible.” 

But Google said in a statement that although the DOJ’s investigation is ongoing, the agency’s time limit for delivering a decision has passed. For this reason, Google said it felt comfortable finalizing the deal.  

“We complied with the DOJ’s extensive review for the past 14 months, and the agreed upon waiting period expired without their objection,” the company said. “We continue to be in touch with them and we’re committed to answering any additional questions. We are confident this deal will increase competition in the highly crowded wearables market, and we’ve made commitments that we plan to implement globally.” 

At this point, there’s no official word on whether the DOJ intends to take legal action against Google or Fitbit. 

Google announced on Thursday that it has completed its $2.1 billion acquisition of wearables maker Fitbit. 

The deal was first announced in November of 2019 and spurred an investigation into what Google planned to do with Fitbit users’ data. Fitbit has health data on more than 28 million users, and European regulators were concerned that the tech giant could use that data to help personalize ads. 

However, Google assured regulators that the deal was “about devices, not data” and promised not to use Fitbit data if the deal was approved. 

“This deal has always been about devices, not data, and we’ve been clear since the beginning that we will protect Fitbit users’ privacy,” Rick Osterloh, Google’s Senior Vice President of devices and services, said in a statement.

“We worked with global regulators on an approach which safeguards consumers’ privacy expectations, including a series of binding commitments that confirm Fitbit users’ health and wellness data won’t be used for Google ads and this data will be separated from other Google ads data,” he added.

Privacy commitments secured

European regulators investigating the deal gave it the green light last month after receiving commitments from Google regarding data privacy. 

"Google will continue to protect Fitbit users' privacy and has made a series of binding commitments with global regulators, confirming that Fitbit users' health and wellness data won't be used for Google ads and this data will be kept separate from other Google ad data," Chief Executive James Park said in a letter to Fitbit users Thursday.

Park said the acquisition will enable Fitbit to “do even more to inspire and motivate you on your journey to better health.” 

“We’ll be able to innovate faster, provide more choices, and make even better products to support your health and wellness needs. On our own, we pushed the bounds of what was possible from the wrist, pioneering step, heart rate, sleep and stress tracking. With access to Google’s incredible resources, knowledge and global platform, the possibilities are truly limitless.” 

More than 200 Google and Alphabet workers have banded together, trumpeting their intention to form a labor union -- The Alphabet Workers Union -- which will be open to both employees and contractors.

Its goal will be to tackle ongoing issues like disparity in pay, mistreatment, and controversial government contracts -- many of the issues that a group of U.S. senators pushed Google to stop in 2019. 

The structure of the union will be members-only. While going that route doesn’t allow the union to negotiate a new contract for its workforce, it will allow it to speak for any employee who seeks to participate, including temporary workers, contractors, and vendors.

“We’ve had enough”

While the organizing effort is still in its infancy and built mostly out of Google/Alphabet workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, its organizers are confident that the story they have to tell will help their effort spread.

“For far too long, thousands of us at Google — and other subsidiaries of Alphabet, Google’s parent company — have had our workplace concerns dismissed by executives,” Parul Koul, the executive chair of the Alphabet Workers Union, and Chewy Shaw, the union’s vice chair, wrote in a guest editorial in the New York Times on Sunday.

Koul and Shaw reminded the world that when Google was originally formed, its motto was “Don’t be evil,” then took the company to task for a litany of issues ranging from profiting from ads by a hate group to failing to make necessary changes to meaningfully address retention issues with people of color.

How much can be accomplished?

This is not the first time Google/Alphabet workers have joined forces to fight what they consider to be “abuses.” Organized workers at the company were able to get executives to drop Project Maven, the company’s artificial-intelligence program that the Pentagon contracted for, and Project Dragonfly, a strategy to launch a censored search engine in China. 

Still, the organizers need to prepare for a fight. If the recent past is any indication, Google/Alphabet will not take this effort lightly. Just a month ago, the company was not only accused of violating labor laws by monitoring workers, but by going even further and allegedly retaliating against -- and firing -- workers who were trying to unionize.

However, Koul and Shaw are confident that the effort can produce some positive results. They point out that some of Alphabet’s subcontractors “won a $15 minimum hourly wage, parental leave, and health insurance” after previous mobilization efforts. 

“And the practice of forced arbitration for claims of sexual harassment was ended after the November 2018 walkout -- albeit only for full-time employees, not contractors. A few months later, Google announced that it would end forced arbitration for employees for all claims,” the pair wrote.

Google has announced that it’s delaying its planned return to the office until September 2021 in light of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic. 

Google has already pushed its return-to-office date several times: first to January 2021, then to July, and now the company is targeting September. The company is also considering implementing a “flexible workweek” after allowing employees back into the office. 

In an email to employees over the weekend, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Google is considering a new policy under which employees would come into the office three days a week and work from home the other days. The days in the office would be known as “collaboration days.” 

Increasing productivity

Google executives have long believed that facilitating organic interactions between coworkers, such as in campus cafes and kitchens, can help spur new ideas and boost productivity. 

“We are testing a hypothesis that a flexible work model will lead to greater productivity, collaboration, and well-being,” Pichai wrote in an email obtained by The New York Times. “No company at our scale has ever created a fully hybrid work force model — though a few are starting to test it — so it will be interesting to try.”

To keep workers safe, teams would be able to reserve collaboration spaces for up to a dozen people. Larger gatherings would take place outdoors. To lower the risk of coronavirus spreading, the company will be changing up its office designs and making single desks available to employees. 

Google executives haven’t said whether the company will require employees to take the COVID-19 vaccine before returning to the office. 

The tech giant has said it is “looking for opportunities in mid-to-late 2021 to help make Covid-19 vaccines available to its workers, but only after high-risk and high-priority people globally have received the vaccines,” according to the New York Times.

Google appears poised to obtain regulator approval for its acquisition of wearables maker Fitbit after promising not to personalize advertisements based on user data for the next decade. 

Previously, the company pledged not to use Fitbit health data to aid its ad targeting for five years. Now, reports indicate that the tech giant has extended the data pledge in a bid to receive approval from the European Union.

Google announced its intention to buy the Fitbit in November 2019. Citing sources familiar with the matter, Reuters reported on Tuesday that Google’s plan to buy the company for $2.1 billion looks set to be approved thanks to the company’s new concessions. 

‘About devices, not data’

In August, the EU launched an investigation into the company’s proposed acquisition of the wearables maker in order to determine whether the deal might allow Google to exploit Fitbit's health and location datasets in order to get an edge over competitors. 

Fitbit has health data on more than 28 million users. In July, Google assured regulators that the deal was “about devices, not data” and promised not to use Fitbit data if the deal was approved.

“We appreciate the opportunity to work with the European Commission on an approach that safeguards consumers’ expectations that Fitbit device data won’t be used for advertising,” Google said in a statement at the time.

In addition to promising not to use data for ad targeting purposes, Google also reportedly agreed this week to allow other devices to use Fitbit’s health data if a user consents. Additionally, the company said Fitbit devices will still work with competing services, like Map My Run and Strava.

The EU has until the end of the year to make a formal decision on whether to approve the deal. 

In a blog post on Monday, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said his company has offset its entire “carbon legacy.” 

The company said it has purchased enough “high-quality carbon offsets” to eliminate the emissions produced by its campuses and data centers prior to becoming carbon neutral in 2007. Pichai said Google’s latest action brings its net carbon footprint to zero as of today.

The executive vowed to have Google running on completely carbon-free energy everywhere, at all times, by 2030. 

"This is our biggest sustainability moonshot yet, with enormous practical and technical complexity. We are the first major company that's set out to do this, and we aim to be the first to achieve it," Pichai said.

Aiming for a carbon-free future 

The CEO noted that Google is the “first major company to make a commitment to operate on 24/7 carbon-free energy.” 

“This is far more challenging than the traditional approach of matching energy usage with renewable energy, but we’re working to get this done by 2030,” Pichai said. 

Google also announced that it will bring five gigawatts worth of carbon-free energy to its key manufacturing regions by 2030. The move should help hundreds of cities shift toward greener power. 

The company is also helping commercial building and data center owners use artificial intelligence to reduce heating and cooling costs. Google said the technology enabled it to reduce energy consumption at its own data centers by 30 percent.

“We’re optimistic that by harnessing new technologies, investing in the right infrastructure and tools, and empowering partners, nonprofits and people, this can be the most decisive decade for climate action yet,” Pichai concluded. “We’re proud to do our part, and to help move the world closer to a carbon-free future for all.”

Google is telling its 200,000 full-time and contract employees to sit tight from a remote location, at least until July 2021, according to the Wall Street Journal. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly made the call last week following a meeting with company brass.

Google had previously announced plans to reopen some of its offices for a limited number of employees starting on July 6, but the move was strictly optional for its employees.

Pichai’s new timeline allows employees to better plan their personal lives, an aspect especially important for parents of school-aged children as school districts try to figure out whether going virtual or establishing new safeguards is the best path for them to follow.

“To give employees the ability to plan ahead, we’ll be extending our global voluntary work-from-home option through June 30, 2021 for roles that don’t need to be in the office,” Pichai said in his message to employees. “I hope this will offer the flexibility you need to balance work with taking care of yourselves and your loved ones over the next 12 months.”

The new norm continues to expand

The shift to remote life -- especially for tech and investment companies -- is quickly becoming part of the new norm. A solid 65 percent of all workers are doing their jobs away from the office all the time, frequently, or very often. 

Google joins Amazon, Zillow, PayPal, Salesforce, and others Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Capital One, Zillow, Facebook, Slack, Amazon, PayPal, Salesforce, and others that have extended their work-from-home options, according to SHRM, a human resources organization. However, Google is the first to extend the mandate out so far.

The most conspicuously absent brand on that list is Apple. It was a little slow on its embrace of working from home, but it recently opted to convert its retail associates to remote-based customer assistants.

Google is set to begin banning ads from publishers pushing content that contradicts scientific consensus on the COVID-19 pandemic.

The tech giant said Friday that it will begin prohibiting “dangerous content,” such as the claim that the COVID-19 vaccine is “an attempt to genetically modify the population,” starting August 18. 

Google said it will remove ads from pages that promote theories that aren’t supported by “authoritative scientific consensus” about the health crisis and its origins. Additionally, advertisers will not be allowed to create their own ads that promote coronavirus conspiracy theories. 

The company already prohibits the monetization of harmful medical misinformation, such as claims about “miracle” health cures or treatments or ads promoting the anti-vaccine movement. The policy update announced Friday builds upon the company’s existing efforts to combat misinformation. 

Tech giants clamping down on misinformation

Regulators recently sent letters to a number of major tech companies requesting actions to curb a “troubling rise of false or misleading information related to COVID-19.” 

“This disinformation has ranged from false statements about certain groups being immune from contracting the virus to unsubstantiated assertions about masks and vaccines,” a group of Democratic lawmakers said in letters to Google, Facebook, and Twitter last week. “This type of disinformation is dangerous and can affect the health and well-being of people who use this false information to make critical health decisions during this pandemic.” 

Facebook has announced that it plans to roll out a new “Facts About Covid-19” section to dispel common but inaccurate myths about the virus, such as the one that drinking bleach will cure the virus or that hydroxychloroquine can cure, treat, or prevent the illness. Facebook has also launched notifications encouraging everyone to wear a mask and has begun labeling misleading posts about the virus as false. 

With the European Commission gearing up to launch a probe into Google’s proposed $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit, the tech giant has promised regulators that it will not use Fitbit health data to aid its ad targeting. 

“This deal is about devices, not data. We appreciate the opportunity to work with the European Commission on an approach that safeguards consumers’ expectations that Fitbit device data won’t be used for advertising,” Google said in a statement to various media outlets.

Google announced its intent to buy Fitbit last year. The company said at the time that buying Fitbit would help bolster its service offerings in the wearables department.  

“By working closely with Fitbit’s team of experts, and bringing together the best AI, software and hardware, we can help spur innovation in wearables and build products to benefit even more people around the world,” Google’s hardware chief Rick Osterloh said in a blog post.

“Google also remains committed to Wear OS and our ecosystem partners, and we plan to work closely with Fitbit to combine the best of our respective smartwatch and fitness tracker platforms.”

Earlier this month, a group of 20 consumer organizations expressed concern about the deal. The group said in letters to antitrust regulators that the acquisition could lead to Google using data from the wearables maker. 

"Google could exploit Fitbit's exceptionally valuable health and location datasets, and data collection capabilities, to strengthen its already dominant position in digital markets such as online advertising," the letter reads. "Google could also use Fitbit's data to establish a commanding position in digital and related health markets, depriving competitors of the ability to compete effectively.” 

“This would reduce consumer welfare (including degrading data privacy options), limit innovation and raise prices,” the group said. 

Now that Google has agreed not to use Fitbit data, EU regulators have until August 4 to decide whether to allow the deal to move ahead. 

Google has announced that it will ban advertisements for products or services that secretly track or monitor people. 

In an update to its “Enabling Dishonest Behavior” policy, Google said the changes will apply to spyware and technology used for “intimate partner surveillance,” including tech used to monitor texts, phone calls, or browsing history. 

The update will also apply to GPS devices touted as tools for spying on someone without their knowledge, as well as surveillance equipment such as cameras, audio recorders, dash cams, and nanny cams. 

“We constantly evaluate and update our ad policies to ensure we are protecting users,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We routinely update our language with examples to help clarify what we consider policy violating. Spyware technology for partner surveillance was always in scope of our policies against dishonest behavior.” 

The ad policy change will go into effect globally on August 11. 

“Stalkerware” use on the rise during lockdown

COVID-19 lockdowns have led to a rise in the use of GPS trackers and surveillance software marketed with the sole purpose of spying.

Earlier this week, cybersecurity software firm Avast reported that there was a 51 percent increase in the use of spyware and stalkerware from March through June when compared to the period between January and February. 

“Stalkerware is unethical software that allows people to track someone's location, access their personal photos and videos, intercept emails, texts and app communications such as WhatsApp and Facebook, as well as eavesdrop on phone calls and make covert recordings of conversations over the internet, without the target's knowledge or consent,” the company said. 

In 2018, a group of researchers discovered tens of thousands of ads in the Google ecosystem that promoted software designed to monitor an intimate partner without their consent. 

The ads discovered included: “How to catch a cheating spouse with his cell phone” and “Track My Wife’s Phone — Want to Spy on your Wife? Track your Wife without her knowing. Discover Who Are They messaging. Download! 24-Hour Support Price Superiority No Jailbreaking and App Results Guaranteed.”

Google said its ad policies already prohibit ads for products and services that enable users to gain unauthorized access to systems, devices, or property. The update now loops in spyware and surveillance technology designed to provide unauthorized access to intimate partners’ devices.

Google has taken the unusual step of temporarily suspending all commercial browser extensions sold in the Chrome Web Store.

The company says it has been alerted to a “significant increase” in scams and frauds being launched by some of these extensions. Chrome users are sometimes urged to download and install certain extensions to enhance the browser’s performance or to make it do special things. There’s almost always some kind of fee involved.

Now, Google says some of these extensions “aim to exploit users” and all are being suspended until everything can be sorted out. It turns out the problem may have been building over time.

Unwanted popups

Nearly a year ago, ZDNet reported that a popular commercial Chrome extension had started serving users with popup ads. At the time, the extension was being used by more than 4 million consumers.

This particular extension was called Automatic 4K/HD for YouTube and was used to enhance and control the quality of YouTube videos.

“The popup ads abuse Chrome's ability to show desktop notifications, permission that the extension contains from users during installation, but which it is not allowed to abuse to bombard them with unrelated content, such as ads,” ZDNet reported in February.

A few months later, Google reviewed and updated its policies regarding third-party extensions for its browser. Most of those updates had to do with better protecting user privacy. In October 2018, Google said it was taking steps to “ensure that all Chrome extensions are trustworthy by default.” 

Recent discovery

According to Forbes, this most recent action was driven by a discovery earlier this month that some commercial Chrome extensions were carrying out fraud and that the activity had recently increased.

Chrome users who have not downloaded or installed extensions that require payment are likely not affected. Users who have paid for extensions will not receive any extension updates until Google lifts its ban.

In November, the Security Research Team at Checkmarx reported finding a vulnerability in both the Google and Samsung camera app that allowed hackers to commandeer the app and take photos and/or record videos via a malicious application that had zero permission to go that far. 

Google responded quickly, telling ConsumerAffairs the issue was addressed on impacted Google devices via a Play Store update to the Google Camera Application. A patch was made available to all partners.

Google is reportedly working toward launching a checking account product for consumers, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

A Google executive told the publication that the company’s “Cache” project could launch as soon as 2020. It will operate in partnership with Citigroup and the Stanford Federal Credit Union. Checking accounts will be branded with the names of the financial institutions rather than Google’s own name. 

Google executive Caesar Sengupta noted that customers’ financial data won’t be sold to advertisers; the new venture is simply intended to expand Google’s digital service offerings, he said. 

“If we can help more people do more stuff in a digital way online, it’s good for the internet and good for us,” Sengupta told the Journal. He added that the service could be used to offer loyalty card programs. 

Tech firms branching out into financial services

Google joins other big technology companies that have expressed an interest in offering financial services. Last year, Amazon was said to have been having discussions with J.P. Morgan about a potential checking account. 

In August, Apple launched its own credit card in collaboration with Goldman Sachs. The company is currently facing accusations that it assigns higher credit limits to men who apply for the card. 

Facebook is attempting to expand its presence in the financial services sector through the launch of a proposed cryptocurrency called Libra, but it is struggling to get lawmakers and financial backers on board with the venture. Facebook has also announced that it’s launching a new payments service called Facebook Pay, which offers a way for users across its services to make payments to one another. 

Regulatory skepticism

During a Wednesday interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Senator Mark Warner (D- Va.) expressed concern about problems that could arise in regulating big tech companies that are experimenting with financial service offerings. 

“I’m concerned when we got, whether it’s Libra or the Google proposal, ... these giant tech platforms entering into new fields before there are some regulatory rules of the road,” Warner said. “Because once they get in, the ability to extract them out is going to be virtually impossible.” 

Google has banned payday loan apps that use “deceptive or harmful” tactics from its Play Store, the Wall Street Journal reports. 

A spokesperson for Google told the publication that the policy change was implemented with the aim of protecting users from “deceptive and exploitative personal-loan terms,” where annual percentage rates are 36 percent or higher. 

Apple told the Journal that it hasn’t yet imposed a similar ban. However, the tech giant said it regularly reviews its App Store rules to “address new or emerging issues.” 

Lenders affected by Google’s policy change -- which went into effect in August -- argue that the ban hurts “legitimate operators,” as well as users looking for “legal loans.” 

Online Lenders Alliance CEO Mary Jackson contended in the report that her firm’s practices are still legal. She said lenders would either have to cut their rates or exit the business altogether as a result of the change.

In an effort to mitigate consumer stress and frustration over data breaches, Google has rolled out a new Password Checkup feature that automatically checks whether passwords have been compromised.

The feature can let users know if their saved passwords have been exposed in breaches at other services or if a weak password should be updated. The service was previously available as an extension, but it’s now available for the Google web dashboard and Android devices. Later this year, it will be built into the Chrome browser.

Tapping the “Check Passwords” feature will prompt Google to check all of a user’s passwords against an internal database containing over four billion user credentials that have been leaked online via third-party data breaches. 

Checks breached passwords

When Google launched the feature earlier this year as an add-on for the Google Chrome web browser, it said scores of user password and username combos were found to be vulnerable. 

"In the first month alone, we scanned 21million usernames and passwords and flagged over 316,000 as unsafe – 1.5% of sign-ins scanned by the extension,” the tech giant said. 

Google added that all user information it cross-references with breached passwords is encrypted to protect user privacy. 

“Password Checkup was built with privacy in mind,” Google wrote in its overview of the extension. “It never reports any identifying information about your accounts, passwords, or device. We do report anonymous information about the number of lookups that surface an unsafe credential, whether an alert leads to a password change, and the domain involved for improving site coverage."

Google has given its Play Store a new look in an effort to “improve the overall store experience.” 

In a blog post, Google said it has moved the navigation bar to the bottom of the app on Android phones and shifted the navigation on tablets and Chrome OS devices to the left.

Within the new navigation bar, users will find two main tabs for apps and games. Google says adding the distinction between apps and games is intended to help “better serve users the right kind of content.”

"Once users find the right app or game, the updated store listing page layout surfaces richer app information at the top of each page as well as a more prominent call-to-action button. This makes it easier for users to see the important details and make a decision to install your app," wrote Boris Valusek, design lead of Google Play.

Visually, Google’s Play Store is now predominantly white, which mirrors the aesthetic of its all-white homepage. Users will also see more rounded-edge icons, similar to the ones Apple has on iOS. 

A “Recommended for you” section has been added to enable users to discover other apps they might enjoy. 

Finally, Google has moved the “Music” tab. Music can still be found in the search bar at the top of the screen. Relocating the Music tab suggests the company is gearing up to implement its plan of replacing Google Play Music with YouTube Music. 

As part of its effort to grow the number of affordable housing options available in San Francisco's Bay Area, Google plans to repurpose at least $750 million of the land it owns there over the next ten years.

In a blog post on Tuesday, the company said its investment will help support the development of “at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families."

Google is also establishing a $250 million investment fund for developers to build more than 5,000 affordable housing units in the area. Finally, the tech giant plans to give $50 million to charities focused on the issues of displacement and homelessness.

Creating new homes

"Across the region, one issue stands out as particularly urgent and complex: housing," Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote. “As Google grows throughout the Bay Area — whether it’s in our home town of Mountain View, in San Francisco, or in our future developments in San Jose and Sunnyvale — we’ve invested in developing housing that meets the needs of these communities. But there’s more to do.”

Google says it will work alongside local authorities to foster the rapid development of affordable housing. The tech giant said its already made progress in freeing up available land in its home city of Mountain View.

“Our goal is to get housing construction started immediately, and for homes to be available in the next few years. In Mountain View, we’ve already worked with the city to change zoning in the North Bayshore area to free up land for housing, and we’re currently in productive conversations with Sunnyvale and San Jose,” Pichai said.

The announcement was met with excitement from local authorities, including Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council.

“This is a really big day,” Wunderman told the San Jose Spotlight. “It signals that there’s a new day where private companies are stepping up and recognizing that they’re part of the fabric of our communities and they need to be part of the solution to the region’s most pressing problem: housing affordability.”

Users of the Google Play Store are being urged to update to the latest version of the app after it received a facelift, according to 9to5Google.

Fresh to version 15.1.24 is the Material Theme Play Store, which adds in a cleaner look in the marketplace’s app bar while changing some of the tabs that users have become accustomed to. Instead of multi-colored accent colors and nested tabs, a white search field at the bottom of the screen will allow users to search for anything they might want to find.

Due to a switch in focus when it comes to music, the “Music” tab has now been removed. Instead, users can “Browse music” in the navigation drawer and open up the appropriate apps to play their favorite tunes.

Changing the Play Store

The Material Theme redesign comes less than a month after Google announced that it would be changing how apps on the Play Store are rated. Under the new system, developers who more frequently update and refine their apps will be given prominence over those who haven’t updated their apps. New apps will also be featured more prominently.

At its I/O Developer conference, Google executives said that developers and consumers would also be seeing a few other new updates. Included in that list are new features designed to help developers optimize their apps for use in the car and improved sensors to help devices have more functionality.

Consumers should take note of new features that are aimed at “optimizing battery and memory consumption.” After all, what’s the point of enjoying all these new features if they kill your phone too quickly.

For everyone who thinks it’s an overreach for Google to know everywhere you’ve been, the tech giant has decided to yank “Whither thou goest, I will go” out of its phrasebook and add auto-delete controls for users’ Location History and activity data.

In an announcement on Google’s Keyword blog, the company said consumer feedback has been loud and clear regarding personal data.

So, going forward, if a user doesn’t want things like restaurant recommendations or helping the user pick up where they left off on a previous search, they’ll have the option to manage or delete personal data… and, in Google’s words, do it simply.

Here’s how it works

The user picks a time limit that governs how long their online activities can be tracked and saved. For example, if a user picks 18 months, any data older than that will automatically be wiped from their account immediately. As time moves forward, anything past that 18-month line will be deleted as well.

“You should always be able to manage your data in a way that works best for you -- and we’re committed to giving you the best controls to make that happen,” commented Google’s David Monsees, Product Manager, Search, and Marlo McGriff, Product Manager, Maps.

Is personal data finally on the right path?

What personal data digital providers keep has been a constant frustration since Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica blunder. While Europe has had similar options in play with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the U.S. has been slow to match that pro-consumer move.

“As for the U.S. following in the EU's footsteps, it does look increasingly likely that the U.S. will pass some form of privacy legislation but it's still unclear how closely that will be modeled on the GDPR,” Josephine Wolff, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, told ConsumerAffairs.

”The U.S. will probably chart its own course to some degree; for instance, it may grant some specific exemptions for smaller businesses.”

Apple appears to be on board for similar legislation. In a conference in Brussels last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the crisis of data collection is real and “should unsettle us.”

Getting compliant with the GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is also on Facebook’s to-do list for 2019.

Tracking is a personal preference

Wolff points out that what data a company collects depends largely on how that company serves consumers.

“For instance, it might make sense that Google Maps or the Weather Channel would collect your location data since the services they provide depend on where you are, but it would perhaps seem less reasonable for an app that provides a game or a set of recommended workout routines to collect your location data.”

“Reasonableness of data collection is dictated by the service that a company provides to its consumers and whether the data is essential to the provision of that service or merely being used as an additional potential revenue stream for instance through advertisement targeting or selling the data to third parties for other purposes.”

The best way to find out whether your data might be sold? Read the app or a platform’s “terms of use.” It’s not the most fun read -- and “I have read and agree to the Terms” might be the biggest lie on the web -- but knowing what data a user gives to a platform is the user’s responsibility.

​Google appears to be testing a new feature that lets users create public events on Google Maps.

Android Police reported that the company has rolled out the new functionality to some Android users, though its behavior was “laggy” in initial tests. The tech website said it had issues adding photos and that it had to wait an hour for an event to appear on Google Maps.

The feature, when it works, “could allow users to submit events akin to the public events being shown in Maps,” Android Police said. “Maps has heavily relied on crowdsourced information for a while, so adding a means for the public to make a note of public events would be consistent with that approach.”

Users can set an event name, location, date, and time through the app’s existing Contribute tab. The event can also be given a description and an image header.

After the feature was spotted by Android Police, Google confirmed on its Support page that the feature is currently available to Android users.

Google said the feature may not be available in some regions, but users can check to see if it’s available to them by opening Google Maps, tapping “Contribute,” tapping “Events,” and tapping “+” to add a public event.

Google has not provided a timeline for the wider rollout of the feature.

Google has announced that it will soon no longer require its employees to sign forced arbitration agreements, which essentially waive workers’ rights to a day in court if they suffer injuries, harassment, or other negative consequences from working at a company.

Company officials said that the new policy would go into effect on March 21, and it would apply to all of its workers around the globe. However, the new policy would not apply to claims that have already been settled by arbitration, according to an Axios report. Workers will also still have the option of going to arbitration if they wish to do so.

The new standards would not only apply to full-time workers, but to temporary and contract workers that work directly for the company – though firms that hire these workers may still choose to use arbitration clauses.

Making changes following pressure

Google’s decision likely isn’t one that was made by chance. Last year, approximately 20,000 of its workers around the world staged a walkout in protest of forced arbitration. Within a week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai released a blog post saying that the company takes its workers’ rights seriously.

“At Google we try hard to build a workplace that supports our employees and empowers them to do their best work. As CEO, I take this responsibility very seriously and I’m committed to making changes we need to improve,” Pichai said.

While the executive promised at the time to “double down” on the company’s commitment towards improving workplace conditions, the action plan he detailed in the post focused primarily on improvements to how the company would deal with sexual harassment claims. The new proposal has been hailed as being more comprehensive.

Sayonara, Google+.

The consumer version of the 7-year-old social media platform bids its final farewell on April 2, 2019. If you’re one of its 100+ million users, your Google+ account and pages will become inaccessible on that date and the company will begin the removal of photos and videos from the platform’s Album Archives.

Google cites “low usage and challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers’ expectations” as Plus’ downfall. Those so-called challenges may well have been the recently discovered bug that affected over 50 million users and the private user data of 500,000 Google+’ers that had been exposed over a three-year period -- an intrusion that the Wall Street Journal reported Google decided to keep hush on.

No biggie -- at least not to Google

And for the “low usage” justification, it’s typical Google being Google.

Over the course of its life as a digital colossus, the company has shuttered close to 20 products it thought were either innovative (like Google Glass) or something that could be competitive with a similar product -- examples being Orkut, Google Buzz, and Google Wave, Google’s social media notions designed to take some steam out of Facebook.

Google+ had a good life, but seeing the platform’s metrics fall from a one-time high of 300 million active monthly users down to a little more than 100 million had to be a buzzkill for the company.

And the users? The sunsetting of Plus isn’t going to upset too many onliners. The truth is that 90 percent of its user sessions are less than five seconds, according to Ben Smith, Google Fellow and Vice President of Engineering. A study by digital marketing firm Stone Temple only confirmed Google+ ghost town status, reporting that less than 1 percent of the Google-wide 2 billion users ever did any real interaction with the platform.

The money-making version of Plus stays alive

One important clarification: it’s the consumer version of Google+ that’s going away. Google will still keep the lights on for the enterprise, revenue-generating version.

“Our review showed that Google+ is better suited as an enterprise product where co-workers can engage in internal discussions on a secure corporate social network,” Smith said. “Enterprise customers can set common access rules, and use central controls, for their entire organization. We’ve decided to focus on our enterprise efforts and will be launching new features purpose-built for businesses.”

Downloading your data

ConsumerAffairs found two methods Google+ users can deploy to retrieve their posts and content from their Google+ account.

One is Google’s own data exporter -- which, by the way, you can use to manage or archive any Google-housed content you have. The other is the Google+ Exporter, a third-party desktop app that allows you download up to 3,000 Google+ posts for free.

On Tuesday, nearly two dozen consumer, privacy, and public health groups filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging that Google’s Play Store allows children to download apps that put their personal information at risk.

The groups argued that the tech giant’s app store is endangering children by allowing apps that violate privacy laws, contain adult content, or include manipulative advertising in a section of its Play store designed for children, the Associated Press reported.

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy were the primary groups to file the complaint. In it, they argued that some apps that Google deems appropriate for children are “sharing kids’ sensitive personal information without the required parental consent.”

Now, a group of U.S. lawmakers are also putting pressure on the FTC to launch an investigation into whether Google is breaking privacy laws.

Regulators want an investigation

In a letter to the FTC, Democratic Senators Ed Markey, Richard Blumenthal, and Tom Udall encouraged the agency to initiate an investigation to determine whether Google is violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

“The FTC is statutorily obliged to enforce COPPA and protect American consumers from unfair and deceptive practices,” the senators wrote in a letter to the FTC’s five commissioners. “We’ve brought to your attention a number of pressing concerns that call into question Google’s compliance with existing laws, and we encourage you to initiate an investigation into the aforementioned concerns as soon as possible.”

Representative David Cicilline (D -Rhode Island) is also in support of an investigation into the matter, the AP reported.

In a statement to the media, Google said it takes these issues “very seriously” and that it’s continually working hard to “remove any content that is inappropriately aimed at children from our platform.”

In 2014, the FTC charged both Google and Apple with unfair practices involving kids. Google agreed to refund consumers $19 million in Google Play purchases that were made without parents’ consent, and Apple agreed to refund $32.5 million for the in-app purchases made on its devices without parents’ consent.

Separate class action lawsuits focused on Google’s location tracking mechanism amid claims that the tech titan unlawfully stored user location information have been combined into a single suit in California.

According to TopClassActions, U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila approved a consolidation of six proposed Google class action lawsuits in order to “promote efficiency and avoid the possibility of inconsistent judgments.”

The lawsuits claim that to completely block Google from saving location data, a user would have to disable the “web and app activity” setting in their account. Google reportedly failed to inform users about the setting, nor did it disclose that the setting was “crucial” in the company’s power to track and store user data.

“Google improperly baited users into using its applications and functionalities without worrying about their privacy by representing to users that they could control Google’s access to their location data and allowing them to opt out of giving Google their location data, then Google switched users into allowing it to collect their location data,” one of the Google tracking class actions stated.

The U.S. Supreme Court waved that red flag in a separate case where chief justice John Roberts commented that when a third party has access to the information stored on one’s cell phone, that entity “achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.”

The backstory

The genesis of the Google suit started with an investigation by the Associated Press (AP), in which computer science researchers at Princeton University were able to create a visual map of the movements of the study’s subject as he moved around with his Android phone that had Location History toggled off.

The map included the subject’s “train commute on two trips to New York and visits to the High Line park, Chelsea Market, Hell’s Kitchen, Central Park, and Harlem. To protect his privacy, The AP didn’t plot the most telling and frequent marker -- his home address.”

Following the Associated Press’ scrutiny, Google updated its disclosures. However, plaintiffs in the Google class action lawsuits claim that this was “too little, too late and does not absolve the company of liability.”

The AP’s findings were confirmed by Vanderbilt University computer science professor Douglas C. Schmidt in a separate study.

“Google counts a large percentage of the world’s population as its direct customers, with multiple products leading their markets globally and many surpassing 1 billion monthly active users,” Schmidt concluded.

“A major part of Google’s data collection occurs while a user is not directly engaged with any of its products. And while such information is typically collected without identifying a unique user, Google distinctively possesses the ability to utilize data collected from other sources to de-anonymize such a collection.”

The data that Google collects

Since Google found itself under the heat lamp on the matter, it’s seemingly doing its best to make sure users know what data they’re allowing the company to collect and use.

When “Web & App Activity” is on, Google saves information like:

• Searches and other things you do on Google products and services, like Maps

• Your location, language, IP address, referrer, and whether you use a browser or an app

• Ads you click, or things you buy on an advertiser’s site

• Information on your device like recent apps or contact names you searched for

• Websites and apps you use

• Your activity on websites and in apps that use Google services

• Your Chrome browsing history

Do you have an Android phone?

The magnitude of Google’s data collection is significant, especially on Android mobile devices where it’s estimated that those devices send 10 times more data to Google than iPhones. And when you multiply that data times the two billion active monthly users that connect to the world using that platform, the data net that Google casts is vast.

Google might argue that it’s codependent on Android since it’s the ecosystem for many related products ranging from wristwatches to coffee machines. Nonetheless, Google’s ability to give or deny data collection is squarely on users’ shoulders.

If any of this unnerves you as an Android owner, the best next step to take is following Google’s guide to data collection for Android.

iPad and iPhone users should also double-check their Google data collection settings, as should anyone who relies on a desktop or laptop for connecting to the internet.

In the last four months alone, Google has released several versions of its Chrome browser. One beefed up security against cyber attacks, one was a major redesign, and another was a security-focused update.

That particular update came after Google lost trust in cyber-security software company Symantec’s efforts in making sures its subscribers’ website SSL certificates were compliant with industry standards. In layman’s terms, SSL certificates contain information about the identity of the site’s owner and ensure that the site’s contents have been verified as trustworthy.

Fast forward to December, 2018, and consumers will see Chrome 71, a version ripe with more new privacy and security features.

"Last year, after hearing from Chrome users, we launched a set of user protections against "abusive experiences" -- experiences designed to intentionally mislead and trick users into taking action on the web," wrote Vivek Sekhar, Google Chrome Product Manager in a blog post. "These protections blocked pop-ups and new window requests from sites with certain abusive experiences like redirecting pages."

"However, we've learned since then that this approach did not go far enough. In fact, more than half of these abusive experiences are not blocked by our current set of protections, and nearly all involve harmful or misleading ads. These ads trick users into clicking on them by pretending to be system warnings or ‘close’ buttons that do not actually close the ad. Further, some of these abusive ad experiences are used by scammers and phishing schemes to steal personal information."

Say goodbye to abusive experiences and sneaky subscription sign-ups

Going straight for the security jugular, Chrome 71 will remove all advertisements that continue to push out "abusive experiences."

Users also have control over what sites they feel are "abusive" simply by going to their Chrome Settings and noting the abusive sites.

And, with the internet becoming increasingly accessed via mobile over desktop and sites trying to rope-a-dope consumers into subscribing to content, Google is waiting in the wings when a user lands on a page that contains "insufficient mobile subscription information."

"Chrome will show a warning before these pages, so that users can make informed decisions when signing up to mobile based subscription services. Users will be offered the choice to proceed to the page or go back if they were unaware that they were entering a billing page. We want to make sure Chrome users understand when they are going through a billing flow and trust that they’ll be able to make informed decisions while browsing the web," the company said.

Chrome 71 will be released on December 4, 2018 (December 11, 2018 for Chrome OS). If you’re chomping at the bit to try out the new release, a beta version is available, but remember that Google is still working out the kinks for the browser’s final release.

Google is shutting down Google+ for consumers following reports that a bug in the system could have leaked some personal information users posted to their profiles.

According to a report by Google, there is no evidence anyone discovered the vulnerability and took advantage of it. After a review, Alphabet -- Google's parent company -- decided it was time to pull the plug.

"This review crystallized what we’ve known for a while: that while our engineering teams have put a lot of effort and dedication into building Google+ over the years, it has not achieved broad consumer or developer adoption, and has seen limited user interaction with apps," the company wrote in a blog post. "The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds."

It was that review that revealed the bug in the system -- specifically in the Google+ People API. In that part of the app users can grant access to their profile data, and the public profile information of their friends, to Google+ apps, via the API. The bug allowed apps, not marked as public, to get access to that data and share it.

Not known how many users were affected

It's not known which and how many users were affected. Because of the way the system was set up, the log data is only kept for two weeks. But Google said it ran a detailed analysis over the two weeks before the bug was patched and concluded that the profiles of as many as 500,000 users could have been affected.

According to Google, the data was limited to optional Google+ profile information that included name, email address, occupation, and age. The company stressed it did not include other data users may have posted to Google+ or any other service.

The company discovered the bug in March but is only now revealing it.

"We believe it occurred after launch as a result of the API’s interaction with a subsequent Google+ code change," the company said. "We found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or abusing the API, and we found no evidence that any profile data was misused."

Google is just the latest tech giant to reveal privacy issues. Facebook has been struggling to reassure users since March when it revealed user data was misappropriated and used for political advertising purposes.

Google announced on Monday that it will soon roll out several new changes to its search engine. Going forward, Search will rely more heavily on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the overall goal of enhancing the search experience for users.

The unveiling of the new features coincides with the twentieth birthday of Google’s search engine. At an event in San Francisco, Ben Gomes, Google's vice president of search, said Google is always thinking of ways to improve Search.

“We see billions of queries every day, and 15 percent of queries are ones we’ve never seen before,” Google executives said in a statement. “Given this scale, the only way to provide Search effectively is through an algorithmic approach. This helps us not just solve all the queries we’ve seen yesterday, but also all the ones we can’t anticipate for tomorrow.”

Personalizing the Search 'journey'

A key theme underlying all of the new features is a “shift from answers to journeys.” The company says it wants to help users resume tasks where they left off, as well as get familiar with new hobbies and interests.

In the next few weeks, Google will be adding a "Discover" news feed that will appear below the default Google search bar on mobile browsers. The Discover feed will display recommended content rather than content that is prioritized in chronological order. For example, if a user searches for a particular interest such as cycling, content related to cycling will appear in their feed and Google will show the user a way of adding hiking as an interest.

Google is also making Search a more visual experience by adding more “featured videos” at the top of search results. The company says it will rely on AI to generate short previews of a video that are relevant to a user’s search.

The tech giant is adding a new “Journeys” feature, which is intended to keep track of users’ searches about particular topics. Users can also opt-in to a feature called “activity card,” which lets them see pages they have visited and questions they have asked about a particular topic. With these features, the company is aiming to help people with longer-term searches, such as trip-planning or pursuing a different hobby or line of work.

Among other new features, Google is also introducing a “topic layer,” which will help power its related suggestions.

“The Topic Layer is built by analyzing all the content that exists on the web for a given topic and develops hundreds and thousands of subtopics,” according to Google. “For these subtopics, we can identify the most relevant articles and videos — the ones that have shown themselves to be evergreen and continually useful, as well as fresh content on the topic. We then look at patterns to understand how these subtopics relate to each other, so we can more intelligently surface the type of content you might want to explore next.”

The new changes are part of Google’s ongoing effort to ensure that Search works in a way that aligns with how people currently search for content.

“Underpinning each of these are our advancements in AI, improving our ability to understand language in ways that weren’t possible when Google first started,” Gomes said in a statement.

In an effort to fight the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online, Google will be launching an artificial intelligence toolkit that will help organizations quickly review large amounts of sexual abuse material and reduce the need for human inspection.

While countless organizations have been working tirelessly to report these horrific images, Google’s new initiative will make the job much easier.

“Today we’re introducing the next step in this fight: cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) that significantly advances our existing technologies to dramatically improve how service providers, NGOs, and other technology companies review this content at scale,” Google wrote in a company blog post.

The process

Google will utilize deep neural networking for image processing and then prioritize the most likely candidates for review.

“While historical approaches to finding this content have relied exclusively on matching against hashes of known CSAM, the classifier keeps up with offenders by also targeting content that has not been previously confirmed as CSAM,” Google wrote.

This new technology’s speed will allow children who are being sexually abused to be identified faster -- and protected from future abuse. Additionally, the number of responses will increase by 700 percent more than before, while reducing the number of eyes needed to look at the images.

Google is offering the service for free to non-governmental organizations and industry partners through the Content Safety API.

“We, and in particular our expert analysts, are excited about the development of an artificial intelligence tool which could help our human experts review material to an even greater scale and keep up with offenders, by targeting imagery that hasn’t previously been marked as illegal material,” said Susie Hargreaves OBE, CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation. “By sharing this new technology, the identification of images could be speeded up, which in turn could make the internet a safer place for both survivors and users.”

Google has been hit with a lawsuit over claims that it monitors the whereabouts of iPhone and Android users despite their “Location History” settings being turned off.

“Google represented that a user ‘can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.’ This simply was not true,” the complaint, filed late Friday in San Francisco federal court, said.

The lawsuit accuses the tech giant of violating the privacy of its users and cites a report last week that found these claims to be accurate.

As part of an investigation by the Associated Press, computer science researchers at Princeton University were able to create a visual map of the movements of the study’s subject as he moved around with his Android phone that had Location History toggled off.

The map included the subject’s “train commute on two trips to New York and visits to the High Line park, Chelsea Market, Hell’s Kitchen, Central Park, and Harlem. To protect his privacy, The AP didn’t plot the most telling and frequent marker -- his home address.”

Google updates location history language

After the report was released, Google altered the help section of its website to clarify that turning location history off “does not affect other location services on your device, like Google Location Services and Find My Device.” The company noted that location data may also be tracked for use in other services such as maps or search.

Previously, the page had indicated that turning location history off ensured that places visited were not logged by Google.

“We have been updating the explanatory language about Location History to make it more consistent and clear across our platforms and help centers,” Google said in a statement to the Associated Press.  

Violation of privacy

The plaintiff, Napoleon Patacsil of San Diego, is seeking unspecified damages, as well as class-action status on behalf of all U.S. iPhone or Android users who turned off the location history feature with the belief that it would grant them privacy.

The suit alleges that Google is in violation of California's Invasion of Privacy Act.

"Google expressly represented to users of its operating system and apps that the activation of certain settings will prevent the tracking of users' geolocations," the lawsuit said. "This representation was false."

Google's redesigned Gmail platform has a confidentiality mode feature that is now available on mobile versions.

Using it, a sender can place restrictions on sent messages. The recipient of an email with Gmail Confidentiality Mode activated won't be able to print or forward the message.

The sender can also place an expiration date on the message that will automatically remove it from the recipient's inbox on a certain date. It may even require two-step security system in which the recipient must enter a code, received via text message, before the email can be opened.

Google said it developed Confidential Mode to help organizations protect sensitive information from unauthorized or accidental access. But the company admits there are some limitations.

"Although confidential mode helps prevent the recipients from accidentally sharing your email, it doesn't prevent recipients from taking screenshots or photos of your messages or attachments," the company said in a support message. "Recipients who have malicious programs on their computer may still be able to copy or download your messages or attachments. This feature isn't available for G Suite customers at this time."

Privacy group express doubts

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a privacy advocate, says the new email feature isn't quite as secure as it might seem. In a recent review, EFF points out that the message isn't encrypted from end-to-end, so Google could read the contents. The authors of the analysis also say the expiration date won't affect Google -- the message will reside on Google servers indefinitely.

The authors conclude that the only totally secure email system would rely on robust technologies, such as end-to-end encryption "which provide actual mathematical assurances of confidentiality." They say the term "Confidential Mode," under these circumstances, could be misleading.

However, the new Gmail feature provides a layer of security currently lacking in the standard system and in some other email platforms. To try it out, Google provides these instructions.

A new investigation from the Associated Press (AP) revealed that many Google services on both iPhones and Androids store users’ location data even if the privacy settings are set to prevent it from doing so. After the AP requested a confirmation of these findings, computer-science researchers at Princeton found them to be accurate.

Many of Google’s apps and services require permission for users’ location information. For example, Google Maps requires users’ location in order to start navigating. Google Maps then stores users’ location history in a “timeline” feature that maps out users’ daily movements, should users grant the app permission to record their locations over time.

However, Google also allows location history to be “paused,” as the setting poses a number of privacy risks. According to Google’s support page, “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.”

Effect on users  

These privacy issues are affecting nearly two billion Android users and hundreds of millions of iPhone users who utilize Google for search or maps.

“If you’re going to allow users to turn off something called ‘Location History,’ then all the places where you maintain location history should be turned off,” said Jonathan Mayer, a Princeton computer scientist and former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission’s enforcement bureau. “That seems like a pretty straightforward position to have.”

However, Google is confident that its settings are clear for its users.

“There are a number of different ways that Google may use location to improve people’s experience, including: Location History, Web and App Activity, and through device-level Location Services,” said a Google spokesperson. “We provide clear descriptions of these tools, and robust controls so people can turn them on or off, and delete their histories at any time.”

Google’s Web and Activity App setting -- which is enabled by default on all devices -- stores users’ information to users’ Google apps and websites to Google accounts. Users can toggle the setting to be turned off, and that stops Google from saving location markers.

However, users that just turn off the Location History setting (and leave the Web and Activity App setting running) will only prevent Google from storing movements to a user’s “timeline.” This does not stop Google from collecting other location markers.

AP’s investigation

The AP’s investigation worked to uncover just how powerful Google’s other location markers can be for users. Princeton postdoctoral researcher Gunes Acar was the subject of the study, and the AP created a visual map of his movements as he moved around with his Android phone that had Location history turned off. Acar shared the record of his Google account.

According to The AP, “The map includes Acar’s train commute on two trips to New York and visits the High Line park, Chelsea Market, Hell’s Kitchen, Central Park, and Harlem. To protect his privacy, The AP didn’t plot the most telling and frequent marker -- his home address.”

Sean O’Brien, a Yale Privacy Lab researcher who received the findings from the investigation, believes it is “disingenuous” for Google to continuously record users’ locations -- even when users’ Location History is turned off.

“To me, it’s something that people should know,” he said.

Google has updated its Play Store developer policies, with the company now banning several more categories of apps. The Store has banned cryptocurrency mining apps, as well as apps with disruptive ads.

“We don’t allow apps that mine cryptocurrency on devices,” the policy update reads. “We permit apps that remotely manage the mining of cryptocurrency.”

While the new policy has explicitly spelled out bans for crypto mining apps like NeoNeonMiner, MinerGate, and Crypto Miner, apps that “remotely manage the mining of cryptocurrency” will still be available for users.

These now-banned apps are involved in what has come to be known as cryptojacking -- a “method used by hackers to embed cryptocurrency mining scripts onto a user’s device without their consent, consuming battery power, and degrading system performance,” according to CryptoSlate.

Google had banned cryptocurrency mining extensions from the Chrome Store earlier this year in an effort to prevent attacks like these.

Other new restrictions

In addition to the crypto mining apps, Google has also banned repetitive apps from the Play Store. These are apps that mimic pre-existing apps on the platform or offer users very similar experiences. The company explained that “apps that are created by an automated tool, wizard service, or based on templates and submitted to Google Play by the operator of that service on behalf of other persons are not allowed.”

The Store has also placed new restrictions on apps that deal with firearms and firearm accessories. Google has banned apps that “facilitate the sale of explosives, firearms, ammunition, or certain firearms accessories.”

As for firearm accessories, the Play Store defines restricted firearm accessories as those that allow a firearm to “simulate automatic fire or convert a firearm to automatic fire (e.g. bump stocks, gatling triggers, drop-in auto sears, conversion kits), and magazines or belts carrying more than 30 rounds.” Also banned are apps that give detailed instructions on manufacturing explosives, firearms, ammunition, and other weapons.

Google Play’s new restrictions also include apps that “appeal to children but contain adult themes.” Additionally, apps that force users to submit personal information or click ads in order to gain full access to the app have been banned.

Fresh off the rollout of a new version of Gmail, Google is now trying to quell a potential storm over reports that it gives developers access to read and analyze the contents of Gmail users’ messages.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported two apps -- Edison Mail and Return Path -- gained access to Gmail content, but with user permission.

Edison Mail claims its app "extract[s] meaningful, actionable data directly from mailboxes to simplify your users and understand how their preferences are changing in real‑time — from the way they travel to the brands they enjoy most."

Return Path claims its platform connects marketers with nearly 70 percent of the email inboxes worldwide, describing itself as "help[ing] marketers take their email programs to the next level by driving more response and increasing revenue."

In response to the report, Google went on the defensive and outlined exactly what it allows developers to view in a person’s Gmail account.

"We make it possible for applications from other developers to integrate with Gmail—like email clients, trip planners and customer relationship management (CRM) systems—so that you have options around how you access and use your email," wrote Suzanne Frey, Google Cloud’s Director, Security, Trust, & Privacy.

"We continuously work to vet developers and their apps that integrate with Gmail before we open them for general access, and we give both enterprise admins and individual consumers transparency and control over how their data is used," Frey added.

Automatic processing and strict standards

Google vows that while it shows ads in the consumer version of Gmail, those ads are not based on the content of a users’ emails. However, to head off spam and phishing emails from reaching inboxes and to make features like Smart Reply more productive, Google says it conducts "automatic processing" of emails -- a practice that is supposedly common across the industry.

Making sure it doesn’t walk into the same quicksand Facebook did over user privacy, Google wants it known that the company is not compensated by developers for API (application programming interface) access and any developer that wants to create a Gmail-related app has to toe the line and meet two key requirements:

• Accurately represent themselves: Apps should not misrepresent their identity and must be clear about how they are using your data. Apps cannot pose as one thing and do another, and must have clear and prominent privacy disclosures.

• Only request relevant data: Apps should ask only for the data they need for their specific function—nothing more—and be clear about how they are using it.

User privacy remains on high alert

Even though the WSJ report failed to peg Google with any privacy trespassing, it reminds everyone -- developer, provider, and user alike -- that the world is watching when it comes to data privacy, thanks to Facebook’s privacy negligence. And while it may seem a little undiplomatic, Google puts the onus directly on the end-user in saying "You control your data."

"Before a non-Google app is able to access your data, we show a permissions screen that clearly shows the types of data the app can access and how it can use that data," wrote Frey in her blog post. "We strongly encourage you to review the permissions screen before granting access to any non-Google application."

Take a Google privacy checkup

If you’re one of the 1.2 billion consumers with a Gmail account, there are steps you can take to tighten up your privacy settings. Those include:

• Adjusting your ad settings.

• Taking a "security checkup." That will show any non-Google app that’s been granted access to your data. It will also highlight any potentially risky apps you have given permission to but may want to turn off going forward.

Gmail users can also view and control permissions within myaccount.google.com under "Apps with account access."

Google is continuing its drive towards seamlessness between browsers and devices by introducing "Messages for Web" for Android phone users.

For mobile users who’ve felt tied to their phone to send and reply to texts, Android users can now send text messages from a web browser on their laptop or desktop and those conversations will synch and update automatically on both platforms. Just like with text messaging, the web version also integrates animated gifs, Smart Reply, and inline previews of any links users want to share.

"Over the past few years, we’ve been working on improving the messaging experience on Android -- from working with carriers to upgrade their networks to RCS to building new features," said Google’s Product Management Director, Sanaz Ahari.

"With Android Messages, we're creating a messaging experience that's available on multiple devices, lets you share whatever you want to share, and makes it easy to take action on your messages with Google AI (artificial intelligence)," Ahari said.

RCS stands for "Rich Communications Services," a richer, multimedia-friendly communication protocol that’s quickly replacing the old text-only messaging system. At present, RCS is only available on Google and Microsoft operating systems.

How to set up Messages for Web

Setting up Messages for Web requires users to follow the following 8-step process:

1. Download Android Messages for your Android phone. Not every Android phone comes automatically equipped with the app, so it’s best to double-check.

2. Follow the app installation instructions.

3. On your laptop/desktop, go to https://messages.android.com in your computer's web browser.

4. Open the Android Messages app on your phone.

5. Tap the menu button in the top-right corner -- the one with the three vertical dots.

6. Select "Messages for Web."

7. Tap on "Scan QR Code."

8. Point your phone toward the QR code on your computer screen. If your phone doesn’t react to the scan, then you may need to restart your phone.

If all goes according to plan, your messaging between work, home,  mobile, and computer will now be seamless.

Android is on a roll

If it seems like Google is going for the jugular of Apple’s iPhone, it very well may be. Over the last few months, Google released Google Podcasts for Android, amped up the capabilities of Google Assistant, released a hyperlocal news app called Bulletin, and added the power of AI to Google Photos so users can scan documents and making photo-sharing more efficient.

The company says its responsibility as a global corporate citizen isn’t lost on its technological advancements. Its focus on improving digital lives has led to training 25+ million people -- a metric Google expects to exceed 60 million over the next five years.

"We are at an important reflection point in computing, and it’s exciting to be driving technology forward" commented Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai at the company’s 2018 I/O Developer Conference. "It’s made us even more reflective about our responsibilities. Expectations for technology vary greatly depending where you are in the world or what opportunities are available to you."

"For someone like me who grew up without a phone, I can distinctly remember how gaining access to technology can make a difference in your life. And we see this in the work we do it around the world. See it when someone gets access to a smartphone for the first time," said Pichai.

In the coming weeks, Google plans to fix a bug in two of its most popular devices -- the Google Home and Chromecast. New research found that websites can run a simple script in the background of the devices that collects precise data location when installed on a user’s private network.

The Google Home serves as both a smart speaker and a home assistant, while the Chromecast is a small electronic device that streams TV shows, movies, and games to a television or monitor.

According to Tripwire’s Chris Young, there is an authentication weakness that leaks users’ location information that he found to be incredibly accurate. Young says the attacker will ask Google for a list of nearby wireless networks and then send that list to Google’s geolocation lookup services.

“An attacker can be completely remote as long as they can get the victim to open a link while connected to the same Wifi or wired network as a Google Chromecast or Home device,” Young said. “The only real limitation is that the link needs to remain open for about a minute before the attacker has the location. The attack content could be contained within malicious advertisements or even a tweet.”

How an attacker can get your location

Security reporter Brian Krebs explained how Google’s geolocation services can enable an attacker to seize a user’s location.

“It is common for websites to keep a record of the numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address of all visitors, and those addresses can be used in combination with online geolocation tools to glean information about each visitor’s hometown or region,” Krebs said.

Krebs noted this kind of data typically doesn’t produce the most precise results; however, that isn’t the case with Google’s geolocation data, which includes sophisticated maps of wireless networks globally that associates Wifi networks with physical locations.

“Armed with this data, Google can very often determine a user’s location to within a few feet (particularly in densely populated areas), by triangulating the user between several nearby mapped Wifi access points.”

When the bug will be fixed

A developer closed the bug issue shortly after Young found it in May, with it being marked as an “intended behavior.” However, when Krebs told Google he’d be writing a report on the issue, the company agreed to work on a fix.

The company says the issue should be fixed by sometime in July.

“The implications of this are quite broad including the possibility for more effective blackmail or extortion campaigns,” Young said. “Threats to release compromising photos or expose some secret to friends and family could use this to lend credibility and increase their odds of success.”

Following a soft launch to certain users last month, Google has officially launched YouTube Music and YouTube Premium in 17 countries.

Google’s new music streaming service lets consumers listen to music in several ways. The first is through a free, ad-supported version, which may be a good fit for people who just want to try out the service.

For $9.99 per month, users can get YouTube Music Premium. In exchange for the monthly fee, users can enjoy an ad-free experience, as well as mobile app background listening (for audio tracks only), downloads, and offline playback.

For a slightly higher fee of $11.99 per month, consumers can get YouTube Premium. This service encompasses everything YouTube Music offers, as well as background listening for videos and an ad-free experience across all content on YouTube. Consumers who already have a Google Play Music subscription will get access to YouTube Premium as part of their membership.

Personalized mixes

YouTube Music comes with a “reimagined mobile app” and a new desktop interface designed specifically for music.

After opening the app, users can tell YouTube what artists they like to listen to. Google will use these preferences, as well as the user’s YouTube viewing history, to craft “A Station Built For You,” which features “endless personalized music.”

The service continually offers new recommendations based on the user’s listening history, location, and activity. Thanks to its intelligent search feature, YouTube Music can perform lyrics-based searches. Type a few lyrics into the search box, and YouTube will return the song that features those lyrics.

YouTube Music has music videos, official albums, singles, remixes, live performances, covers, and “hard-to-find music you can only get on YouTube,” according to the company.

YouTube Music and YouTube Premium are now available in 17 countries, including the US, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, South Korea, Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Consumers can get the new YouTube Music from the Play Store and App Store today, or sign up for YouTube Premium here.

Is Google a monopoly that's gotten too big and powerful and needs regulation? The company, quite naturally, says no -- but some regulators, attorneys, and other tech companies beg to differ.

In a CBS 60 Minutes report, Margrethe Vestager, the competition commissioner for the European Union (EU), says her office can prove that Google is engaging in illegal, anti-competitive behavior. Google denied the charge but declined CBS's request for an interview.

“Our responsibility is to deliver the best results possible to our users, not specific placements for sites within our results," Google said in a statement released to the media. "We understand that those sites whose ranking falls will be unhappy and may complain publicly.”

Part of Vestager's claim hinges on research her team conducted. The researchers looked at 1.7 billion Google search queries and charges the results show Google was manipulating its secret search formulas—or algorithms—to promote its own products and services, while virtually ignoring any competitor.

"It's very difficult to find the rivals," Vestager told CBS. "Because on average, you'd find them only on page four in your search results."

Complaint from Yelp

Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman told CBS he doubts he could launch his company in today's environment.

"Because if you provide great content in one of these categories that is lucrative to Google, and seen as potentially threatening, they will snuff you out," he said.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reportedly acted on some of these complaints in 2011, conducting an investigation into the company's business practices. According to an internal memo leaked to The Wall Street Journal, the agency recommended an antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant, but no action was taken.

A year ago, the EU fined Google $2.7 billion, charging it deprived some competitors of the opportunity to compete with them.

Netmarketshare.com measures international search engine traffic. In its latest report, it gives Google nearly 73 percent of the world's search traffic. Baidu, a Chinese search engine, is second with nearly 13 percent. Bing, owned by Microsoft, has less than 8 percent.

Life is getting a little easier for Google aficionados, and the tech giant likes it that way. The connections the company’s Google Assistant can make has grown to more than 5,000 devices ranging from doorbells to thermostats.

Google Assistant comes in two forms -- a smartphone app and Google Home, a smart speaker. Both are voice-controlled and the smartphone app can control any connected device from anywhere in the world.

The company is creating partnerships and new home automation touchpoints at breakneck speed. Since January, Google Assistant has added 3,500 devices to its connectivity database. Google recently announced new deals with IKEA, Hunter Douglas, ADT, and LG that will extend Assistant’s reach to air purifiers, security cameras, and window treatments.

Something for everyone

"Android users are all around the world, so from the start, our goal has been to bring the Assistant to as many people, languages, and locations as possible,” Google VP of product Nick Fox wrote in a blog post. "The Assistant is already available in eight languages, and by the end of the year it will be available in more than 30 languages, reaching 95 percent of all eligible Android phones worldwide."

Google Assistant is trying to cover every possible situation, too, and it’s constantly adding to its index of one million actions.

If the children want to hear a classic tale like "Sleeping Beauty," all they have to say is "Hey Google, tell me a story." Come Mother’s Day, those who want to entertain mom with a heartwarming interview between moms and their children need only say "Hey Google, tell me a story about motherhood.”

There’s also good news for the 10 million Wear OS smartwatch users. “Smart suggestions” are on tap for later this year, enabling wearers to ask Google Assistant a question and have it populate contextual, follow-up questions automatically. For example, if you asked about the weather conditions in a city you’re driving to, Google Assistant is on-call with regular updates, along with any associated news like weather-related closings.

At the retail level, Google launched a program last month that allows users to purchase items through Google Assistant and shopping ads in Search results.

Happy to ask for help

To keep Assistant’s blood pumping, Google is kickstarting an investment program for early-stage startups that can create new ideas for Assistant and advance its potential. Google is making venture capital, cloud space, tools, and promotional support freely available to developers who share their vision.

Google’s investments are already starting to pay off. Take GoMoment, a company that built "Ivy," a 24/7 hotel concierge of sorts that can answer questions like "Is there a happy hour at the bar tonight?" Ivy is now in place at hotels like Hard Rock and Caesars Palace.

Then, there’s "Edwin" -- a personal English tutor that helps students trying to master a foreign language. Edwin brings together artificial intelligence and English instructors so every step along the way is structured to meet a student’s needs, pace, and learning style.

Google is reportedly testing a self-destructing option for emails as part of its upcoming Gmail redesign. Sending an expiring email will ensure that only the intended recipient can view the message -- and only for a set period of time.

Once the link has expired, the message will effectively disappear. Users can set an email to expire after one week, a month, or after a couple of years.

“Working on an email service is hard as you have to be compatible with all sorts of email providers and email clients,” TechCrunch reported. “But it doesn't seem to be stopping Google as the company is now evolving beyond the simple POP3/IMAP/SMTP protocols."

Confidental Mode

“Confidential Mode” will allow users to limit what recipients can do with the email. This feature -- which can be activated by clicking a lock icon in the window -- prevents recipients from forwarding, downloading, or printing the email’s content.

Additionally, users can choose to require a recipient to verify their identity by entering a passcode sent via text message. It's unclear if the passcode feature will work for non-Gmail users, TechCrunch noted.

The tech giant previously said it planned to give Gmail “a fresh, clean look.” Several new features will be added in the redesign, including smart replies, a new sidebar, the ability to snooze emails, and three new layouts to choose from.

The new version of Gmail on the web is expected to launch over the next few weeks, with some speculating it could be announced at Google’s I/O development conference May 8.

Google has confirmed that it will be rolling out a redesigned version of Gmail in the coming weeks. The company says the update will feature a “fresh, clean look” and give users access to several new features, like Smart Reply, the ability to snooze emails, and offline support.

Leaked screenshots of the redesign obtained by The Verge show the company plans to let users choose from three different views. A compact view will look similar to the current version of Gmail but with less vertical whitespace; a default view highlights attachments such as images or documents; and a comfortable view doesn’t highlight attachments.

“We’re working on some major updates to Gmail (they’re still in draft phase),” a Google spokesperson said. “We need a bit more time to compose ourselves, so can’t share anything yet—archive this for now, and we’ll let you know when it’s time to hit send.”

New sidebar and tools

A major change to the forthcoming version of Gmail would be the addition of a new sidebar.

Sahil Bhutani saw a Google employee playing with the new design on public transport and told TechCrunch: “The left-side column was more like inbox.google.com and the right side was an enlarged version of Gmail. The color in the background had a blue-ish gradient. Every folder on the left had an icon just like Inbox and dividers to split the categories.”

Screenshots of the redesigned Gmail show that a smart reply feature for quickly answering emails without typing anything is on the way, as well as a snooze button for muting email threads in your inbox until you’re ready to reply to them.

For now, it’s unclear when the new version will launch. However, some have speculated that if it doesn’t happen in the next few weeks, the company may share more details about the redesign at Google I/O in May.

Google has made a $300 million commitment to elevate quality journalism and combat the spread of misinformation.

The company is launching what it calls the Google News Initiative (GNI), which will include features to help publishers grow their number of subscribers, adopt innovative technologies, and change their business model to thrive in the digital age.

"Over the next three years, we're committing $300 million toward meeting these goals. We're also deepening our commitment to building products that address the news industry's most urgent needs," Google said in a blog post.

Tacking misinformation

"It's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish what's true (and not true) online," the company said. "Business models for journalism continue to change drastically. The rapid evolution of technology is challenging all institutions, including the news industry, to keep pace."

To combat the spread of misinformation during elections and breaking news moments, Google teamed up with Harvard University’s fact-checking organization First Draft to create a “Disinfo Lab.”

Disinfo Lab will identify inaccurate news stories and remove them from Google News rankings.

To help publishers garner more paying subscribers, Google will offer a “Subscribe with Google” tool that lets consumers subscribe to multiple outlets via Google. The tech giant will take a minor cut of the subscription cost while publishers get a majority.

The company has also partnered with the Poynter Institute, Stanford University, and the Local Media Association to develop MediaWise, an initiative to help middle and high school students be smarter consumers of news and information online.

Boosting consumer trust

The $300 million commitment towards elevating and strengthening quality journalism comes amid growing concern over “fake news.”

The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer found that trust in traditional media is still on the higher end at 61 percent. However, the study found that more than half (59 percent) of consumers said they worried about fake news being used as a “weapon.”

"The commitments we're making through the Google News Initiative demonstrate that news and quality journalism is a top priority for Google," Google said. "We know that success can only be achieved by working together, and we look forward to collaborating with the news industry to build a stronger future for journalism."

In an effort to compete with Amazon and make more money from product searches, Google has rolled out a new program called Shopping Actions.

Aware of the fact that consumers often start their search for a product on Google but ultimately purchase the item on Amazon, the company has launched a program that will allow users to purchase items through Google Assistant and shopping ads in Search results.

Consumers can save their payment information and make purchases from retailers with instant checkout. Google gets a part of the profit from each, which is different from its typical ad revenue model.

‘Google-hosted checkout flow’

The number of searches containing the phase “how to buy” grew by a 85 percent in the past two years, according to Google. In launching Shopping Actions, the company is aiming to make more money from searches and give retailers a better chance of fighting off Amazon.

“Shopper Kai can do a search on Google for moisturizing hand soap, see a listing for up & up brand soap from Target, and add it to a Google Express cart,” the company said as an example of how the service works.

“Later, in the kitchen, Kai can reorder foil through voice, add it to the same cart using Google Home, and purchase all items at once through a Google-hosted checkout flow.”

Google is encouraging companies to see the service as an ally against Amazon.

“We have taken a fundamentally different approach from the likes of Amazon because we see ourselves as an enabler of retail...We see ourselves as part of a solution for retailers to be able to drive better transactions,” Google’s president for retail and shopping Daniel Alegre told Reuters.

Google is working with several retailers on the new service, including Target, Walmart, Ulta Beauty, Costco, and Home Depot.

• 79 million ads for linking to malware
• 400,000 sites for hosting malicious ads
• 66 million “trick-to-click” ads
• 48 million ads attempting to get users to install unwanted software
• 320,000 website publishers for failing to meet its policies for publishers

One hundred ads removed every second

Combating ad fraud

Back in June, Google announced that it was going to be taking a tougher stance on terrorist and extremist content on platforms like YouTube.

Among the changes, the company said that it would be using machine learning systems to detect and remove terrorist videos, hiring more experts to review problematic content, and cracking down on videos that don’t necessarily violate its policies but still contain offensive, extremist, and inflammatory religious and supremacist messages.

Now, the company has released an update on how those efforts are paying off. In a blog post released on Tuesday, company officials said that progress is being made on all fronts.

“Altogether, we have taken significant steps over the last month in our fight against online terrorism. But this is not the end. We know there is more work to be done," the company said.

"With the help of new machine learning technology, deep partnerships, ongoing collaborations with other companies through the Global Internet Forum, and our vigilant community we are confident we can continue to make progress against this ever-changing threat.”

Making progress

When it comes to its machine learning systems, YouTube says that they are faster, more accurate, and more efficient than ever before. The company notes that over 75% of videos showcasing extremist content were taken down after receiving a single human flag in the past month.

Additionally, the systems have more than doubled both the number of videos removed for violent extremism and the rate at which YouTube has taken those kinds of videos down. Officials say that they are encouraged by the improvements, but that the company will continue to invest in experts and technical resources to improve outcomes.

Speaking of experts, YouTube says that it has added 15 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and institutions to its Trusted Flagger program to help identify hate speech, radicalization, and terrorism in videos that are used to recruit extremists. Some of the groups include the Anti-Defamation League, the No Hate Speech Movement, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

“We will…regularly consult these experts as we update our policies to reflect new trends. And we’ll continue to add more organizations to our network of advisors over time,” officials said.

“Limited state”

Finally, YouTube says that it has taken several steps in the past month to impose tougher restrictions on videos that are not technically illegal but are flagged by users for showcasing hate speech and violent extremism.

The company says that although these videos will not be taken down from its site, they will be placed in a “limited state."

“The videos will remain on YouTube behind an interstitial, won’t be recommended, won’t be monetized, and won’t have key features including comments, suggested videos, and likes,” the company said, adding that this new treatment will soon be rolled out to videos on desktop versions of YouTube. 

Officials say that further updates on its progress will continue to roll out in the coming months.

Back in August, we reported that Google was staking its claim in the ride-sharing business. Using its Waze navigation app, the company began testing a “Going my way?” concept that allowed drivers to connect with travelers that were going in the same direction.

Initially, tests were confined to Israel and the San Francisco Bay area, but the Wall Street Journal reports that positive results have prompted Google to expand the program. Waze chief Noam Bardin announced that the company will be testing the service in several U.S. cities and in Latin America over the next several months.

Ride-sharing differences

The expansion is likely to put Google on a collision course with other popular ride-sharing services like Lyft and Uber. However, Waze’s service differs in several key ways.

For one, users must order their Waze rides hours in advance and there is no guarantee that a driver will accept. This is because the service asks drivers who use the navigation app to pick up travelers who are going in the same direction. Uber and Lyft, on the other hand, operate more of an on-demand service that users depend on to take them wherever they want to go on short notice.

As such, drivers will more than likely not be using Waze as their main source of income, as many Uber and Lyft drivers do now. Riders only pay drivers 54 cents per mile – the reimbursement rate for business travel according to the IRS – and Waze currently doesn’t take a cut of those earnings. However, that could change if the service finds success.

The main drawing point for riders will be the difference in price. A trip from downtown Oakland to downtown San Francisco cost a scant $4.50 for users of the Waze service, while Uber and Lyft’s cheapest rides cost $10.57 and $12.40, respectively. However, much of the service’s success will depend on driver cooperation.

“Can we get the average person on his way to work to pick someone up and drop them off once in a while? That’s the biggest challenge,” said Bardin.

Self-driving integration?

Google bought Waze for $1 billion back in 2013, but it has had its eyes on the self-driving market for some time. In the same year, it invested $258 million in Uber and placed one of its executives on the company’s board.

Over time, the companies parted ways due to competition, but the emergence of the Waze Carpool service may kick things into overdrive. As of right now, Google does enjoy some advantage because it doesn’t have to overcome some of the regulatory obstacles that other ride-sharing services have had to deal with. Bardin also notes the possibility of integrating self-driving technologies into the service in the future.

“If we were a startup, we couldn’t afford to take these sorts of long term bets. With Google, we can. . . And maybe at the end of the day, instead of a neighbor picking you up, a robot picks you up,” he quipped.

Legend has it that Twitter has for years been a twinkle in the eyes of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and now Bloomberg reports that Google parent Alphabet has hired Lazard Ltd. to evaluate a possible acquisition.

Lazard served as the financial adviser for Google’s $625 million takeover of software developer Apigee in September. The deal is expected to close by year’s end.

Rumors of a Google takeover of Twitter have been around since at least 2009. It's seen as a natural fit for both companies and for advertisers who already advertise on both sites to reach their target audiences.

For Google, Twitter would perhaps finally supply what Google has been unable to conjure up on its own -- a successful presence in the social space. Google+ never quite took off, and microblogging site Buzz faded quickly after its 2010 launch. Meanwhile, Twitter has continued to ramp up its user base despite problems figuring out how to majorly monetize it, so to speak.

What the benefits are for everyday consumers isn't quite as clear, but there's no immediately obvious downside.

There could be privacy implications if the sites' user lists were merged after an acquisition, but does anyone really expect privacy in a social network setting?

Google is perhaps one of the biggest companies in support of getting self-driving cars on the road. Back in March, it asked Congress to allow federal regulators to override the wishes of states that rejected the new technology, and since then it has been testing and refining its own prototype.

Testing new technologies comes with risks, though, and the company's self-driving car recently hit a bump in the road. On Friday, reports surfaced that the vehicle had been involved in an accident in Mt. View, Calif. Another driver allegedly ran a red light and collided with Google’s vehicle.

The car was operating autonomously when the crash occurred, but a Google employee quickly took over control and applied the brakes as the other car entered the intersection. No one was hurt as a result of the incident.

“A Google vehicle was traveling northbound on Phyllis Ave. in Mountain View when a car heading westbound on El Camino Real ran a red light and collided with the right side of our vehicle. Our light was green for at least six seconds before our car entered the intersection. Thousands of crashes happen everyday on U.S. roads, and red-light running is the leading cause of urban crashes in the U.S. Human error plays a role in 94% of these crashes, which is why we’re developing fully self-driving technology to make our roads safer,” said Google in a statement.

Improving safety

The crash comes shortly after safety regulators released new guidelines for autonomous vehicles. The provisions are meant to shore up any laissez-faire approaches to creating self-driving cars so that they are safe before consumers can operate them on the open road.

Safety advocates were pleased with the change in policy, saying that the Department of Transportation’s focus on consumer safety was “long overdue.” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx reiterated in a statement that self-driving vehicles could save many lives..

“Automated vehicles have the potential to save thousands of lives, driving the single biggest leap in road safety that our country has ever taken,” he said.

Despite the recent accident, Google will surely continue to test its self-driving technologies going forward. The company releases reports on how far its vehicles have traveled and provides accident details at its “Google Self-Driving Car Project” page here.

Texting is oh so dull and drab and who has time for Facetime or Hangouts? That seems to be the thinking behind Google's latest messaging entry, dubbed Allo, an emoji-infested app powered by Google Assistant, which seems to be sort of a smarter Siri.

As far as we can tell, Allo sort of takes the thinking out of texting. "Google Allo can help you make plans, find information, and express yourself more easily in chat. And the more you use it, the more it improves over time,” according to Google.

To hear Google tell it, Allo is intended to be a market-entry strategy for Google Assistant. But marketers were quick to pick up on its potential for such ad-related features as recommendations, reviews, reservations, and so forth.

“You can easily move from discussing dinner with friends to making plans for the night, right in your chat. Just add the Assistant to your group chat and ask for movie times, local restaurants and more. You can also research travel destinations, flights and hotels together with friends,” as Google put it in a blog posting.

Why think?

Carried to its logical extension, Allo is like having a speechwriter and an appointments secretary right in your pocket. This is only logical; why should you have to wrack your brain when a friend asks what you want to do tonight? Now you can let Allo figure it out.

All of this might suggest that Allo does the thinking for those unable to do it for themselves, but a more generous view is that it frees us up to think great thoughts and ponder issues of global significance instead of obsessing over which Starbucks to go to.

For a more animated description, check out this video from Google:

Travelers from around the world know what it feels like to be disoriented in a new city. All of the new sights, sounds, and people can be overwhelming, and if you don’t know where to go you may be in for a rough time.

For this reason, most consumers rely on their smartphones to get around in unfamiliar places. But what happens if the battery dies or you hit your data limit? Now, the new Google Trips app can come to your rescue.

Google Trips is an app that allows users to store all of their trip information in one place. Officials say that the app can help you successfully plan your trip day-by-day and take the hassle out of a visit or vacation.

“We wanted to reduce the hassle and help travelers enjoy their hard-earned vacations. So today, we’re introducing a new mobile app to help you instantly plan each day of your trip with just a few taps of your finger: Google Trips,” said the company in a blog post.

Planning your trip

The app provides categories that consumers can input information into, such as day plans, reservations, food and drink options, travel arrangements, and more. After filling in all of the pertinent information, consumers can then tap the “Download” button to save the trip to their device, allowing them to access it without needing to rely on WiFi or data.

For some of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, Google has provided some day plans so that travelers have an idea of where to visit. For example, those wishing to visit Florence, Italy may be given prompts to visit the Duomo, Uffizi museum, or even the Ponte Vecchio for some shopping.

For those working under strict time constraints, the app also gives the option to search for things to do in areas that you already know you want to visit. After clicking the “+” button in the day plans category, travelers will be provided with a list of attractions that they can see in any given area.

Users can also specify times for when they’re visiting, so someone who only has time in the morning or afternoon can input that information above the map and the app will generate a day plan for you. If they happen to find a new spot that they like or want to change plans, travelers can also tap the “magic wand” icon to have the app generate a new itinerary on the fly.

Organizing information

Google Trips isn’t just good for planning out your day, though. The app also allows users to store all the information they need on flights, car rentals, hotel and restaurant reservations, and more. The app collects all of the information by gathering it from a connected Gmail account and then organizes it by trip, so users won’t need to dig through their inbox to find what they need.

“Vacations are a chance to recharge and experience new places and cultures. For your next trip, let us help you see all the sights you want to see, without all the work,” concluded the company.

The app is available to download on both the iOS and Android platforms. 

There has been a lot of press over the past year about the advent of self-driving cars. While many drivers feel uneasy about giving up control of their vehicles, companies like Google have been performing extensive tests on them to see if they would be viable in the near future. But when that day comes, consumers might hope that they're not as slow as the Google vehicle that was pulled over yesterday for traveling too far under the speed limit.

Dealing with slow drivers is a constant source of ire for drivers around the world, so you can imagine how some of them must have felt when they were stuck behind one of Google's self-driving prototypes in Mountain View, CA., yesterday. Police in the area noticed traffic backing up behind the vehicle and noted that it was going 24 mph in a 35 mph zone.

Luckily, these same police officers were tech savvy enough recognize that the vehicle was a self-driving model, despite the human safety driver who was in the car at the time. They pulled the vehicle over to alleviate traffic and reportedly “made contact with the operators to learn more about how the car was choosing speeds along certain roadways and to educate the operators about impeding traffic,” according to a police blog post.

Later, via its Google+ page, the team responsible for the car project explained that prototype cars are set not to exceed 25 mph due to “safety reasons.”

'We want them to feel friendly and approachable, rather than zooming scarily through neighborhood streets. . . Like this officer, people sometimes flag us down when they want to know more about our project. . . After 1.2 million miles of autonomous driving (that's the human equivalent of 90 years of driving experience), we're proud to say we've never been ticketed!,” said Google.

Regardless of its clean record, there will be many drivers on the road hoping that they aren't stuck behind one of these prototypes again.  

Back when Google was founded in 1998, its name was unique and clever. When it founded its parent corporation this week it named it Alphabet, which may or may not be clever but which is certainly far from unique.

In fact, there are companies named Alphabet that run the gamut from A to, well, maybe not quite Z but close. First of all, there's the Alphabet Corp. that is owned by BMW, an automotive fleet manager that operates in 18 countries and supplies 530,000 vehicles to its customers.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office reports there are no fewer than 103 registered trademarks containing the word "Alphabet" so it seems that, rather than breaking new ground as it once did, Google is taking the path more chosen.

Other Alphabets

There's Alphabet Acquisition Corp., founded in 1943. It operates a chain of radio stations around the country. There's the Alphabet line of furniture, which makes plastic form-fitting chairs.

There are Alphabet cooking sets that let you make letter-shaped cookies. AlphabetKids,runs lunch programs in Canadian schools.

In Warren, Ohio, there's an Alphabet Group that makes stainless steel assemblies and other industrial equipment.

Probably no one in Mountain View cares much about any of these small companies and feels no compunctions about riding roughshod over their hard-won identity.

While BMW might be a more formidable foe than AlphabetKids, it apparently doesn't feel proprietary about its name.

Trademark issues

A BMW spokesman told Reuters the automaker was "examining whether there are any implications over trademarks" but said there are currently no plans for legal action against Google or its parent, Alphabet.

Google has said it doesn't plan to use the Alphabet name on any of its products or services and will use it only as the name of its holding company.

While it's not likely any of the smaller Alphabets will want to pick a fight with Google, it's not hard to imagine that a few years down the road, Google starts insisting that it and only it owns the Alphabet name and begins sending long letters on fancy legal letterhead to the more insignificant Alphabets.

One might wonder why, since it is the self-appointed fount of the world's knowledge, Google didn't take the trouble to at least come up with a one-off name -- you know, something like "AlphaBit." Even Microsoft managed to jam two words together when it came up with its moniker.

As one observer put it, Google has birthed its parent company. Known as Alphabet, the parent company will do what parents have always done -- try to keep the brawling brood in line, encouraging the brighter bulbs and trying to keep the wastrels from bringing down the entire clan.

Google is the biggest and brawniest of the Alphabet family and does the down-and-dirty work -- search, email, thermostats -- that pay the bills. It may not be glamorous but it's what the first-born does: trudges to the office each day carrying on the family name.

The others? Well, who knows. Google over the years has tried all kinds of things. Some look promising, others not. The idea behind this reorganization is to run Google like a business while leaving company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin free to chase ideas without running up a big tab that draws down Google's earnings.

A to Z

Alphabet -- A to Z, get it? -- will have enough money to pursue big ideas but will not get its hand into the Google cookie jar more often than the parent dictates.

Google will have its own CEO -- Sundar Pichai -- whose task is to keep Google's nose to the grindstone, doing what it does best, which is selling advertising. He's been in charge of that part of the business for quite some time so keeping it stoked and steaming ahead should be no challenge. 

What this means for consumers is that Google should continue to innovate and grow its core businesses, producing even more targeted ads in even more places. Not that anyone was ever really afraid it would stop doing so.

Although everyone is too polite to say so, Google has now turned into something that's just a little bit boring -- it makes scads of money but at the end of the day, well, it's work. This is what happens to start-up companies that are truly lucky: they become so successful that their founders begin to get edgy and want to go try their hand at something else.

Midlife angst

This kind of midlife angst makes Wall Street nervous. It wants a steely-eyed businessman running the company day-to-day, crunching numbers, hitting financial goals and keeping everyone in line. 

Some of us have been around long enough to remember when Google started. It was so under-financed that it canceled its affiliate advertising deals with sites like this one because they were too expensive.

We emailed Google at the time and said we thought their new search engine was so valuable that we would run the ads for nothing. We never heard back though, so they must still be doing all right. 

Not surprisingly, Google is resisting a demand that it broaden the "right to be forgotten" by censoring search results worldwide, saying that allowing one country to censor the Web worldwide would start a "race to the bottom."

"We believe that no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access," global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer says on Google's blog.

Privacy advocates say that an individual's right to privacy is well-established principle in American law.

"In the end, the Internet would only be as free as the world’s least free place," Fleischer writes, noting that content that is legal in one country might be illegal in another. "Thailand criminalizes some speech that is critical of its King, Turkey criminalizes some speech that is critical of Ataturk, and Russia outlaws some speech that is deemed to be 'gay propaganda.'"

Google has been struggling with the European Union since last year's court ruling that search engines must allow Europeans to request removal of links about themselves. In June, France demanded that Google remove results from all of it results pages -- even in the U.S. -- rather than simply from results pages in Europe.

In the U.S., Consumer Watchdog, a California group, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission saying that Google's refusal to let Americans ask it to remove information about themselves was "unfair and deceptive."

"No legal basis"

Today, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) came to Google's defense. In a letter to the FTC, the group said the "terms suggested in the complaint are extraordinarily broad, vague and elusive and would create dangerous precedents adversely impacting numerous other U.S. companies in addition to Google."

The advertisers group argued that there is,"absolutely no legal basis, and in fact, it would be unconstitutional to allow the U.S. government to compel companies to give to these types of demands."

“Allowing ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ policies to be enforced in the U.S. would cause serious and undue harm to the public’s right to determine for itself what is important and relevant information,” said Dan Jaffe, ANA’s Group Executive Vice President for Government Relations. “Such a rule would force American companies to edit the past under the supervision of federal regulators. Consumer Watchdog’s costly, onerous censorship proposal runs contrary to consumers’ interests, and is certainly not constitutional in the U.S.”

Cornerstone of privacy law

"There is a lot that is incorrect in the ANA statement," said,Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in an email to ConsumerAffairs, "But my favorite is this: 'Consumer Watchdog is clearly confusing the right to privacy with the right not to be embarrassed.'"

Said Rotenberg: "No, actually, Consumer Watchdog is describing the right to privacy set out by [former Supreme Court Justice] Louis Brandeis in the famous 1890 law review article. That right is, not surprisingly, the cornerstone of privacy law in the USA."

Rotenberg and other privacy advocates note that no one is suggesting newspapers should remove articles or not publish them in the first place.

"In Google v. Spain, the European Court of Justice ruled that the European citizens have a right to request that commercial search firms, such as Google, that gather personal information for profit should remove links to private information when asked, provided the information is no longer relevant. The Court did not say newspapers should remove articles," EPIC said in a recent posting on its website.

"The Court found that the fundamental right to privacy is greater than the economic interest of the commercial firm and, in some circumstances, the public interest in access to Information," EPIC said.

A recently leaked version of a Google transparency report found,that the vast majority of requests for delisting concern private matters of private individuals, EPIC said.

Google has conceded what everyone else already knew -- Google+ is sort of a big minus and is not going to knock Facebook and Twitter out of cyberspace. Google says it will no longer require users to have a Google+ account to interact with other users.

In a Google+ post, Google+ manager Brad Horowitz announced that Google will "retire [Google+] as the mechanism by which people share and engage within other Google products." Instead, users will need only a Google email or other type of account.

When it launched "+" -- as it may affectionately be known somewhere in the universe -- four years ago, Google's hope was that it would grow into a huge social network with a billion users. While it had its pluses, including the ability to break groups into categories such as "friend," "family" and "colleague," + actually grew into a big source of frustration for many users.

"Why the f---?"

YouTubers, in particular, were miffed that after years of commenting loudly and vociferously they suddenly needed to sign up for a + account, the most famous outburst coming from YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, who asked "Why the f— do I need a google+ account to comment on a video?”

As Horowitz tells it, the goal was to establish a "platform layer" that would tie all of Big G's services together. But many users saw it as a way for Google to muscle into social media by forcing its users to sign up for G+ whether they wanted to or not. Some critics went so far as to label it downright Microsoftian.

Horowitz says the company meant well.

“This was a well-intentioned goal, but as realized it led to some product experiences that users sometimes found confusing,” he wrote.

Horowitz said Google is rolling out the policy change "as fast as possible," starting with YouTube.

"What does this mean for Google+ the product?" he asked rhetorically, replying: "Relieved of the notion of integrating with every other product at Google, Google+ can now focus on doing what it’s already doing quite well: helping millions of users around the world connect around the interest they love."

Horowitz said it's been "incredibly gratifying" to see how well the change has been received.

,

Google may be applying the "right to be forgotten" to its own activities. The company revealed in a blog post yesterday that one of its self-driving cars was rear-ended in an accident that sent three employees and the driver of the other car to the hospital for check-ups.

The accident happened July 1 and Google gave no reason why it took 16 days for it to get around to mentioning it.

Of course, one could argue that Google is not obligated to reveal details of its internal operations, but since it is using public roads for its experimental commutes and trying to persuade regulators and the public that autonomous cars will be safe, cover-ups aren't exactly helpful.

The accident happened with one of Google's Lexus RX450h prototypes was rear-ended by another car in Mountain View, Calif., where Google autonomous cars ply the streets regularly.

The Googlemobile had a green light but the cars in front of it had slowed down to avoid getting stuck in the intersection in an upcoming light change, according to a blog account by Chris Urmson, director of Google's self-driving project. 

Whiplash

The three Google employees in the car and the long occupant of the car that plowed into it all complained about neck pain and were checked out and then released from a local hospital.

Google says it's the first injury accident in a self-driving car. It's the 14th accident overall involving Google's fleet of self-driving cars. In 11 of those incidents, the Google car was rear-ended.

Google displayed its usual self-assurance in describing the incident.

"Our self-driving cars are being hit surprisingly often by other drivers who are distracted and not paying attention to the road," wrote Chris Urmson, director of Google's self-driving car project, in the blog post. "The clear theme is human error and inattention" in those incidents.

Proponents of self-driving cars, as well as some scientists, say there will likely be fewer accidents when computers replace humans at the controls. We'll see.

Google accidentally revealed more than it intended to in its latest transparency report. The Guardian reported today that it discovered “new data hidden in source code on Google’s own transparency report that indicates the scale and flavour of the types of requests being dealt with by Google – information it has always refused to make public. The data covers more than three-quarters of all requests to date.”

Those “requests” the Guardian mentioned are link-takedown requests invoking the so-called “right to be forgotten,” a legal [privilege and/or burden, depending who you ask] covering people and organizations in the European Union, but not in the United States (though some U.S.-based consumer groups would like to see that change).

Origins of "right to be forgotten"

The European “right to be forgotten” dates back to May 2014, when the E.U. Court of Justice ruled that Google and other search engines are, in at least some circumstances, legally obligated to stop linking to old news stories about various people — true and accurate news stories about people — if the people in question request it.

The original case was brought by a Spanish national, Mario Costeja González, whose house was auctioned off for unpaid taxes back in 1998. A Spanish newspaper printed legal notices about the proceedings — standard operating procedure for a local paper, in Spain or in America — and then in 2009, Costeja asked the newspaper to remove the stories from their online archives and also asked Google to stop linking to the stories, on the grounds that those 11-year-old news pieces about his debts were no longer relevant, since the debts in question had been settled.

Google and the newspaper refused, so Costeja sued them both. The court sided with the newspaper – so it is not required to remove the stories from its website. But the court also sided against Google – the stories can stay online, but Google has to stop linking to them when people search for the name “Mario Costeja González.” Specifically, Google and other search engines must honor certain takedown requests which involve “irrelevant and outdated” search results.

Data leak

As soon as the European court announced its decision, Google was inundated with takedown requests. Within two days of the court ruling, the BBC mentioned three of them: a politician running for re-election asked Google to stop linking to old news stories about his behavior while in office, a pedophile wanted Google to stop linking to news articles about his previous criminal conviction for possession of child pornography, and a doctor wanted to take down links to negative reviews written by his patients.

But that was only during the first two days of Europe's “right to be forgotten.” That right is now 14 months old and, according to the Guardian, “Less than 5% of nearly 220,000 individual requests made to Google to selectively remove links to online information concern criminals, politicians and high-profile public figures … with more than 95% of requests coming from everyday members of the public.”

Not that you'll find this statistic in the transparency report itself. The Guardian figured it out by analyzing previously archived versions of older transparency reports. The data “details the numeric breakdown of each request and associated link by country and issue type. The underlying source code has since been updated to remove these details.”

Largely private and personal information

Information about specific takedown requests doesn't seem to be available, but the Guardian said that “Of 218,320 requests to remove links between 29 May 2014 and 23 March 2015, 101,461 (46%) have been successfully delisted on individual name searches. Of these, 99,569 involve 'private or personal information'.”

Although some consumer or privacy groups want Google to honor a similar “right to be forgotten” in America – and even asked the Federal Trade Commission to require it – it's not certain whether such a law would even be constitutional. Unlike Europeans, Americans have First Amendment guarantees to free speech and a free press, which sometimes means that laws allowable in the E.U. wouldn't pass constitutional muster in the United States (and, conversely, that certain U.S. laws and practices violate privacy laws in the E.U.).

For example: in Europe, you won't find many websites like ConsumerAffairs or Yelp, for the simple reason that businesses can bring libel charges against anyone who speaks ill of them and have a reasonable certainty of winning, even if the criticism is accurate. (And now, even if websites like ConsumerAffairs did operate in Europe, it might be illegal for Google to link to our stories anyway.)

That said, European supporters of the “right to be forgotten” will likely view the accidental Google data dump as evidence favoring their cause. The Guardian quoted Dr. Paul Bernal, a lecturer in technology and media law at the University of East Anglia, as saying that the data suggests the right to be forgotten is a legitimate law (in the United Kingdom): “If most of the requests are private and personal ones, then it’s a good law for the individuals concerned. It seems there is a need for this – and people go for it for genuine reasons.”

The advocacy group Consumer Watchdog today filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, saying that Google's failure to offer U.S. users the same “right to be forgotten” enjoyed by citizens of the European Union is “unfair and deceptive.”

John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project director, wrote that “Google’s refusal to consider such requests in the United States is both unfair and deceptive, violating Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act.”

European "Right to be Forgotten"

Europe's “Right to be Forgotten” dates back to a May 2014 ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (the E.U.'s equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court, more or less). That ruling regarded a case brought before the court in 2010, by a Spanish national named Mario Costeja González. But the start of Costeja's complaint dates back to 1998, when some of his property was auctioned off to pay back taxes. 

In Spain as in America, property auctions for tax settlements are public information and thus count as legitimate news, so the Spanish daily newspaper La Vanguardia published legal notices of the proceedings in January and March 1998.

In 2009, those 11-year-old notices still turned up in Google searches for Costeja's name, so Costeja asked La Vanguardia to take the stories down and also asked Google to stop linking to them, on the grounds that old stories about his debt issues were no longer relevant since his debts had been resolved.

Google and the newspaper both refused Costeja's request, so in 2009 he took his complaints to the Spanish Data Protection Agency which, in July 2010, ordered Google to remove the links but did not order La Vanguardia to remove the stories.

Google challenged the order, the E.U. Court of Justice agreed to hear the appeal, and in May 2014 it ruled against Google. The E.U. “right to be forgotten” essentially says that, while information does not have to be deleted from the Internet (meaning: websites like La Vanguardia can keep their archives online), search engines might have to obey requests to take down links to certain stories.

Court of Justice rulings are legally binding throughout the European Union just as Supreme Court rulings are legally binding throughout the U.S., so Google has obeyed European law while conducting operations in Europe, and U.S. law for its business in the United States.

Seeking similar treatment in U.S.

But Consumer Watchdog's complaint to the FTC (which is available as a .pdf here) criticizes Google for not honoring E.U.-style takedown requests in the United States, specifically:

…. Google’s failure to offer U.S. users the ability to request the removal of search engine links from their name to information that is inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant, or excessive. In Europe the ability to make this request is popularly referred to as the Right To Be Forgotten. As [FTC] Commissioner Brill has suggested it may more accurately be described as the Right Of Relevancy or the Right To Preserve Obscurity.

Consumer Watchdog went on to explain why the “right of relevancy” is a necessary consumer-privacy protection:

Before the Internet if someone did something foolish when they were young – and most of us probably did – there might well be a public record of what happened. Over time, as they aged, people tended to forget whatever embarrassing things someone did in their youth. They would be judged mostly based on their current circumstances, not on information no longer relevant. If someone else were highly motivated, they could go back into paper files and folders and dig up a person’s past. Usually this required effort and motivation. For a reporter, for instance, this sort of deep digging was routine with, say, candidates for public office, not for Joe Blow citizen. This reality that our youthful indiscretions and embarrassments and other matters no longer relevant slipped from the general public’s consciousness is Privacy By Obscurity. The Digital Age has ended that. Everything – all our digital footprints – are instantly available with a few clicks on a computer or taps on a mobile device.

However, the letter goes on to point out that U.S. law already recognizes a “right of relevancy” in certain cases, such as credit reports – the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires that information about debt collections, civil lawsuits, tax liens, and similar matters becomes “obsolete” after a certain period of time (usually seven years) and must henceforth be removed from consumers' credit reports.

"Right to be Forgotten" could be useful

Consumer Watchdog offered examples of cases where a “right to be forgotten” might prove useful, including:

A guidance counselor was fired in 2012 after modeling photos from 20 years prior surfaced. She was a lingerie model between the ages of 18-20, and she had disclosed her prior career when she first was hired. Despite this, when a photo was found online and shown to the principal of her school, she was fired.

Arguably, in cases such as that – the counselor openly admitted her previous career when she was hired, which clearly caused no problems until the principal took umbrage at a photograph from half a lifetime before – what the woman needed wasn't a “right to be forgotten” so much as “protection from a hypocritical employer.”

But Consumer Watchdog also offered examples of European link-removal requests, those honored by Google under the “right to be forgotten” and also those requests Google did not honor: “A woman in Italy requested that Google remove a decades-old article about her husband’s murder, which included her name. The page was removed from search results for her name.  A Swiss financial professional asked Google to remove more than 10 links to pages reporting on his arrest and conviction for financial crimes. Google did not remove the pages from search results.”

Last month, Google did implement a policy change in the United States, specifically to crack down on the practice of “revenge porn” — the practice wherein people (usually angry ex-lovers) post identifiable nude or sexually explicit photos of their partners, along with the partners' names, links to their social media accounts and other identifying information, with the intention of humiliating them and/or damaging their careers.

On June 19, Google said that henceforth, the company would honor requests from victims to remove “revenge porn” images from its search engine, and stop linking to the results. Consumer Watchdog mentioned this in its complaint to the FTC, and said “Google's approach to removals in the United States underscores the unfairness of offering the Right To Be Forgotten to Europeans, but not to Americans. As clearly demonstrated by its willingness to remove links to certain information when requested in the United States, Google could easily offer the Right To Be Forgotten or Right to Relevancy request option to Americans. It unfairly and deceptively opts not to do so. … Americans deserve the same ability to make such a privacy-protecting request and have it honored.”

Legal differences between continents

Of course, Americans (unlike Europeans) have First Amendment guarantees of free press and free speech, which sometimes means that laws allowable in the E.U. wouldn't pass constitutional muster in the United States (and, conversely, that certain U.S. laws might fall short of privacy protections in the E.U.).

For example: in Europe, you won't find many websites like ConsumerAffairs or Yelp, for the simple reason that businesses can bring libel charges against anyone who speaks ill of them and have a reasonable certainty of winning, even if the criticism is accurate.

It is true, as Consumer Watchdog pointed out, that the so-called “right to relevancy” exists regarding some forms of personal information: you generally aren't expected to repay a credit card debt if it's more than seven years old, for example, and even a declaration of bankruptcy will eventually drop off your credit report so that you'll once again be able to apply for fresh lines of credit.

But should individuals be required to “forget” these things about other individuals, too? Here's an example Consumer Watchdog did not include in its complaint to the FTC: in 1998, a man named Mario Costeja González (remember him?) fell so far behind on his taxes, the authorities ended up auctioning off some of his real estate holdings to settle the debt — and now the European courts agree he has the right to expect everyone else to forget about it.

If Costeja does business in the United States, he already has that right, at least in financial matters — a debt resolved in 1998 would've dropped off his credit report seven years later, and wouldn't affect his ability to get a mortgage or other loan in mid-2015.

Now suppose that after getting that loan, he celebrates and drinks excessively at a nearby bar where he meets an attractive single woman (or man, if that is his preference). They get to talking and decide to start dating. Things start getting serious and at some point she types his name into a search engine because that's what people do nowadays when dating someone new.

Love alone is not enough to make a happy marriage: you also must share compatible values, especially in financial matters. So, if a woman who is very prudent and careful with money starts dating a man who, as an adult, once let his affairs get in such disarray that the authorities auctioned off his property to settle tax debts, whose rights take precedence here – the man's presumed right for everyone to forget how irresponsible he once was, or the woman's presumed right to get an accurate answer to such questions as “Has my potential partner ever been spendthrifty enough to make headlines?”

In the European Union, the man's rights take precedence here. Under current U.S. law, it's the reverse. Whether that status quo needs changing, and by how much, is shaping up to be the next big privacy-rights battleground in America.

A research paper published today claims that Google manipulates search results to promote its own content over that of its competitors, which “yields serious concerns if the internal content is inferior to organic search results.”

Worse yet, the study found Google-produced content does appear inferior to organic search results. Users who took part in a “randomized controlled trial” searching for various local businesses were 45% more likely to “engage with universal search results … when the results are organically determined.”

The paper, titled “Is Google Degrading Search? Consumer Harm from Universal Search” was co-authored by legal scholar and former Federal Trade Commission adviser Tim Wu, Harvard Business School economist Michael Luca, and a team of researchers from Yelp, which bankrolled the study. Last weekend, Yelp presented the study to the Antitrust Enforcement Symposium, hosted at Oxford University in the U.K.

Multiple accusations

This is not the first time Google has been accused of manipulating search results for its own benefit — although the company has successfully beaten such accusations before. In January 2013, the FTC completed what was then a 19-month-long study into Google's practices, and concluded that the “facts just weren't there” to support charges of biased search results.

At least, that's what the FTC publicly proclaimed at the time. Yet in March 2015, the Wall Street Journal acquired and published some internal FTC documents which claimed the opposite. The FTC staff members who investigated Google's practices a few years ago recommended at the time that the agency sue the company on anti-competitive grounds over its allegedly biased search-engine results, yet the FTC publicly voted to do the exact opposite. (The FTC denied these allegations in a press release.)

In 2012, the FTC started investigating Google and concluded that the company's search engine results “boosted its own shopping, travel and local business services” while intentionally giving lower search rankings to rival products, according to the FTC staff report acquired by the Journal — and then the FTC publicly made the opposite announcement the following January.

Not presenting its best product

At the time, Tim Wu believed the FTC's public announcement, going so far as to write a column in the New Republic asking “Why does everyone think Google beat the FTC?” and lamenting how “too many reporters fell for the line that Google used some fancy combination of executive charm and lobbying prowess to beat the federal government at its own game. You'd easily believe, from reading what has become the conventional wisdom, that Google managed to avoid any sanctions by meeting with John Kerry or paying off think tanks.”

That's what Tim Wu wrote two and a half years ago. What happened since then to make him change his mind?

“When the facts change, your thinking should change,” Wu said to Re/code. “The main surprising and shocking realization is that Google is not presenting its best product. In fact, it’s presenting a version of the product that’s degraded and intentionally worse for consumers.”

Wu admits that Yelp paid the cost of the study, saying, “They are paying me for my time. But I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think this new evidence was a game-changer.”

Humans aren't very good drivers but maybe computers won't be much better. Everyone's been assuring us that autonomous cars like those being designed by Google will be oh so much better than the ones with a breathing carbon unit behind the wheel.

But on San Antonio Road in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, a self-driving Audi Q5 being developed by Delphi Automotive was motoring along minding its own business Tuesday when a Google-driven Lexus SUV cut it off.

Delphi's software does not yet include such responses as laying on the horn and extending a certain digit out the window but fortunately, one of those soon-to-be-obsolete humans was on board and was able to take the wheel and avoid a fender bender, or worse, according to Reuters as interpreted by Business Insider, the Washington Post and others. 

(Fewer and fewer events are witnessed by human reporters these days but thanks to Google, we're better than ever at looking over each other's shoulder. When a tree falls in the forest, we may not be there to hear it but we will quickly report others' accounts.)

There have been several -- at least 11 -- fender benders on California streets since self-driving cars became sort of legal there. In each case, Google and the DMV have said, the self-driving car wasn't at fault, although consumer groups have insisted Google needs to release more information about those accidents. 

But what happens when two self-driving cars collide? Will it bring new meaning to the phrase "no-fault?" That hasn't happened yet, although Tuesday's incident suggests it won't be long now.

Google has announced a policy change to crack down on “revenge porn” -- henceforth, the company will honor requests from victims to remove “revenge porn” images from its search engine, and will stop linking to the results.

Google senior vice-president Amit Singhal explained the rationale in a post on the company's public policy blog Friday:

Our philosophy has always been that Search should reflect the whole web. But revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims—predominantly women. So going forward, we’ll honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results. This is a narrow and limited policy, similar to how we treat removal requests for other highly sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers and signatures, that may surface in our search results.

Nasty trend

Revenge porn is arguably one of the nastier online trends of the past few years. As the name (and Singhal's wording) suggests, it's a practice wherein people, usually angry ex-lovers, post identifiable nude or sexually explicit photos of their partners, along with the partners' names and other identifying information, with the intention of humiliating them and/or damaging their careers.

Online advocacy groups such as “End Revenge Porn” share horrifying real-life stories from revenge-porn victims.

Google's announcement makes it the latest major tech or social media company this year to announce a policy crackdown on revenge porn. Reddit and Twitter announced policy changes in February and March, respectively; Twitter's stated “content boundaries” now include the clause “You may not post intimate photos or videos that were taken or distributed without the subject's consent.”

A few days after Twitter announced this change, Facebook also updated its policies to disallow revenge porn; although it was already disallowed under Facebook's previous no-nudity policies, Facebook later updated its policies specifically to forbid “images shared in revenge or without permissions from the people in the images.”

Google says its fully autonomous pod-shaped cars are ready to roll but the company has not yet applied for the permit it will need to hit the road in California.

Google has been testing Lexus SUVs retrofitted with its self-driving software and hardware for quite some time but it is now itching to take its fully autonomous prototypes out for a ride.

What's the difference? Well, besides being a lot smaller than an SUV, the Google pod cars have no steering wheel, brake pedal or accelerator. They are inended to be just what the name implies -- fully autonomous, leaving the "driver" with nothing to do but sit there.

That, after all, is the whole idea -- creating a car that is basically a personal transport pod, according to a blog post by Chris Urmson, director of the project.

"When we started designing the world’s first fully self-driving vehicle, our goal was a vehicle that could shoulder the entire burden of driving. Vehicles that can take anyone from A to B at the push of a button could transform mobility for millions of people, whether by reducing the 94 percent of accidents caused by human error, reclaiming the billions of hours wasted in traffic, or bringing everyday destinations and new opportunities within reach of those who might otherwise be excluded by their inability to drive a car," Urmson said.

25 mph

The pod cars will be scooting around Google's hometown of Mountain View, Calif., collecting real-world experience that can be used to refine the process and iron out any kinks.

Urmson said speeds will be capped at 25 miles per hour and drivers will be on board with removable steering wheels, brake pedals and accelerators so they can take control of the car if needed.

He noted that the Lexus vehicles have been logging 10,000 miles per week and, although they've been involved in three fender-benders, all the accidents were minor and were the fault of the other car's driver. 

Not everyone is happy with that explanation.

“It is important that the public know what happened,” wrote John M. Simpson of Consumer Watchdog in a letter to Google.  “You are testing driverless vehicles on public highways, quite possibly putting other drivers at risk.” 

Simpson said Google should release all of the data it has on the accidents, however minor.

California enacted legislation in September that allows autonomous cars on its streets and highways, although each model must be tested and granted a permit. So far, Google hasn't applied for that permit, Automotive News reported.

Google, founded on Sept. 4, 1998, will be turning 17 in a few months and, like many teens, it's eager to get out on the open road after a few years of puttering around town with driving instructors and anxious parents looking over its shoulder.

Critics have been questioning whether Google's self-driving cars are safe and Google, like many an adolescent driver before it, is arguing that a few dings here and there don't really amount to much and says it's getting better with experience.

The Associated Press reported recently that three of Google's self-driving cars have been involved in accidents since September, when California allowed them to begin using public roards. Google doesn't deny that but says its cars have logged 1.7 million miles since 2009, more than twice the 700,000 the AP reported. They've also been involved in 11 minor accidents, according to Google, not just three.

Driving record

Chris Urmson, the head of Google's self-driving initiative, says 11 accidents in 1.7 million miles is a lot better record than most humans achieve.

Also chiming in is Consumer Watchdog, a non-profit organization that is calling on Google to release all of the data it has on the accidents.

“It is important that the public know what happened,” wrote John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project director, in a letter to Google.  “You are testing driverless vehicles on public highways, quite possibly putting other drivers at risk.” 

But Urmson says Google's cars are much safer than those driven by humans.

"If you spend enough time on the road, accidents will happen whether you’re in a car or a self-driving car. Over the 6 years since we started the project, we’ve been involved in 11 minor accidents (light damage, no injuries) during those 1.7 million miles of autonomous and manual driving with our safety drivers behind the wheel, and not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident," Urmson wrote in a blog posting on Medium. 

Urmson said that in most of the accidents, there was nothing Google's driver -- human or otherwise -- could have done to avoid being hit.

"Rear-end crashes are the most frequent accidents in America, and often there’s little the driver in front can do to avoid getting hit; we’ve been hit from behind seven times, mainly at traffic lights but also on the freeway," he said. "We’ve also been side-swiped a couple of times and hit by a car rolling through a stop sign. ... We have a detailed review process and try to learn something from each incident, even if it hasn’t been our fault.

Simpson said Google should make all of the accident reports public.

“Rather than hide behind the cloak of DMV confidentiality, Google should disclose the accident report and the full details of the incident.  We also call on you to commit to making all future accident reports public,” he said in a letter to Google executives.

Well, that didn't take long: earlier this week, Google introduced a new anti-phishing tool called Password Alert to its Chrome browsers. Password Alert would show you a warning if you type your Google password into a site that isn't a Google sign-in page.

So if, for example, a scammer sent you an email purportedly (but not really) from Google, claiming there's some problem with your Google account so you should click the link in this-here email to log in and type your password when asked – Password Alert would send you a warning notice advising you to reset your password since it had just been typed into a non-Google page.

But it took less than 24 hours for security researchers to discover a workaround which ArsTechnica called a “drop-dead simple exploit that nukes Google's password alert.”

White-hat hacking

Paul Moore, an information security consultant with the UK-based Urity Group, developed a simple proof-of-concept exploit, shown here,which looks convincingly similar to a genuine Google login page even though it's completely fake, with no connection to Google at all — yet if you're in Chrome and type your password into it (don't try this yourself), you won't see Google's Password Alert warning because the program will suppress it.

A proof of concept (or PoC) exploit is an example of white-hat hacking (or “good guy” hacking). PC Mag's encyclopedia defines a PoC exploit as: “An attack against a computer or network that is performed only to prove that it can be done. It generally does not cause any harm, but shows how a hacker can take advantage of a vulnerability in the software or possibly the hardware.”

To its credit, Google swiftly responded to news of Moore's PoC exploit with an update to patch it. Yesterday, a Google engineer took to Twitter to say that Password Alert has been updated to version 1.4, in order to prevent Moore's PoC exploit from working:

It's now fixed in 1.4. To update quickly, go to chrome://extensions/ , enable developer mode, click update extensions now.

Google has introduced a new security tool for the Chrome browser that's intended to help keep consumers safe from phishing attacks. Those are the scams that use what look legitimate pages (like the one above) to trick consumers into revealing their passwords.

Phishing attacks are not only very common, they're also very effective. Google says they succeed nearly 45 percent of the time and reports that nearly 2% of emails submitted to Gmail are designed to smoke out consumers' passwords.

Called Password Alert, the free, open-source Chrome extension will show you a warning if you type your Google password into a site that isn’t a Google sign-in page. 

"Once you’ve installed and initialized Password Alert, Chrome will remember a 'scrambled' version of your Google Account password. It only remembers this information for security purposes and doesn’t share it with anyone," Google's Drew Hintz and Justin Kosslyn said in a blog posting.

They said that if you type your password into a site that isn't a Google sign-in page, Password Alert will show you a notice like the one below, alerting you that you’re at risk of being phished so you can update your password and protect yourself.

The app is available in the Google Play store.

The Wall Street Journal has acquired and released internal Federal Trade Commission documents that raise some interesting questions about the FTC's official handling of an antitrust investigation into Google's practices.

Specifically, FTC staff members investigating Google's practices a few years ago recommended at the time that the agency sue the company on anti-competitive grounds over its allegedly biased search-engine results, yet the FTC publicly voted to do the exact opposite.

In 2012, the FTC started investigating Google and concluded that the company's search engine results “boosted its own shopping, travel and local business services” while intentionally giving lower search rankings to rival products, according to the FTC staff report acquired by the Journal.

But that's not what the American public initially heard. In January 2013, the FTC publicly announced that, after 19 months of investigation into Google, the “facts just weren't there” to support charges of biased search results. At a press conference, the then-current chairman Jon Leibowitz said that the FTC's bipartisan commission voted 5-0 that Google's search results were not biased to favor its own products over its competitors'.

Not everyone convinced

Not that everyone back then was convinced by the FTC's reassurances. The California-based nonprofit Consumer Watchdog group, for example, responded to the FTC's January 2013 announcement by saying that “Google clearly skews search results to favor its own products and services while portraying the results as unbiased. That undermines competition and hurts consumers.... The FTC rolled over for Google.”

The following December, Consumer Watchdog filed a complaint with the FTC alleging deception in Google Shopping results. “The way that the Internet giant is featuring results from Google Shopping without making it clear that the highlighted results are nothing more than advertisements for merchants who bid for placement is an unfair and deceptive act …. Moreover, consumers are actually being harmed because the featured results from Google Shopping more often than not return higher prices than can be found elsewhere, when consumers would reasonably expect Google’s suggestions to be the best,” CW's Privacy Project Director said at the time.

This week's revelations suggest that the FTC itself agreed with such criticisms all along, despite publicly claiming otherwise.

The FTC has not commented about the report, but Google's general counsel, Kent Walker, said in a statement that, “After an exhaustive 19-month review, covering nine million pages of documents and many hours of testimony, the FTC staff and all five FTC Commissioners agreed that there was no need to take action on how we rank and display search results. Speculation about potential consumer and competitor harm turned out to be entirely wrong.”

Furthermore, said Walker on behalf of Google, “since the investigation closed two years ago, the ways people access information online have increased dramatically, giving consumers more choice than ever before. And our competitors are in fact thriving. For example, Yelp calls itself the ‘de facto local search engine’ and has seen revenue growth of over 350% in the last four years, TripAdvisor claims to be the web’s 'largest travel brand' and has nearly doubled its revenues in the last 4 years.”

Earlier this week, Google inspired an uproar when it announced a stunning change in its longstanding policy toward bloggers: starting next month, it would ban anyone on Blogger or Blogspot websites from being “able to publicly share images and video that are sexually explicit or show graphic nudity,” according to a Feb. 24 announcement Google posted on its support forum:

Starting March 23, 2015, you won't be able to publicly share images and video that are sexually explicit or show graphic nudity on Blogger.

Note: We’ll still allow nudity if the content offers a substantial public benefit, for example in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts.

At best, Google said, such content would have been made “private,” which means that the only people able to see the blog would be the blog's own administrators, plus those individuals with personal invitations from the blog owner. At worst, Google might delete the content, or disable access to the author's Google and/or Blogger accounts: a longstanding blog over a decade old could suddenly vanish along with all of its content.

At the same time it made the announcement, Google reminded everyone on Blogger and Blogspot that if they didn't like the upcoming policy change, this Google support page explained how to save your blog content as an .xml file, then move the entire blog onto a different platform with more liberal policies (such as WordPress or Tumblr).

Another course change

Today, three days after announcing this abrupt policy change, Google changed course again and rescinded its intended ban. Jessica Pelegio, a Social Product Support Manager at Google, posted this announcement on Google's user forums:

Hello everyone, 

This week, we announced a change to Blogger’s porn policy. We’ve had a ton of feedback, in particular about the introduction of a retroactive change (some people have had accounts for 10+ years), but also about the negative impact on individuals who post sexually explicit content to express their identities. So rather than implement this change, we’ve decided to step up enforcement around our existing policy prohibiting commercial porn.  

Blog owners should continue to mark any blogs containing sexually explicit content as “adult” so that they can be placed behind an “adult content” warning page.

Bloggers whose content is consistent with this and other policies do not need to make any changes to their blogs.

Thank you for your continued feedback.  

The Blogger Team

Google also changed some of the language in its online “Blogger Content Policy”; as of Feb. 27 it says this:

Adult Content: We do allow adult content on Blogger, including images or videos that contain nudity or sexual activity. If your blog contains adult content, please mark it as 'adult' in your Blogger settings. We may also mark blogs with adult content where the owners have not. All blogs marked as 'adult' will be placed behind an 'adult content' warning interstitial. If your blog has a warning interstitial, please do not attempt to circumvent or disable the interstitial - it is for everyone’s protection.

Google is starting to have the kind of problem that comes with phenomenal success: It's getting so big it is running out of competitors, forcing it to compete with itself.

Sound crazy? Consider this: Uber has built a big business using Google's money and Google's map software. Now it's reported that Google may be going into competition with Uber, possibly launching its own virtual taxi service, even though it owns a big chunk of Uber.

Back when Uber was just getting started, Google Ventures -- the company's venture capital arm -- invested $258 million in the brazen start-up, which uses its own software combined with Google Maps to send cars anywhere and everywhere.

Everyone expected that Google would take Uber under its wing and the companies would work closely together, especially as Google developed its self-driving cars that would fit perfectly into Uber's business, leaving Uber's drivers as road kill.

Collision course

But now, according to a Bloomberg report, the companies may instead be on the path towards being ferocious competitors.  A Google executive who sits on Uber's board has reportedly informed Uber that Google is developing its own ride-hailing service. And Uber executives have reportedly seen screenshots of Google's ride-sharing app.

Google would indeed be a formidable competitor. It now only has money, scale and technological prowess, it also has -- through Google Maps -- access to just about everything there is to know about Uber's operations. 

Uber has also made few friends and lots of enemies in its short time on the scene, basically invading cities and operating however it pleases, daring regulators to do something about it.

It has lately been cleaning up its act but its pugnacious behavior leaves a big opening for a competitor offering a more genteel approach.

Neither company is commenting on the report.

Google is halting sales of its controversial Google Glass, saying it wants to develop the next version outside the harsh glare of publicity. The first version of the wearable, voice-activated device was slammed by privacy advocates.

Consumer Watchdog -- a California non-profit -- said Google should not offer a new version until the privacy issues are resolved.

“Google Glass may have appealed to a bunch of socially clueless ‘Glassholes’ who were oblivious to our privacy rights, but the device fulfilled no real consumer need,” said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project director. “I’m only surprised it took them so long to kill the program as we know it.”

Last April, the group issued a report that found Glass inappropriate for the broad consumer market and urged consumers not to buy the device. 

By withdrawing the product from public view while it undergoes further testing and development, Google is adopted the methodology used by Apple, which develops products in secret and releases them only when they are in their final version.

Google said it will continue to sell Glass to corporations and developers but will not sell to the public after Jan. 19.

"Stalker's tool"

Consumer Watchdog said that Glass 2.0 must include privacy protections. The key problem with the wearable device, Consumer Watchdog said, is that it allows a user to easily make surreptitious and intrusive video recordings.

“Simply put, it is a perfect stalker’s tool,” said Simpson. “It’s difficult to see how they solve that.”

“Glassholes wanted the device because they thought it made them look cool,” said Simpson. “Now even Google gets that it didn’t.”

If you read websites or blogs that allow reader commentary, you've seen too many robo-spam comments to count them all: “I make $7800 a week at home in my spare time! Click this link to learn how,” “Your area is filled with horny housewives and/or hunks! Click here to meet them,” or even “This is interesting blog. I learn much on this subject” which almost sounds like something a real human might type until you notice the alleged commenter's name is something like “No prescription V!agra” or “Tommy Hilfiger discount” and links to a skeevy website in someplace like China.

So Captcha tests were invented in hope of culling out the robots and limiting comment threads to actual humans – except that today, you can find a lot of those obvious-spam comments on websites and blogs that do have Captcha test requirements.

With modern technology, robots can pass Captcha tests with a mind-boggling 99.8% accuracy rate, according to Google researchers. (That's a higher Captcha accuracy rate than my hundred-percent-human self can manage, especially when I'm supposed to discern between the numeral 1, a lower-case L or an upper-case I.)

Answer truthfully

That's why Google announced that it will be doing away with Captcha tests in favor of simply asking readers if they're robots: if you check “I'm not a robot,” you'll be allowed in.

Seriously. Google hasn't explained how, in practical terms, that particular anti-robot test is supposed to differ from eschewing anti-robot tests altogether: if robots can be programmed to decipher Captchas better than I can, surely they can be programmed to read and check the phrase “I'm not a robot,” too.

Though Google's plan is a bit more complex than that; apparently you still might face tests if you fail somehow to convincingly click the "not a robot" option. But instead of tests expecting you to identify distorted text images of numerals and letters, you're expected to classify types of photo images.

One of the sample tests Google posted shows a photograph of a live turkey displayed above nine other photographs: five showing live turkeys from various angles, four showing traditional Thanksgiving foods including rolls and cranberry sauce. Presumably, current artificial intelligence technology, though sufficient to let robots read distorted Captcha letters, is not yet good enough to let robots solve that test, especially not robots who couldn't even convincingly click an "I'm not a robot" option.

There's a common saying about social media, and the Internet in general: if you're not paying them anything, you're not their customer; you're what they're selling. The same holds true for traditional broadcast television, and terrestrial radio: you pay nothing to watch or hear these broadcasts, so you're not really the TV or radio station customer. The customers are the advertisers who pay to air their commercials where you might hear them.

With that in mind, you could say Google's new “Contributor” plan works by letting ordinary Internet users stop being what's for sale, and become paying customers instead. Indeed, Google more or less says as much on its own site, calling Contributor “an experiment in additional ways to fund the web” and noting that “today's Internet is mostly funded by advertising. But what if there were a way to directly support the people who create the sites you visit each day? Introducing Contributor by Google.”

Right now, you cannot simply sign up and start paying for Google Contributor – thus far the service is invitation-only, and the main Contributor by Google page offers visitors the chance to click on one of two different green link-buttons: the one on the left says “Need an invitation? Join the waitlist” and on the right, “Already have an invitation? Get started now.”

A chance to pay

That's pretty standard for new Google services – Gmail and Google+ were both invitation-only when they started, too – but those services were and are free to the end user. Contributor, by definition, is not. But if you receive and accept an inviation to join Contributor, you get the chance to pay Google in exchange for not seeing ads on websites that use Google advertising services. Some of that money you pay Google is supposed to go to the website, in lieu of the ad revenue it otherwise would've received.

Thus far, even for those who have signed on with Contributor, there are only 10 websites, or “publishing partners,” taking part in the venture, including Science Daily, WikiHow and Mashable. Contributors who visit other websites using Google ad platforms will still see ads.

Thus far, Google hasn't offered specific details of exacly how the program works. Contributors can choose from three payment options – you can pay $1, $2 or $3 per month – though the differences between the different plans hasn't been specified yet.

Things to come?

Is Contributor likely to be the shape of Internet browsing to come? Over in the U.K., the BBC spoke to one tech-startup executive (of a company which, incidentally, produces interactive games intended to replace ads) who said that such programs “could change the publisher landscape and how people browse content online.” (Semantic note: “could” covers a lot of ground. After all: anybody could become independently wealthy after receiving an inheritance from a long-lost relative you never knew you had — but don't bet your future on that.)

The Guardian took a more cynical view of Contributor, observing that “Internet giants are exploring new ways to raise cash from their users, but harvesting our data remains key to their strategy.”

And, of course, even if you are invited to give Google one to three dollars per month to divvy up among the various websites you visit, it only works when you're online through your Google account.

Uber is starting to resemble one of those start-ups that grows like kudzu. Or something. While expanding into new global markets at near-light speed it is also starting to get its tentacles into neighboring businesses. Like home delivery.

Or so it appears anyway, with the news that Tom Fallows, the head of Google's same-day delivery business, has abandoned Google for Uber. Don't feel bad for Google though. It holds a major investment position in Uber so what's good for Uber is good for Google. It's sort of an Uber uber alles situation.

The obvious implication in all of this is that Uber now has its eye on the home delivery business -- something everybody has been scheming to enter lately, although few have done so on any major scale with any major degree of success.

Lots of cars

An Uber entry makes a lot of sense, however. After all, it has what Amazon, Google, et al, don't -- namely, cars and drivers, lots of them. 

Amazon, which seemingly has everything imaginable in stock, is still largely reliant on third-party carriers -- everyone from UPS to USPS and points in between.

Google has indexed everything but the actual items for its home-shopping service, Google Express, come from retailers like Walgreens, Costco and Staples. Google doesn't have its own cars, unless you count those cute little self-driving ones. It does have a collection of independent contractors who run around buying whatever customers order and then delivering it to them. Not exactly state of the art, but a start anyway.

While neither company is saying much about Fallows' delivering himself from Google to Uber, he dropped a hint that his loyalties had not necessarily been much changed by the move.

“Even though the next stage of my career takes me outside Google, I’m really excited to watch Google Express continue to thrive and expand,” Fallows said in a statement Google emailed to The Wall Street Journal.

Speaking of the WSJ, the news of Fallows' move was delivered earlier today by Re/code, the technology news website started by a couple of Wall Street Journal defectors.

If you have so many bills that you just can't remember to pay them all — it's possible you have too many bills, and both your memory and your finances would improve if you found ways to cut expenses, give up pricey voluntary subscriptions, and so forth.

If not, Google is offering to keep track of your bills for you, via a Google Now feature it announced on a publicly available Google+ post yesterday:

When you can't remember whether you've paid your bills—or you simply can't remember how much money you need to pay—you can now just ask Google. Tap the mic on the Google app (g.co/googleapp) and say, “Show me my bills” or “My bills due this week.” If you have the payment due date and amount in your Gmail, you’ll see a quick summary of upcoming and past bills. Pretty handy, huh?

Of course, as the Google announcement says, this service only works for bills sent to your Gmail account, which in turn encourages any user of this service to connect more of their regular bill payments to Gmail.

So far the tech-world response has been largely positive. “Awesome new Google Now feature helps you keep track of your bills,” said GreenBot. “Killer Google Now feature ensures you'll never miss paying a bill again,” said BGR.

More neutral

In contrast, the Wall Street Journal's tech blog took a more neutral tone, listing the useful aspects of the features and how they work, but also noting “the fact that Google is reading your bills via email may unnerve some users and worry privacy advocates.

This has happened in the past when Google rolls out new features like this — and the reaction was especially strong when the company first announced its method of mining Gmail for advertising.”

On the other hand: since Google is indeed scanning the content of private (as opposed to student, government or business) emails anyway, and is certainly aware of whatever bills you have connected to your Gmail address, one could argue it may as well turn some of that scanned data into a new service useful for Gmail users in addition to advertisers pitching to same.

General Motors is recalling 5 model year 2013-2014 Cadillac XTS vehicles manufactured April 11, 2013, to June 27, 2013, and 2014 Chevrolet Impala vehicles manufactured May 13, 2013, to November 5, 2013.

The vehicles may have left the factory with the sensing and diagnostic module (SDM) set to "manufacturing mode." In manufacturing mode, the vehicle's air bags will not deploy in the event of a crash, increasing the risk of occupant injury.

GM will notify owners, and dealers are to reprogram the SDM to the correct mode, free of charge. The recall is expected to begin in September 2014.

Owners may contact Cadillac customer service at 1-800-458-8006 or Chevrolet customer service at 1-800-222-1020. GM's number for this recall is 14532.

There's mildly good news for Gmail users trying to reduce the number of spam messages they get: Google is moving any “Unsubscribe” links from the bottom of email messages to the top.

Google announced this change in a publicly available Google+ post on Aug. 6:

Email is a handy way to get updates from your favorite brands, social networks, discussion boards and more. But sometimes you end up subscribed to lists that are no longer relevant to you, and combing through an entire message looking for a way to unsubscribe is no fun.

Both statements are completely true: email genuinely is a handy way to get updates from your favorite brands, etc., and combing through an entire message looking for a way to unsubscribe is no fun. Google is 100% correct about that.

Needle in a bitstack

Come to think of it, combing through entire messages looking for anything is no fun. For example: do you remember last April, when Google changed its service and privacy policies for the nth time, this time to explicitly say that yeah, if you use Gmail your writings will be scanned for various purposes, including advertising?

In order to discover these changes, all the average Gmail user (or consumer-journalist investigating Google's policy change du jour) had to do was visit Google's Privacy Policy page (which, you'd think, is where they'd discuss such privacy-related issues as “Are we or aren't we scanning your email content”), read through all 2,049 words there (according to my word processor's word-count function) in order to determine that none of those words say anything about scanning or analyzing email content one way or the other, then click the link to Google's Terms of Service page and scroll down or read though the first 849 words written there until you finally get to the part where it says “Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.”

Nope, combing through an entire enormous eye-glazing pile of unwanted words in search of the one small bit you actually want is no fun at all. It's nice to know that Google empathizes with this, though.

Anyway, Google's Gmail-change announcement goes on to say:

Now when a sender includes an “Unsubscribe” link in a Promotions, Social or Forums message, Gmail will surface it to the top, right next to the sender address. If you’re interested in the message’s content, it won’t get in the way, and if not, it’ll make it easier to keep your inbox clutter-free.

That's great! (By the way: if you use any other email service where the unsubscribe links remain hidden down at the very bottom of your messages, you can make use of your browser's “Find” function: click on “Find,” type in the word “unsubscribe,” and if the word does appear anywhere in your email, you'll immediately be taken to the first appearance of it.)

Google ended its Google+ announcement by saying:

Making the unsubscribe option easy to find is a win for everyone. For email senders, their mail is less likely to be marked as spam and for you, you can now say goodbye to sifting through an entire message for that one pesky link.

Goodbye, sifting through an entire message for that one pesky link (provided of course the message is in Gmail, rather than about Gmail and lurking somewhere in the dense word thickets of Google's posted online policies, terms and conditions)! 'Twas nice knowing you.

Last November, Google announced the launch of a new initiative against child pornography. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt announced at the time that the company was altering its search algorithms in hopes of making it harder to find or share child pornography online, and also making extensive use of Microsoft image-recognition technology in order to detect examples of it.

The process would also involve human oversight; Schmidt said that “computers can't reliably distinguish between innocent pictures of kids at bathtime and genuine abuse. So we always need to have a person review the images.”

Google's announcement then focused entirely on the pictures or videos themselves, and Google's efforts to ensure its search engines weren't used to help distribute them.

Fast forward to last week: In a move which might (or might not) be directly related to Google's earlier anti-child-porn initiative, a Texas man was arrested after Google let authorities know he was using his Gmail account to send images of child porn.

Houston news station KHOU reported on July 31 that:

Police say Google detected explicit images of a young girl in an email that John Henry Skillern was sending to a friend, the company then alerted authorities.

"He was trying to get around getting caught, he was trying to keep it inside his email," said Detective David Nettles of the Houston Metro Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce. "I can't see that information, I can't see that photo, but Google can."

Skillern is a registered sex offender who was convicted of sexually assaulting an 8 year old boy in 1994.

It's been known for a long time now that Google scans email contents in order to provide targeted advertising, but knowing that Google scans emails to make its contents available to law enforcement – even for the noble cause of protecting child-pornography victims – raises potential privacy or civil-liberty concerns.

Consider: Last April, citing privacy concerns, Google announced that it would stop scanning student or government-employee email accounts for advertising purposes. Then again – “we won't scan your email contents looking for ad words” clearly does not mean the same thing as “we're not scanning your emails at all.”

Even if you're inclined to think “Well, scanning private emails isn't so bad if it catches violations of the law” – a few years ago, that argument didn't win Yahoo! many fans after it helped the Chinese government crack down on dissidents by handing over email evidence of such crimes as writing emails praising democracy and criticizing China's one-party government.

Not that child pornography is in any way analogous to writing about democracy; it's just worth remembering that the notion “email company cooperates with authorities to catch catch lawbreakers” is only good when the company and authorities are both trustworthy.

That said: Google insists that its automatic image-scanning technology is only used to detect images of child pornography.

Most news about the current Supreme Court session involves the cases it did address this year, but the cases it declined are arguably just as important. (The way American law works is: if the Supreme Court declines to hear an appeal of a lower court decision, that effectively means the lower court decision stands as is.)

The Supreme Court ended its session without hearing Google's appeal of its earlier Street View ruling, which means Google still faces accusations of violating anti-wiretapping laws.

The problem actually started in 2007, when cars emblazoned with the Google logo could be seen on various city streets, photographing the surroundings for the Street View option on Google maps. Had Google done nothing more than take pictures, there likely wouldn't have been any problem.

But Google also sucked data out of whatever unsecured wi-fi networks it passed, including people's emails, passwords and other sensitive information.

In May 2012, TheNew York Times spoke to a German data-protection official who'd recently won a two-year battle to see exactly what information Google had collected on his fellow citizens:

After months of negotiation, Johannes Caspar, a German data protection official, forced Google to show him exactly what its Street View cars had been collecting from potentially millions of his fellow citizens. Snippets of e-mails, photographs, passwords, chat messages, postings on Web sites and social networks — all sorts of private Internet communications — were casually scooped up as the specially equipped cars photographed the world’s streets.

“It was one of the biggest violations of data protection laws that we had ever seen,” Mr. Caspar recently recalled about that long-sought viewing in late 2010. “We were very angry.”

$7 million fine

In March 2013, Google agreed to pay a $7 million fine over its data-collection activities; Google executives claimed they had no idea its Street View cars were collecting all this data anyway.

And on June 30, 2014, when the Times' tech blog reported the Supreme Court's refusal to hear Google's case, it said: “Google maintains it was not wiretapping as part of Street View.”

Right now, various plaintiffs seek class-action status to sue Google. Thus far they have not officially been granted class-action status, but the Supreme Court decision to let stand lower-court rulings against the data collection will presumably increase the plaintiffs' chances of success.

If the case does go to trial as a class-action, however, it's extremely unlikely it will do so before the end of this calendar year.

There's a lot of froth around streaming music services lately, what with Spotify, Pandora, Beats and others too numerous to curate all competing for not just your time but also your $10 or so per month.

Apple, you'll recall, is paying $3 billion to acquire Beats Electronics, which includes the streaming service that until recently was known as MOG. Not wanting to be left behind, Google is now said to be pawing the ground around Songza, a music streamer that keys its selections to what you're doing at the moment, according to a New York Post report.

We checked it out late this morning and found that with Songza, we could choose music for working in an office, enjoying the morning, and keeping calm and mellow, among others -- all of these being, presumably, mutually exclusive. 

This, we're told, is a notch above the way the other guys do it. They basically build playlists around a few of your favorite artists. This works OK initially, although over time it can result in some fairly esoteric selections. 

Songza, which claims about 5.5 million users, is the only music streamer that tailors its selections to what you're doing, as far as we know. Since Google, along with the NSA, presumably already knows what you're doing, what could be more natural than for it to sweep up Songza as an addition to its Google Play Music All Access, which apparently was created on the day the brand-name manager called in sick?

Where is Amazon?

Google and Apple are, of course, bitter enemies these days, having being close compatriots just a few years ago. Both, presumably, would see Amazon as a looming threat to just about all of their businesses. And it just so happens that Amazon already owns a piece of Songza, which could add some intrigue to what would otherwise be a ho-hum Monday morning business story.

Amazon doesn't currently have a streaming music service but it does sell CDs, DVDs and vinyl recordings and it operates an online music player that will play all the music you buy from Amazon as well as CDs that you upload.

It wouldn't be much of a stretch to imagine Amazon becoming an active player if a Songza bidding battle breaks out.

And about that name -- Songza? Yes, it does have a faintly Italianate ring and yes, the company is based in Long Island City, N.Y., long known as the slice of Queens where taxis go to sleep, but beyond that, we're not speculating.  

It's said that hindsight is 20/20, but before you've had time for hindsight to come around you often muddle your way through an indistinct blur.

So it is with the latest news from Google, promising a “new encryption tool” to protect email users' privacy; when the New York Times reported the story on June 3, it kicked off with the sentence “The National Security Agency’s snooping is about to get more difficult.”

This of course is in reference to the NSA's indiscriminate monitoring of American communications in what critics say is defiance of constitutional guarantees against it, and maybe hindsight will one day view this as “One of the milestones on the road leading to Americans' regaining their ability to have private discussions without the government reading and recording every word.”

On the other hand, the whole NSA-spying bit didn't become common knowledge until whistleblower Edward Snowden told the world what his former NSA employers were up to. Among Snowden's many revelations/allegations was one saying that the NSA secretly installed “backdoors” into various encryption programs — meaning, you think your messages are encrypted and secure but the NSA can read them anyway.

In addition to Snowden's files, there are also the (alleged) email communications between Google and the NSA suggesting that Google executives have cooperated with the spy agency more enthusiastically than they've let on.

Of course, the phrase “Google executives” covers many different individuals, some of whom might be more idealistic than others. The New York Times quoted Eric Grosse, Google's chief of security, as saying “It’s important that the government not overstep … We don’t want any government breaking the security of the Internet.”

On the other hand, Grosse was allegedly one of the individuals mentioned by [first] name in those alleged emails between Google and the NSA (assuming the emails are genuine, not taken out of context, and otherwise accurate). And that same New York Times article later said this:

Until now, technology companies have been hesitant to provide end-to-end encryption because it excludes companies like Google and Yahoo from gathering data from messages that can be sold for targeted advertising. None of the major technology providers have signed on to Dark Mail Alliance, a partnership announced last year by Silent Circle and Lavabit, two privacy-conscious communications providers, that offered companies like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo a new end-to-end encrypted email protocol.

So perhaps hindsight will agree that Google genuinely is standing on principle, abandoning not only its former (alleged) close relationship with the NSA, but also a good chunk of its own ad revenue, to preserve the privacy essential for a free country. Or maybe hindsight will laugh at those who were naïve enough to believe it. It's still too early to tell.

Bad news for anyone who likes using Zavers by Google to collect money-saving coupons: Google's shutting down the program, which launched in January 2013.

It sounded like a good idea: in 2011, Google acquired a startup called Zave Networks. The service allowed shoppers with grocery-store loyalty cards to “clip” online coupons they found on the stores' websites, using Zavers to link the coupons to their cards so that the discounts applied next time the cardholder went shopping.

However, as Recode.net noted on June 2 when it reported the Zavers shutdown: “Sources say the program did not expand as quickly as Google had hoped, in part due to some retailers’ uneasiness with giving Google access to information about their best customers.”

Fairly or not, Google already has a bit of a reputation for sucking up data and even committing privacy violations in the process; in light of this, perhaps the retailers' unease was to be expected.

So imagine you wanted to design something that does what a car does without having a driver, what would it look like? And what would you call it? Those are some of the questions that Google is now dealing with.

It's no secret that Google has been developing the software that will allow cars to drive themselves. We've all seen the photos of Prius and Lexus vehicles that drive themselves but everyone understands the software-hardware interface on those cars is a retrofit -- a car designed to be driven becomes a rudimentary self-driven vehicle.

But now that the navigation and terrain-sensing software is at an advanced stage, Google engineers have started asking themselves what kind of car they should wrap around it.

A preliminary answer emerged last week as the first photos and drawings of a prototype Google car were made public. To be blunt, it looks sort of like a Little Tykes car -- a seat, four wheels and not much else. No steering wheel, no accelerator or brake pedal. Just a screen where you enter your destination. Oh, and a couple of seat belts.

"The vehicles will be very basic — we want to learn from them and adapt them as quickly as possible — but they will take you where you want to go at the push of a button. And that's an important step toward improving road safety and transforming mobility for millions of people, said Chris Urmson, director of Google's self-driving Car project. 

No one we know of has suggested a name yet, but it's obvious it should be called the Google Chromecar. 

Not Detroit Iron

The Chromecar landed with something of a thud in Detroit. Automakers have sort of been assuming -- or perhaps hoping would be a better word -- that Google would be offering a package that could be integrated into existing Hupmobiles but it looks like Big G is out to supply the entire package.

It's taking an Apple approach -- hardware, software, interface all in one integrated package. 

The Google engineers have also done a lot of thinking about how these odd-looking little cars will be used. Will you buy one and keep it in your garage or will you just summon one when you need to go somewhere, sort of like Uber without the driver?

Google, after all, invested some $250 million in Uber last year so it has more than a passing interest in its fate.

But think for a second of the potential advantages of a vast fleet of Google Chromecars that you could summon as needed. It would mean you wouldn't have to shell out $30,000 or so for a car that mostly sits around doing nothing much except depreciating.

It would also mean that cities wouldn't have to devote so much real estate to parking -- a waste of space if there ever was one.

Sits idle 

"If you look at a vehicle purchase today, it's the second largest purchase most people in America make, and it's a resource that basically sits idle for 95 percent of the time," Urmson told reporters at a briefing last week, Automotive News reported. 

The Chromecar concept isn't all that new. It's generally referred to as the "autonomous taxi" model and it is something urban planners and municipal transportation directors dream about. It would answer an awful lot of problems.

Of course, it would also cause a lot of anguish in Detroit and other auto manufacturing centers, not to mention how they're feeling about it over at the local Ford dealership. 

Perhaps one consolation for existing car cultists is that the Chromecar is very much a city car. At least for now, the prototypes will have a top speed of 25 miles per hour, so you won't see them on the Jersey Turnpike or the 405.

You will be seeing them though -- about 100 of them -- on California's streets next year as Google's engineers continue to refine the concept.

Want to take it for a spin? Go ahead, be our guest.

In the United States, the First Amendment trumps just about everything and, unlike the Second, is relatively non-controversial. But every now and then, we're reminded of how rare the right to "publish and be damned" truly is.

Witness Google tying itself in knots as it struggles to comply with a European court's ruling that it must allow individuals to request that information about them be removed from Google's search results.

Google's philosophy, if it can be called that, has always been to include anything and everything in its search index. It has slowly and grudgingly removed links to child pornography and other clearly objectionable information. After all, while the First Amendment protects such activity, that doesn't necessarily mean it's admirable.

The right to publish isn't an obligation to publish in other words. 

Buck passing

Google has traditionally handled individual "take-down" requests by referring them to the publishers of the websites that contain the disputed information. If the publisher removes it, the link eventually disappears from Google.

To cite an everyday example, many local newspapers and news sites routinely publish the "police blotter" -- the official record of a local police department's action for a particular period of time.

Frequently, police officers will arrest someone for, let's say, shoplifting. That person's name then shows up in the report published the next day by the local news sites, even if the prosecutor decines to go forward with the charge and the individual is released -- having not been charged with any crime.

The accused person's name still appears indefinitely, even after the charge is dropped, possibly affecting that person's chances of getting into college, getting a job, security clearance or professional credential.

In one case I happen to know of, the publisher of a local news site -- after receiving a constant stream of such requests, every one of which he granted -- simply decided to stop publishing the police blotters from the 12 or so local jurisdictions his site covers.

"We can't follow up each case so in essence we are convicting the accused without giving them their day in court," I said to myself. Of course, we still report major crimes on my local news site but no longer publish what is essentially the daily trivia report -- barking dogs, drunken driving, thefts from cars, shoplifting allegations.

A public-service business

Note to Google: this cost me a lot of money. The police blotter pages were heavily read. Eliminating them cost me readers. 

But publishing is a public-service business, something that has not always sunk in with the digerati. Publishers have discretion and can pretty much do any damned thing they want, including making decisions that are bad for business but perhaps good for the public interest (or whatever high-blown phrase seems appropriate). It is not censorship to decide that some stories are not newsworthy and should not appear in a responsible publication. 

The European court's ruling strikes many as going too far and strikes others as being impractical. How are Google, Bing, et al supposed to make the decisions that human editors make everyday? It will cost too much money and be too much trouble, critics contend.

Well, perhaps so, but the court has spoken and today, Google has launched a new form on its European websites that residents of the European Union countries can use to request the removal of "outdated, irrelevant" information that may infringe their privacy.

There is, of course, no right to privacy spelled out in the U.S. Constitution, despite everyone seeming to think that the guarantee against illegal search and seizure sort of amounts to the same thing. What the legal basis of the European court's ruling was is likewise something of a mystery but it is now a fact of life that the search engines must deal with.

Void where prohibited

Keep in mind that the court's ruling applies only within the European Union. Therefore, disputed information that is removed from, say, Google's website in Portugal will continue to be displayed in the United States, Mexico, Brazil and, presumably, any other spot on earth that is not within the confines of the European Union.

If a disgruntled German wants to dig up the dirt on his neighbor, he can always ask his friends or relatives living abroad to Google the information and send it to him. 

If this sounds confusing, it is. To keep it all straight, Google has formed a committee to help it navigate the thicket, a task it doesn't seem to think it should be burdened with.

"The court's ruling requires Google to make difficult judgments about an individual's right to be forgotten and the public's right to know," a Google spokesman said.

Well, Google, welcome to the publishing business. 

Google has settled part of the lawsuit brought against it by various adult Gmail users who claim that Google's practice of scanning email content for targeted advertising violated various privacy protection laws.

MediaPost reported that Google filed a “stipulation of dismissal” last week, but the exact details of that settlement—including whether or not any money changed hands—has not been disclosed. The settlement was made with adults, and does not apply to minors who claim Gmail violated their privacy as well.

Last month, on April 15, we warned you that Google had changed its Gmail terms of service, presumably in response to this lawsuit: ever since April 14, Google's terms of service specifically state that “Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.”

Despite this, Google announced two weeks later that it would stop scanning student, government and business emails, though private, personal email accounts presumably still fall under the revised April 14 terms.

So whatever terms are hidden in this settlement between Google and various Gmail users most likely would not apply to anyone using Gmail accounts under these new terms: you can't complain that the contents of your messages are being scanned, because Google came right out and told you (provided you clicked on the link for its Terms of Service page and read or scrolled down past the first 849 words [consisting of five separate subsection headings and 16 paragraphs]). The 17^th paragraph of Google's Terms of Service page clearly states that previously quoted comment about automated systems analyzing your content. So, you've been warned.

Your watch, your thermostat, even your refrigerator are just a few of the things Google thinks are simply crying out for ads. 

Ads are good, right? So it's only reasonable that they be plastered on every possible square inch of space. Or, if a square inch isn't available, just about any little remnant will do.

This seems to be the thinking behind a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last December, in which Google argued against an SEC request that it disclose the revenue it generates from mobile devices, according to a report in Apple Insider.

"Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future, and thus our advertising systems are becoming increasingly device-agnostic," Google said.

Mobile revenue

The SEC had asked Google, Facebook, Twitter and other companies to provide their investors with more detail on their mobile revenue, which is thought to be something of a sore spot with Google, since it trails its arch-rival Facebook in mobile ad revenue by most measurements.

None of this is very surprising, really. It's quite apparent that Google is still in its gung-ho phase, seeking to organize (and capitalize on) the world's information. Back in the 1990s, it was Microsoft whose goal was total world domination. It has come down a few notches since then and it's likely Google will too, one of these days.

But until then, it's full steam ahead for Google and Facebook, the clear leaders in the ads-everywhere derby, and a quick look at Google's recent acquisitions and new products offers further evidence of the company's interest in the Internet of Things, wearables and mobile devices.

It bought Internet-enabled thermostat and smoke alarm maker Nest for $3.2 billion, has been betting big on Google Glass and other wearables and, of course, is the parent of the Android operating system that powers more mobile devices than any other.  

Apple followers seem a bit irked by all of this but, aside from the privacy aspects of it all, no one else seems to be protesting too much.

What we don't understand is why Google hasn't yet put contextual ads on buses, delivery trucks and postal vans. Besides solving the Postal Service's budget problems, ads on moving vehicles could alert us to upcoming coffee shops, super sidewalk sales and burrito buffets.

Maybe for a slight subscription fee we could also get speed trap warnings?

Well, that didn't take long! On Tuesday, May 13, the European Union's Court of Justice ruled that Google and other search engines are, in at least some circumstances, legally obligated to stop linking to old news stories about various people — true and accurate news stories about people — if the people in question request it, because in the European Union, apparently, there is such a thing as a “right to be forgotten” and the Internet is obliged to honor it.

The original case was brought by a Spanish man, Mario Costeja González, whose house was repossessed and auctioned for unpaid taxes back in 1998. A Spanish newspaper printed legal notices about the proceedings — standard operating procedure for a daily paper, in Spain or in America — and then in 2009, Costeja asked Google to stop linking to the old notices in searches for his name.

Google refused, Costeja took Google to court and the court sided against Google.

Requests run rampant

That was Tuesday afternoon. On Wednesday came the first undetailed reports that Google was received an unspecified number of takedown requests, and by Thursday morning, the BBC shared some specifics: a politician running for re-election wants Google to stop linking to old news stories about his behavior in office.

A pedophile wants Google to stop linking to news articles about his previous criminal conviction for possession of child pornography, and a doctor wants Google to stop linking to negative reviews written by his patients.

Those are the only three examples the BBC mentioned; Google has not officially commented on just how many takedown requests it has received.

According to E.U. commissioner Viviane Reding, the court decision is “a clear victory for the protection of personal data of Europeans,” though it's uncertain where or if Reding and the E.U. Court draws any distinction between “protecting personal data” and “trying to erase history.”

As of press time, there's no word on whether Google will, for example, comply with the takedown requests from the pedophile or the politician, nor whether Google is even legally obligated to do so — the court decision, as written, leaves much room for interpretation.

The E.U. has no equivalent to America's First Amendment's free-speech guarantees; you can be successfully sued for libel even if you're telling the truth. Whether the court will revisit its decision in light of recent developments is also unknown-as-of-presstime detail.

(Warning: This article might be illegal in the European Union. More specifically, it might be illegal for search engines such as Google to link to this article in the European Union. Why? This article says nothing about how to commit crimes or acts of violence, but it does make mention of a Spanish back-taxes real-estate auction from 1998 and names the individual involved.)

Who owns your personal information? When people ask that question in America, it's usually in the context of sensitive info which (in theory) is supposed to remain confidential: who owns your Social Security and bank account numbers? Employment and salary history? What about your credit-card history detailing everything about you from what you eat and wear to where and when you travel, and how much money you spend on it all … and what, if anything, can you do to protect yourself from getting hurt when some company is careless with all this data?

In short, Americans' “personal information” is usually of the sort that's not supposed to show up on an ordinary online search engine. Also, for Americans, the answer to the question “Who owns your information” seems to be “Nobody knows, but definitely not you.”

Opposite extreme

In the European Union, a high court's answer to that question appears to be at the opposite extreme: not only do you own your personal information, you may also have some control over publicly available information about you, if it's too old or perhaps even unflattering, and while you can't make such information vanish, you can (in some instances) demand that Google or other search engines refrain from linking to it. Though in E.U. terms, it's not so much “the right to control your information” as it is “a right to be forgotten.”

The Court of Justice of the European Union (the E.U. equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court, more or less) announced on May 13 that “An internet search engine operator is responsible for the processing that it carries out of personal data which appear on web pages published by third parties,” which is another way of saying “Google and other companies are responsible for removing links to certain information, upon request.” An English-language press release summarizing the case is available in .pdf form here.

The Court of Justice ruling was in regards to a case which a Spanish national named Mario Costeja González brought before the court in 2010. But the start of Costeja's complaint goes back much further, to 1998, when he owed some tax debts high enough that some real estate was auctioned off as part of attachment proceedings for repayment.

Public information

In Spain as in America, auctions for tax repayment are public information and thus count as legitimate news, so a Spanish daily newspaper called La Vanguardia published legal notices of the proceedings in January and March 1998. In 2009, those 11-year-old notices still turned up in Google searches for Costeja's name. Costeja asked La Vanguardia to take down the stories and asked Google to stop linking to them, on the grounds that old stories about his debt issues were no longer relevant, now that his debts had been resolved.

Google and the newspaper both refused Costeja's request, so in 2009 he took his complaints to the Spanish Data Protection Agency which, in July 2010, ordered Google to remove the links but did not order La Vanguardia to remove the stories.

Google challenged the order, the E. U. Court of Justice agreed to hear the appeal, and this week ruled against Google.

A footnote in the Court of Justice release notes that the ruling was based on “Directive 9 5/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data.”

No First Amendment

There is, of course, no First Amendment in most European countries. This means that would be an open-and-shut case in the U.S. came become quite muddied elsewhere.

There are, for example, few sites like ConsumerAffairs or Yelp in Europe, for the simple reason that businesses can bring libel charges against anyone who speaks ill of them with a reasonable certainty of winning, even if the criticism is accurate. 

In the U.S., the press has over the years developed accepted standards for handling sensitive information that it might have a legal right to publish. For example, most publications voluntarily withhold the identity of rape victims except in the most extreme cases. The Googles of the world largely ignore such niceties.

A class action antitrust suit charges that Google uses its Android system to abuse its alleged monopoly in search engines and handheld wireless devices.

According to the suit, Google places Google Play, YouTube and other apps onto devices running the Android OS, a practice that it says has hampered the market and kept the price of devices made by competing device manufactures like Samsung and HTC artificially high.

“It’s clear that Google has not achieved this monopoly through offering a better search engine, but through its strategic, anti-competitive placement, and it doesn’t take a forensic economist to see that this is evidence of market manipulation,” said Steve Berman, an attorney representing the plaintiffs. “Simply put, there is no lawful, pro-competitive reason for Google to condition licenses to pre-load popular Google apps like this.”

The complaint claims that if device manufacturers bound by Google’s distribution agreements were free to choose a default search engine other than Google, the overall quality of Internet search would improve.

Cynical scheme

“The more use an internet or mobile search engine gets, the better it performs based on that use,” Berman said. “Instead of finding a way to legitimately out-compete other internet and mobile search providers, [Google] instead decided to choke off competition through this cynical, anti-consumer scheme.”

The lead plaintiffs -- Gary Feitelson, of Kentucky, and Daniel McKee, of Iowa -- sued Google under the Sherman and Clayton Acts, the California Cartwright Act and California's unfair competition law, Courthouse News Service reported.

“This comes down to a combination of Google’s power in the U.S. general mobile search market and their power in the realm of tablet and smartphone manufacturers,” Berman said. “As a result of the pricing conspiracy, everyone loses. Google and its competitors face an uncompetitive, stagnant market, and consumers are forced into one option.”

Trying to pin down Google privacy policies is like discussing the weather: whatever you say about it today will probably be obsolete by next week.

Just a couple weeks ago, on April 15, we discussed how Google, in response to an attempted class-action suit alleging privacy violations in California, changed its Terms of Service for Gmail users to say outright that Google will scan the contents of your emails.

As of May 1, Google's online terms of service page is still dated April 14 and still says, in part, that:

Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.

However, despite these terms, Google has announced intentions to stop scanning the contents of certain emails—specifically, those attached to students' Apps for Education accounts (which have been made available to schools for seven years), and also, those attached to various government or business accounts.

Privacy implications

For all the privacy implications involved in Google's scanning the contents of everyday Gmail accounts (which, according to its terms of service, it still does), the privacy violations inherent in scanning student or workplace accounts are arguably worse. Consider the opening paragraph of Google's April 30 announcement on the official Google Enterprise blog: “Protecting students with Google Apps for Education”:

Today more than 30 million students, teachers and administrators globally rely on Google Apps for Education. Earning and keeping their trust drives our business forward. We know that trust is earned through protecting their privacy and providing the best security measures.

Nitpick: actually, driving that particular business forward requires only the trust (or at least cooperation) of school administrators, and possibly the teachers. Students, by contrast, can be required to use Google at school whether they trust Google or not, which is one of the reasons why scanning their Gmail activities is more fraught with privacy violations than usual.

A similar problem involves workplace accounts, whether government agencies or the private sector: while no adult is legally mandated to hold down a particular job (in the same sense that minors are legally mandated to attend school or otherwise acquire an education), it's still disquieting to think that, for example, letting Google analyze your workplace communications should be a prerequisite for government employees. However, Google has said it will stop scanning their emails, too.

InBloom withers

Google is not the only company to recently step back from data-mining captive-audience public school students. Last week, data-harvesting company inBloom announced its intention to close up shop altogether, after its CEO Iwan Streichenberger posted a head-smackingly self-serving letter blaming his business failure on overprotective parents who don't want third-party data harvesters vacuuming up all available data about their children and themselves:

Over the last year, the incredibly talented team at inBloom has developed and launched a technical solution that addresses the complex challenges that teachers, educators and parents face when trying to best utilize the student data available to them. That solution can provide a high impact and cost-effective service to every school district across the country, enabling teachers to more easily tailor education to students' individual learning needs. It is a shame that the progress of this important innovation has been stalled because of generalized public concerns about data misuse, even though inBloom has world-class security and privacy protections that have raised the bar for school districts and the industry as a whole.

What were these world-class high-impact utilize-the-data corporate buzzspeak services inBloom offered?

Sopho's Naked Security blog, writing about inBloom's shutdown on April 24, noted:

Since inBloom's rollout in 2013, privacy and security experts and parents have been aghast at schools sucking up everything from students' tax ID numbers to intimate family details (including options to identify family members as "foster parent" or "father’s significant other") with inBloom.

So, between Google's recently announced intention to stop data-mining Apps for Education accounts, and inBloom's intended closing, American students this week theoretically enjoy more privacy protections at school than a month or so before. (Even so: you should probably tape over the webcam on any school-issued laptops your kids have, so school administrators can't spy on them at home.)

If you use Gmail, bear in mind that Google has updated its terms of service to inform you that it is scanning and analyzing the contents of your emails.

Last August, Google faced a class-action suit in California, based on claims that its practice of scanning emails to put up customized ads violated state and federal anti-wiretap laws. Google initially responded by saying email users had no real expectation of privacy anyway:

“Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their emails are processed by the recipient’s [email provider] in the course of delivery. Indeed, ‘a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.’"

Last month, a judge struck down the class-action suit, not on grounds that the claims were unfounded, but on the grounds that the millions of individual Google users who might take umbrage with the scanning policy should not be lumped together into a single class-action case. However, the ruling did not preclude the possibility of individuals making individual claims against Google.

Implied consent

So this week, coincidentally or not, Google updated its terms of service to say, in effect, that if you use Gmail, you automatically consent to having Google scans its contents.

Clicking on this link takes you to Google's Terms of Service page. If you scroll down or read through the first 849 words on that page (according to the “Word Count” function on my word processor), past the “Privacy and Copyright” section (which assures you: “Google’s privacy policies explain how we treat your personal data and protect your privacy when you use our Services. By using our Services, you agree that Google can use such data in accordance with our privacy policies), you will then come to the section titled “Your Content in Our Services,” which says this:

“Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.”

The very next paragraph addresses another frequent anti-Google complaint: that it lumps all its services together to pump up their perceived popularity: For example, people who open Gmail accounts end up with Google+ accounts whether they want one or not – or even, whether they know it or not.

Or: you can no longer comment on YouTube unless you do so through Google+, and sundry other complaints that what happens in one part of your Google-based life can bleed over into other areas of it.

Google's updated terms of service suggest they intend to keep right on doing that:

If you have a Google Account, we may display your Profile name, Profile photo, and actions you take on Google or on third-party applications connected to your Google Account (such as +1’s, reviews you write and comments you post) in our Services, including displaying in ads and other commercial contexts. We will respect the choices you make to limit sharing or visibility settings in your Google Account. For example, you can choose your settings so your name and photo do not appear in an ad.

When PCWorld told its readers about the new changes at Google, it also noted: “The company did not immediately comment on why it had changed its terms of service again.”

Let's be honest -- Google Glass is generally regarded as pretty nerdy and anybody wearing the face-mounted gadget risks ridicule, at least in some quarters.

But that may change, now that Google has brought Italian eyewear maker Luxottica, owner of the Ray-Ban and Oakley sunglass brands, into the mix. Luxottica has agreed to design, develop and distribute new versions of Google's Web-connected eyewear.

“We are thrilled to announce our partnership with Google, and are proud to be once again setting the pace in the eyewear industry, as we have been, with more than 50 years of excellence,” said Andrea Guerra, Chief Executive Officer of Luxottica Group.

It's not just Luxottica that sees Google Glass as a potential savior of the somewhat moribund eyewear business; VSP Global agreed in January to offer prescription lenses and frames for use with Glass.

Give up their contacts?

After all, with the possible exception of sunglasses and designer frames, eyeglasses are not exactly a sexy product, so it's not surprising that the eyewear biz is hoping Glass can brighten things up a bit. Who knows? Techies may even forsake their contacts in favor of a snazzy Google Glass/Ray-Ban look.

"Google has opened up a new potential opportunity of use of glasses," said Guerra, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. 

Google executives have admitted that they have a long way to go in persuading masses of consumers to wear their computer on their face. Technically, Glass is fine but from a fashion standpoint, it has a long way to go.

Luxottica notes in a press release, however, that it "has a 10-year heritage in wearable technology that has evolved from MP3 to HUD devices" whatever they may be. 

"We have come to a point where we now have both a technology push and a consumer pull for wearable technology products and applications," Guerra said. "Seeing such a future, over the last years, Luxottica invested heavily in building-out our technology platforms and digital solutions to combine with our products excellence. 

When Google changed its privacy policy in 2012 to expand its data-mining, there was an outcry from consumers and privacy groups who were certain that an outrage was being committed. A blizzard of class action lawsuits followed.

But judges have shown little sympathy for the claims. In the latest act of judicial rejection, U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh held that a class action is not the right way to resolve the matter, even though she had previously refused Google's motion to dismiss the case.

"The court finds that individual issues regarding consent are likely to overwhelmingly predominate over common issues," Koh said in her 41-page ruling, Courthouse News Service reported.

At issue is Google's claim that it is within its rights to electronically scan emails to and from Gmail users for the purpose of displaying ads based on the emails' content.

Google contends that such activities are within the normal range of business activities. Privacy advocates say they're not.

Where it starts to get complicated is the point at which millions of individuals, each with slightly different situations and grievances, are lumped into one gigantic class action lawsuit.

Koh's ruling doesn't mean individuals could not, at least in theory, pursue a successful case against Google. It doesn't even mean that aggrieved consumers are wrong to claim their rights have been trampled. It just means that there are too many differing claims wrapped up in one enormous class action.

The other issue facing privacy advocates is the matter of damages, around which all lawsuits revolve. It's difficult for an individual to show that he has been damaged by Google displaying an ad for snow blowers when the individual has penned an email complaining about the weather.

There's a dangerous new phishing scam, first discovered by security experts at Symantec, that seeks to steal the passwords and other confidential information of any Google account holder.

It's quite sophisticated compared to most phishing attempts, but even so: you should be able to protect yourself provided you pay extra-close attention to details, and also remember the phishing-protection rule “Don't call us; we'll call you.”

Here's how the newest scam works: you, the would-be victim, get an email with the subject heading “Documents”; the body of the email includes a link to an “important” Google Docs document.

Hopefully, if you'd received such an email you'd already know to ignore it, since it's neither personally addressed to you nor from any sender you actually know and recognize. But suppose you decided to click on this unknown link from an unknown sender anyway — what would you have found?

Looks convincing

Here's where the sophistication of this new scam comes in. In most phishing attempts, if you clicked on such a link (and did not immediately infect your computer with all sorts of malware as a result), you'd usually be taken to a page whose address, visible in your browser bar, is obviously not that of the company the scamsters are pretending to be – as in, you get a fake email allegedly from Google, but the link leads to a page with an unfamiliar (and distinctly not Google) web address.

However, as the official Symantec security blogger warned on March 13, if you click on this new Google-based phishing link:

“[T]he link doesn't go to Google Docs, but it does go to Google, where a very convincing fake Google Docs login page is shown. The fake page is actually hosted on Google's servers and is served over SSL, making the page even more convincing. The scammers have simply created a folder inside a Google Drive account, marked it as public, uploaded a file there, and then used Google Drive's preview feature to get a publicly-accessible URL to include in their messages.”

In other words, you think you're logging in to your actual Google account, so you type your email address and password as usual, not realizing that your password is not being read by the real Google to verify your identity, but by phishing scammers to steal your identity.

Still not too late

However, even if you were caught off-guard enough to click on the unsolicited Google Docs link that some unknown sender e-mailed you, it's still not too late to detect certain details indicating a scam. Remember two sentences ago, when we said “you type your email address and password as usual”? That's the detail which sharp-eyed Google account holders should recognize as scammy: usually, when logging into legitimate Google accounts from your own computer, you don't have to type your email address at all, only your password.

As Gizmodo writer Adam Clark Estes pointed out: “if you show up at the log-in screen, you should notice that it doesn't recognize you as a Google user (if you are a Google user).”

Note to non-Google users who don't understand what Estes is talking about here: if you have a Google account, or more than one, anytime you visit a genuine Google page it will recognize you, and you'll see your name, avatar and other personal features as applicable — although you still won't be allowed access to your Gmail or any other personalized, password-protected Google things until you actually type in your password and only your password — your actual you@gmail.com email address is already there.

But with this fake Google phishing scam, you only get a generic login page requiring you to type not just your password, but your email address itself; the genuine Google login pages only require this if you're accessing your account from a public computer, or a brand-new one you've never used to sign in to Google before.

If you have young children and let them play “free” game apps on their handheld devices, watch out: the kids might be ringing up hundreds of dollars' worth of bills without even realizing it — until you get the bill at the end of the month.

The mother of two preschoolers in New York is suing Google after she downloaded the 99-cent children's game app “Run Jump Smash” to her Samsung tablet. Within the first 30 minutes of playing the game, however, the kids bought $66 worth of in-game currency.

This is actually a common feature of many free or low-cost games: you can indeed play for free, but you're very limited in what you can do unless you pay for certain upgrades. Imagine being invited to play the old-fashioned Monopoly board game: it costs you nothing to join the game and use Monopoly money to buy Monopoly properties, but if you want to put houses and hotels on your properties you must spend real-world cash money first.

You, of course, are too savvy to do this, but critics say it's unreasonable to expect preschool kids to have the same financial wisdom (or even recognize the difference between “This link is free” and “That link costs money every time you click on it”).

Doesn't tell parents

Imber-Gluck's complaint is that when Google lets parents download free or inexpensive apps for kids, it does not tell the parents that for the first 30 minutes, anyone playing the app can automatically purchase in-game currency.

Media Post reports that Imber-Gluck alleges “Google offers many games that use the same bait-and-switch business scheme as Run Jump Smash … Google entices the child with a free or inexpensive (e.g., $0.99) download of a gaming platform that then offers the sale of irresistible game currency in order to enjoy the game as it was designed to be played.”

Imber-Gluck is bringing a class action suit which, among other things, demands that Google give parents to void any in-app purchases made by their children. Meanwhile, you should keep a sharp eye on your children's Google game-playing activities — at least for the first 30 minutes.

Back when horses were still people's primary mode of transportation, there was a common saying about people who “locked the barn door after the horse has been stolen.” In other words: trying to prevent a problem after it's already happened.

Meanwhile, Google has published a list of dos-and-don'ts etiquette suggestions for wearers and users of Google Glass, saving the best piece of advice for last: don't “Be creepy or rude (aka, a “Glasshole”).

One way to avoid being a Glasshole is to follow the third suggestion on the “Do” list: “ask for permission” before using Glass to take videos or photographs of others.

Problems ahead

For all the snark possibilities about “Glassholes,” one needn't be a Luddite to worry about the anti-privacy implications of Google Glass. Last October, for example, a tech blogger for the Huffington Post (bearing in mind that Luddites, by definition, are not the sort of people who get jobs as tech bloggers) warned that “People aren't seeing the legal problems ahead with Google Glass.”

Even in preliminary testing phases, Google Glass has opened a Pandora's Box of legal concerns. If it does become the next big thing in wearable technology, what are the ramifications for intellectual property and personal privacy when somebody can secretly film or take a picture of you with, literally, the wink of an eye?... blogger Robert Scoble is so gaga for Google Glass he says he wears them everywhere, and posted this supposed picture of himself wearing them in the shower to prove it. But this is exactly the type of thing that should get privacy advocates all lathered up -- where does privacy end when everybody has access to wearable technology? This could go far beyond sexting and sex scandals when nobody knows whether or not they are being watched, no matter what they are doing.

Search online for complaints about Google Glass, and you'll find many that make use of the word “Orwellian”-- a reference to George Orwell's dystopian classic 1984.

But, to be fair, Google Glass (and smartphone cameras and sundry other cheap, ubiquitous recording devices) are distinctly non-Orwellian in a very important way: in Orwell's world of 1984, spy technology was a one-way street. The totalitarian government could spy on and record everybody, but nobody could spy on or record the government.

But a world where everybody can spy on everybody else … well, Orwell never foresaw that and humanity is still trying to figure out how to deal with it, but meanwhile it's worth repeating: Don't be a Glasshole. Or any rhyming variant thereof.

It wasn't all that long ago that Alta Vista was the hands-down favorite search engine. Then something called Google came along. Now computer scientists at Case Western Reserve University think they may have something even better than Google, although they're still lacking a catchy name.

Would you believe it's called the Conjunctive Exploratory Navigation Interface (CENI)? OK, but other than that, the researchers say their creation saves users time by more quickly identifying and retrieving the most relevant information on their computers and hand-held devices.

"Most people have an iPhone or laptop that stores a wide variety of information and, often, you can't find it when you need it, even though you know it's there," said GQ Zhang, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, division chief of Medical Informatics at Case Western Reserve and an author of the study.

"Or, you go to a website where the content has been divided under different areas, and what you're looking for fits several. If you choose one area but whoever filed the data chose another area, you may not find that information," Zhang said.

Crowdsourced testing

Anonymous testers recruited through crowdsourcing preferred the new search tool nearly two-to-one over a keyword-based lookup interface and the most commonly available lookup search interface using Google, according to the study, published in the open-access Journal of Medical Internet Research.

Side-by-side comparisons showed CENI, which combines two search modes and a more comprehensive way to organize and tag data, is more effective than looking up items by matched keywords alone.

They describe CENI as an on-screen portal where users access data by browsing through menus of topics and typing in keywords and say it provides a more focused search and retrieves the most pertinent information.

In one test, for example, a keyword search came up with 89 responses to a question: "What are the typical vision problems associated with diabetes?" CENI came up with the most applicable 13 by selecting appropriate menus.

CENI overcomes this limitation by allowing data to be tagged into as many areas as relevant, and provides an interface and system that leverages multiple tags for each single data item.

Prototype site

Zhang and Licong Cui, a PhD student in Zhang's lab, have a working prototype designed specifically for the health resource website, NetWellness. This not-for-profit site allowed the public to ask health professionals at Case Western Reserve, Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati health-related questions. More than 60,000 questions and answers are searchable using CENI. The interface is currently not available to the public.

Health information is highly sought after. A Pew Foundation survey found that 80 percent of Internet users have searched for health information, and 60 percent used that information to help make health-care decisions.

But a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that accessing health information using simple terms on such search engines as Google and Yahoo was inefficient. Less than a quarter of the searches led to relevant information, the study found.

This kind of search, called "lookup," can overwhelm the user with a long list of document links the user must then sift through, Zhang said. "If results do not show up in the first couple of pages, they are lost because the user is not going to go through millions of links manually."

CENI combines lookup and another search method, called "exploratory navigation." The exploratory mode enables users who lack a specific target or have trouble forming descriptive lookup terms to use menus of topics to navigate and explore information.

Well, that didn't last long. It was just last May that Google made a lot of noise about its plan to manufacture a smartphone in the USA, saying the Moto X would be slapped together down home in Ft. Worth, Texas.

Google had purchased Motorola Mobility in hopes of gaining a foothold in the highly competitive smartphone business. Its Android software is already the world's leading smartphone operating system but, apparently, Google was envious of the way Apple had built such fanatical loyalty with its integrated hardware/software system.

So much for that idea.

Mouths dropped yesterday as Google announced it was selling Motorola Mobility to the Chinese computer maker Lenovo, the fast-growing firm that bought IBM's personal computer business a few years ago.

Google paid $12.5 billion for Motorola less than two years ago and is selling it for a little less than $3 billion. That doesn't sound so good but Google is getting a big consolation prize in the form of lots of patents that it got with the Motorola purchase.

There's sensitivity about Chinese companie buying high-tech American businesses but the betting today is that the deal gets done. 

If you're a corrective-lenses wearer who thinks, "The problem with my life is, not enough of it is online in hackable form," great news! Google is expanding its business model to include prescription eyeglass frames designed to be worn with Google Glass. Frames in the “Titanium Collection” will cost $225, plus the cost of Google Glass ($1,500) and the cost of the lenses themselves.

However, if you do need corrective lenses and decide to splurge on a pair of Google Glass frames, make sure you have a second pair of ordinary, low-tech prescription glasses to wear on those occasions when Google Glass is inappropriate, including those situations where wearing Glass is legal but you'll still get in trouble because your local authorities don't know this.

For example: last October, California resident Cecelia Abadie was ticketed for driving while wearing Google Glass (believed to be the first such ticket of its kind ever issued). But the charges against her were thrown out earlier this month, since there was no evidence Abadie actually had the device turned on. (In most states, it's legal to drive while wearing Google Glass so long as it's turned off.)

Bad night at the movies

An Ohio moviegoer and Google Glass wearer had an even scarier experience two weekends ago; he went to his local AMC Theatre for a Saturday-night showing of “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” when, about an hour into the movie, an agent working for the Department of Homeland Security suddenly yanked off the glasses and spent the next couple of hours interrogating him and his wife on suspicion of illegally recording the movie. (He wasn't; he had the device turned off, but it took a couple of hours before authorities bothered to confirm this for themselves and return his glasses to him. Meanwhile, the man faced interrogation by intimidating federal agents, plus the additional handicap of dealing with whatever vision problems his prescription lenses were supposed to correct.)

The unnamed Glass-wearer first shared his story with The Gadgeteer tech blog on Jan. 20, but his story (or at least the broad outline of it) has since been confirmed by both DHS and AMC management.

That user also had prescription lenses in his Google Glass frames, which presumably were ordinary Google glasses rather than premium Titanium frames.

Gone nuclear

Incidentally, if you're one of the dozen or so Americans who still watches The Simpsons, you know that last Sunday's episode featured evil Scrooge-like boss Mr. Burns giving his employees the apparently generous gift of “Oogle Goggles,” the amazing high-tech computerized Internet-connected glasses. The catch was that evil Mr. Burns could then use the Oogle Goggles to spy on everything his employees did.

Of course, that is fiction. In real life, C. Montgomery Burns the nuclear plant operator could never use modern Internet-connected devices to spy on you; only members of the NSA, DHS, FBI and night-shift employees of your local movie theater can do that. And they won't give you the device for free: it'll cost you $1,725 for the Titanium frames with Google Glass hookup.

If we were prone to believing conspiracy theories, we'd think at least one high-ranking Google executive is actually a deep-cover secret agent working for the competition, with the mission “Make everybody hate Google and especially hate the Google+ social-media platform.” What else can explain the proliferation of Google+ bad-guy stories since the start of the new year?

First there was Massachusetts resident Thomas Gagnon, arrested because the Google+ invite he'd sent his ex-girlfriend violated the restraining order she'd taken out against him. Except Gagnon and his attorney say Google+ sent the invite automatically, without Gagnon's knowledge or consent.

Then, the Consumer Watchdog group criticized Google in an open letter charging serious privacy flaws in its Google+ system: basically, that anyone on Google+ can add anyone else on Google+ to their “Circle” of friends, without their knowledge or consent.

Meanwhile, Google changed the settings of Gmail and Google+ so that, once again, anybody with one such account can contact anybody else with such an account, without their knowledge or consent. (Notice how that phrase “without their knowledge or consent” keeps appearing here? You'd almost think it a recurring theme, regarding Google's attitudes toward its users.)

Integration mania

Many of these problems can be blamed on Google's mania for “integration” – the company (or the secret-agent executive working to bring about the company's downfall, if you prefer) somehow manages to completely ignore the possibility “Maybe people don't want all of their online activities and accounts consolidated into a single mass. Maybe some people prefer, for example, one account for their professional business life, another account for when they're interacting with young children and need to Set A Good Example, a different account for when they're discussing R-rated movies with their grownup friends and Not Setting A Good Example At All …. no no no, here at Google that's just lunacy talking.”

This unwilling integration is behind yet another Google+ privacy complaint, this one plaguing Android phone users who recently upgraded to the KitKat version. On ZDNet, sex-and-technology blogger Violet Blue explained how Google outed a transgender friend of hers without her knowledge or consent (look, it's that phrase again!).

A woman was using her old (male) name at work, and when her Android phone updated to KitKat - with Google+ integrating chat and SMS into "hangouts" - this is what happened when she texted a coworker:

(ICYMI earlier: KitKat did indeed out me to a coworker. I am freaking out.)

— Erika Sorensen (@eiridescent) January 3, 2014

Somehow I didn't think through the potential consequences of Google+ embedding itself ever deeper into stock Android stuff

— Erika Sorensen (@eiridescent) January 3, 2014

Google's response was that her outing was "user error" - Google blamed her, the user for not understanding the new, confusing integration. …. The issue with identity and Google+ Hangouts overwriting people's Gmail and SMS contacts has been trans-unfriendly since its rollout. One woman worried about the privacy of her transgender sister's identity wrote in Google's Forums (Gmail),

My sister is transgendered and has yet to legally switch to female, and because of this has yet to change her name on her Google+ since she has professional contacts on her page.

(...) Now that I have used the video chat option on Hangouts, everything is reverting back to her old name.

She did not receive a response.

Violet Blue went on to list and link to several additional examples of Google taking a cavalier attitude toward users' privacy concerns, before she wistfully said:

On some level, I want to imagine that Google will fix this.

I don't want to think that controlling our own identities doesn't matter to Google; or it's as if to Google we are the faulty parts of its machine. Or we are Google Plus with a body vaguely attached. Or to Google, the problems are our own faults, and any calls for respect or privacy in a painful world are just annoying to Google, which has better things to do, like terrify us with the privacy nightmare of Google Glass and making bulk data consolidators' jobs of cataloging our personally identifying information easier.

Can't blame Ms. Blue for not wanting to think this, as these are depressing thoughts indeed. That's why we kinda favor the “at least one high-ranking Google executive is actually a deep-cover secret agent working for the competition” theory. Granted, this theory sounds unnecessarily complicated and highly implausible, but it's a lot less depressing than Ms. Blue's.

We're always being told that the "Internet of Things" is the next big thing, and it must be true because Google has just agreed to pay $3.2 billion to buy Nest Labs, which makes Internet-connected devices for our nests a/k/a homes.

The timing couldn't be better, since it was just a few weeks ago that I installed a Nest smoke and carbon monoxide alarm in the ConsumerAffairs Test Hallway -- you know, the upstairs hallway in my apartment.

A regular smoke alarm goes for about $12 and is as simple to use as inserting the battery and attaching it to the ceiling. Of course, after a year or so the battery starts to die and it begins making that annoying beeping sound.

Even worse, when the blackened redfish starts to smoke, the alarm can go off and drive your dogs crazy.

Soothing voice

The Nest smoke alarm -- price about $120 -- does none of these things. Instead, once you have gone through the rather simple but quite boring procedure of getting it initialized and jammed onto the ceiling, the Nest alarm talks to you in a soothing voice.

It will tell you when its battery gets low. It will also murmur at you when the skillet starts to smoke, saying something like "Smoke in the hallway." The thing sort of sounds like the operating system in "Her," you know, the role voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

Of course, it does more than just speak. It will send a text to your smartphone to tell you that your house is on fire.

Not content merely to be alerted to fires and deadly carbon monoxide, I also added an Internet-connected thermostat -- not a Nest but something similar called Ecobee. Same idea: You can change the temperature setting in your Los Angeles apartment from Barbados or wherever you happen to be.

It cost about $220 plus installation and it took a full two days to get it working properly, including plenty of time on the phone with the installer, the installer's supervisor and the folks at Ecobee, who are somewhere in Canada, where thermostats are very important.

Kind of silly

This stuff is great all right, but you know what? I personally find it kind of silly. And in a time when everyone claims to be worried sick -- sick, I tell you! -- about inequality, I have a hard time seeing how a $120 smoke alarm is of much benefit to anybody. It's sort of like the hedge fund manager who buys a Tesla because he wants to save the earth.

Why would Google pay so much for a company that makes what could be considered over-the-top gadgets? 

Well, the race to dominate the Internet of Things is underway and no one wants to get left at the gate. After all, someone -- someone other than you, that is -- is going to be controlling your "smart home" pretty soon. Will it be Google, Amazon, Microsoft, GE or the NSA?

This is not easy for small minds to grasp, apparently. Nest CEO Tony Fadell recalled in a blog post that back in 2011 he showed Google co-founder Sergey Brin an early model of the thermostat. "He instantly got what we were doing," Mr. Fadell wrote. 

Other connected gadgets now in the design stage include

• Refrigerators that, like hotel room minibars, can keep a running inventory and order Greek yogurt, prosciutto and Pinot Grigio when your supplies run low;
• Security alarms that, like the Nest, will text you if someone is breaking into your home to murder you;
• Dog collars that keep track of what your hound is up to and whether he or she is eating and voiding properly;
• Cars that text you when it's time to visit the gas station or, more likely, plug them in to recharge the battery; 
• Medicine cabinets that keep track of your prescriptions, reminding you to take your medicine and ordering refills when needed; and
• Bathroom scales that post your daily weight to Facebook, assigning "Likes" when appropriate.

Maybe there will also be a device we can put in the marijuana stash to alert us and our dealer (or approved medicinal marijuana retailer) when we're getting down to sticks and seeds. You think?

This past week has been a bad one for Google+ public relations. On Wednesday, Americans learned the story of Massachusetts resident Thomas Gagnon, arrested for sending his ex-girlfriend a Google+ invite in violation of a restraining order she'd taken out against him — except Gagnon's attorney says Google sent the invite automatically, without Gagnon's knowledge or consent.

The next day, Consumer Watchdog released a letter highlighting a serious privacy/security problem with Google +: if you have a Google+ account, pretty much any other Google+ user can add you to their “Circle” of friends without your approval, and once your name is in their “Circle,” there's pretty much nothing you can do about it.

Coincidentally, on the same day the watchdog group released this complaint, Google announced some proposed changes to its Gmail system (by the way: if you have a Gmail account, you have Google+ whether you do anything with it or not).

Henceforth, anybody with a Google+ account will be able to send an email to any other user with a Google+ account. As Google asked in its Gmail blog post promoting the change: “Have you ever started typing an email to someone only to realize halfway through the draft that you haven't actually exchanged email addresses?” [Personal anecdote: No.] “If you are nodding your head 'yes' and already have a Google+ profile, then you’re in luck....”

Have to opt-out

If, however, you're shaking your head “no,” you'll need to change the settings on your account, to block Google+-generated emails from strangers. Critics charge that Google's new policy should be “opt-in” (meaning, the changes don't go through unless you-the-user personally allow it) rather than “opt-out” (wherein the changes go through automatically, unless you-the-user choose to block them).

Nick Hide, writing for CNET, noted of the new change: “By default, it's set to 'Anyone on Google+', although I'm seeing reports that if you have a large number of followers the default may be 'Circles'. If someone emails you via Google+ in this way, they don't see your email address, however. I haven't had the change roll out to my profile, either work or personal, but  Google says it will send you an email when it happens -- although some users who contacted me after reading this story earlier did not receive this email.”

Thus far, the only people who seem to like Google's changes are the ones announcing them on behalf of Google, More typical is this complaint/headline in The Next Web blog: “Google, this is the wrong way to build brand loyalty for Google+.”

Fairly or not, people often judge you by the company you keep. And the nonprofit group Consumer Watchdog says this can cause huge problems for people with Google+ accounts, who might not be able to control who does or does not associate with their virtual online personae.

In December, Consumer Watchdog criticized Google for allowing Google+ to become “a virtual playground for online predators and explicit sexual content” (according to this .pdf letter CW sent to Google).

To back its claims, CW also sent Google a detailed, 27-page study (which is also available in .pdf form, but be warned: due to sexually explicit content it might not be suitable to download or read on your workplace computer).

On January 9, Consumer Watchdog thanked Google for clearing out some of the more predatory Google+ accounts but brought another problem to the company's attention: pretty much any Google+ user can add people to their “Circles” whether they want to be there or now.

In social media terminology, Facebook users have “friend lists,” whereas Google+ users have people in their “Circles.” In theory they're pretty much the same thing, only on different social media platforms, so that saying “Let's be Facebook friends” or “Let me add you to my Google+ circle” are more or less synonymous.

Except they're not. There's a big distinction between becoming somebody's Facebook friend and joining their Google+ Circle, as Consumer Watchdog said:

[On Facebook] a person receiving a request from an individual to be their “friend” must approve that request first. If the person chooses not to accept, he or she is in no way associated with the individual.

On Google+ any individual can add a user to his Circles. If the user does not appreciate the posts he sends to them, they can block the individual. However, if anyone visits the person’s profile and he has opted to display publicly who is in his Circles, the user’s name and picture will still appear there. The user cannot remove himself from the sender’s Circles, no matter what, once that person has placed them in their Circle's. A user is forced to be publicly associated with someone with whom they do not wish to be associated.... This is a fundamental privacy flaw and must be fixed. People must have the right to choose with whom they are associated.

Friends and Circles

In other words: on Facebook, I can't add you to my “friends” list (or vice-versa) unless we both agree to it. But on Google+, I can add you to my “circle” whether you want me to or not — so anyone looking through the list of people in my Circle will see your name there, and naturally assume that you chose to associate with me.

Google has already been under fire for accusations that it's going too far in its attempts to expand the size of its Google+ user base (or at least increase the number of people who have Google+ accounts, whether or not they actually use them).

Just this week, we learned the story of Thomas Gagnon, who was arrested after sending a Google+ invite to an ex-girlfriend who had taken out a restraining order against him — except Gagnon's attorney says Google sent the invite automatically, without his client's knowledge or approval. (Gagnon was arrested in late December; as this story is published, Google has not yet released any records related to the invitation or who exactly sent it.)

There's an acronym you'll often see used in online forums: IRL, which stands for “In Real Life” (as opposed to the “virtual” life on the Internet). It usually appears in such contexts as, “I only talk to him online; we've never met IRL.” But as Gagnon's story shows, and Consumer Watchdog's concerns further underscore, “Internet vs. real life” is probably a false distinction — nowadays, the Internet is part of real life, and what you do on the Internet can have real-life consequences … even if you had no idea you did it, because Google's auto-bots did it for you.

In light of the old joke “You're not paranoid if everyone really is out to get you,” we offer the following joke corollary: “Therefore it's not possible to be paranoid on the Internet, where everyone really is out to get you.”

More frightening is the following non-joke observation: “It's not paranoia to think using Google might be all it takes to get in trouble with the law.”

Last month we told you about the former federal contractor suing various federal officials on the grounds that they unfairly deemed him a national-security risk due to autocomplete results on a Google search:

“In October of 2009, Kantor used the search engine Google to try to find, 'How do I build a radio-controlled airplane …. He ran this search a couple weeks before the birthday of his son with the thought of building one together as a birthday present. After typing, 'how do I build a radio controlled', Google auto-completed his search to, 'how do I build a radio controlled bomb.'"

But if Google+ user Thomas Gagnon's complaints are accurate, what happened to him was even worse. On Dec. 21, the Salem News in Massachusetts reported that Gagnon was arrested for violating a restraining order his ex-girlfriend had taken out against him — specifically, by sending her an invitation to join one of his “circles” on Google+.

But Gagnon's attorney claims that Google+ sent the invitation automatically, without Gagnon's approval.

Numbers inflated?

The story came to national attention on Jan. 8 when tech writer Austin Carr wrote about it for Fast Company; Carr also discussed various ways Google is alleged to have been inflating the number of Google+ users – or at least inflating the number of people who have a Google+ account, regardless of whether they ever do anything with it.

Since last November, for example, anyone wishing to comment on YouTube can only do so through a Google+ account. Even worse (and potentially more relevant to Gagnon's case) are claims that Google connects Gmail accounts with Google+ circles, to the point where “by default, when someone joins Google+ and that person is in your Gmail contacts, Google will automatically send you a notification, along with an invitation suggesting that you "add him [or her] to your Circles to stay connected."

Of course, it's also possible that Gagnon actually did violate the terms of his restraining order, by deliberately sending a Google+ invite to his ex, and is now blaming Google in hope of wriggling off the hook. Thus far, Google has not released any records or responded to any media requests for comment, regarding exactly how that invitation came to be sent.

"What's under the hood?" used to be the first question car enthusiasts asked when a new model came out. These days, the question is rapidly becoming, "What's the operating system?"

Google is the latest to put together an alliance of car manufacturers, including Audi, General Motors, Honda and Hyundai. Microsoft already provides the Sync system for Ford and Apple's Siri is found in some BMW, Mercedes, Toyota and Chrysler models. 

There's also some crossover. Some manufacturers will feature one system in certain of their marques but not others.

Google has dubbed its effort the Open Automotive Alliance. It's intended to provide better integration between cars and Android devices and a safer experience that will create an "open development model" to accelerate the use of technology in cars.

The alliance hopes to bring the Android mobile operating system to some car entertainment systems later this year. It's supposed to create new opportunities for developers to power "connected experiences" in cars, much like the "Chevrolet AppShop" announced yesterday.

The group will focus on bringing the Android mobile operating system (OS) to cars in entertainment systems this year.

Safer and more fun

Just what will this be, exactly?

The OAA explains it this way in its publicity material: "We're working with our partners to enable better integration between cars and Android devices in order to create a safer, car optimized experience. We're also developing new Android platform features that will enable the car itself to become a connected Android device. Stay tuned for more details coming soon."

The automakers say it will make driving safer and more fun.

“The worlds of consumer and automotive technologies have never been more closely aligned, and this alliance will only pave the way for faster innovation,” said Ricky Hudi, Head of Electrics/Electronics Development at AUDI AG. “Working toward a common ecosystems benefits driver safety above all.”

“Partnering with Google and the OAA on an ecosystem that spans across vehicles and handheld mobile devices furthers our mission to bring vehicles into our owners digital lives and their digital lives into their vehicles,” said Mary Chan, President of General Motors' Global Connected Consumer unit. “We see huge opportunities for the Android platform paired with OnStar 4G LTE connectivity in future Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac vehicles.”

“Millions of people are already familiar with Android and use it everyday,” said Sundar Pichai, SVP of Android, Chrome & Apps at Google. “The expansion of the Android platform into automotive will allow our industry partners to more easily integrate mobile technology into cars and offer drivers a familiar, seamless experience so they can focus on the road.”

Google and Hewlett-Packard are recalling about 145,000 HP Chromebook 11 power supply/charger units.

The computer’s charger can overheat and melt, posing fire and burn hazards.

Google has received nine reports of chargers overheating and melting during use. There is one report of a small burn to a consumer and one report of minor property damage to a pillow from an overheating charger.

This recall involves chargers that were sold with the HP Chromebook 11. The charger is black with outlet pins, measures 1¾ inches by ¾ inches, and has a 6-foot long cord with a micro-USB connector on the end. The model number of the charger is MU15-N1052-A00S, which is stamped on the face of the battery charger that has the outlet pins.

The chargers, manufactured in China, were sold at Best Buy stores nationwide and online at Amazon.com, bestbuy.com, Google Play at play.google.com, and HP Shopping at shopping.hp.com from October 2013, through November 2013, and included with the Chromebook 11 which sold for about $280.

Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled charger for the HP Chromebook 11 and contact Google for a free replacement.

Consumers may contact Google toll-free at (866) 628-1371 between 5 a.m. and 7 p.m. PT seven days a week.  

The essence of a lawsuit is to enable one party to recover the damages caused by the negligent or deceptive actions or omissions of the other party.

In other words -- no damage, no case.

And that's exactly how U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal viewed the claims of a class action suit taking issue with Google's use of the data it harvests about its users as they search the web, send emails and engage in other online activities, Courthouse News Service reported.

Saying that Google made money from the data and didn't share it with its users isn't much of an argument, Grewal said. 

"A plaintiff must do more than point to the dollars in a defendant's pocket; he must sufficiently allege that in the process he lost dollars of his own," Grewal wrote. "Plaintiffs' allegations certainly plead that Google made money using information about them for which they were provided no compensation beyond free access to Google's services. But an allegation that Google profited is not enough equivalent to an allegation that such profiteering deprived plaintiffs of economic value from that same information."

In other words, it's not as though throngs of competing search engines and marketing companies were waiting in the wings, eager to buy the data that Google obtained by providing free services to its users. 

With that, Grewal dismissed the suit. Game over.

The suit was filed in March 2012 after Google updated its privacy policy to permit the commingling of user data across different Google products, such as Gmail and YouTube. The new privacy policy allowed Google to combine a user's information from one service with the user's information from other services.

The complaint also alleged that the new policy violated the users right to privacy, although there is no explicit right to privacy in the Constitution, popular opinion notwithstanding.

There’s a common saying about social media and other Internet companies: “If you’re not paying them anything, you’re not their customer; you’re what they’re selling.”

So if you use web-based email or Facebook or Google or other free sites — you pay nothing to use them, so how do these companies make money?  Through advertising, of course, and media companies that sell advertising space are basically selling an audience of potential buyers.

With that in mind, check out a complaint filed with the FTC by Consumer Watchdog, a California non-profit organization, complaining about what it says is deception in Google Shopping results.

Unfair and deceptive

“The way that the Internet giant is featuring results from Google Shopping without making it clear that the highlighted results are nothing more than advertisements for merchants who bid for placement is an unfair and deceptive act, violating Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act," said John Simpson, CW’s Privacy Project Director. "Moreover, consumers are actually being harmed because the featured results from Google Shopping more often than not return higher prices than can be found elsewhere, when consumers would reasonably expect Google’s suggestions to be the best.”

Hmm. Reading that made us recall a story we published last month about rent-to-own or lease-to-buy stores;  the gist of the piece is that you should avoid such businesses, because they sell furniture and appliances for much higher prices than ordinary retail stores. To demonstrate, we chose certain items and did price comparisons between the rental centers and various retail outlets, and said this: “We searched online for that make and model of television, and one of the first websites that came up is Kohl’s (which is not remotely the cheapest store we could find).”

We used Google to do that search, so we can say from our own experience: if you use Google to look for a smart TV, the first results will not offer the lowest prices.

However, Consumer Watchdog’s complaint is not based on any idea that Google is somehow obligated to prioritize its search results based on price. Instead, CW said this:

“Google’s presentation of the Google Shopping results disguises the fact that the results are in fact advertisements. Clicking on any one of the Google Shopping suggestions takes the user directly to the merchant’s page where the product can be purchased … Each suggestion is nothing more than an advertisement, however, there is no label that makes this clear.  The omission of an ad label is even more egregious when the Google Shopping results are presented surrounded by results that are marked as ads. Thus, the consumer can only conclude that the Google Shopping results are suggestions, not advertisements.”

A similar analysis from the Financial Timesshowed that “five out of every six items highlighted on a Google search are more expensive than the same items from other merchants hidden deeper in the Google Shopping service.”

Think of these results as yet another reminder why savvy consumers should never assume the first price they see is the best one.

Google takes another step in its transition to an Apple-style company this month as it opens retail showrooms where consumers can try out such products as Nexus 7 tablets, Chromebook computers, and Chromecast video-streaming devices.

They are literally showrooms, not stores. You can walk in and examine the merchandise and, if you like it, order it online. Google has previously worked with retailers like Best Buy to set up sections that display nothing but Google products, but this is taking it a step farther.

The showrooms will feature a large snow globe complete with snow, we're told. Customers will be able to take pictures and videos of themselves with the products that they can share online -- right from the Google showroom! We're not sure this will have the gee-whiz effect Google is hoping for, but who knows?

Just where the showrooms will be isn't quite clear at this point. 

How, you ask, is this like Apple? Well, Google has been steadily moving towards becoming a manufacturer of integrated software and hardware products -- laptops, tablets and smartphones that come with their own operating system. 

Life is a lot easier for a manufacturer when devices can be designed to run one, and only one, operating system. Microsoft rather valiantly for years produced its Windows OS that will more or less happily run on just about any machine and interact with a nearly infinite number of peripherals -- you know, printers, scanners, keyboards, etc. Its reward was being portrayed in commercials as a rumpled guy who produced bloatware instead of the cool dude who put out walled-garden my-way-or-the-highway products.

There's also the "cool" factor. Apple had it in the Steve Jobs era. Google is trying but may not be quite there yet.

Will opening what amount to ersatz igloos in shopping centers move the cool needle? Well, we'll see, won't we?  

There are changes coming to Google, though (fortunately) most everyday users shouldn’t notice anything different: Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has announced that the company is altering its search algorithms in hopes of making it harder to find or share child pornography. The company is also making extensive use of Microsoft image-recognition technology.

Schmidt explained the new plan in a piece he wrote for the UK'sDaily Mail on Nov. 17. (The announcement first appeared in a British rather than American newspaper because the company’s actions are presumably in response to various anti-child-pornography initiatives by UK prime minister David Cameron, after two particularly brutal real-life child murders last year).

Google is approaching the problem from four angles. The first two are “cleaning up search” in hopes of preventing child-abuse links from appearing in search results, and “deterrence” via pop-up legal warnings that will appear if anyone searches for possibly illegal content. These two are to be achieved automatically, via changes in the search algorithms.

For the third category, “detection and removal,” Schmidt admitted that “There's no quick technical fix” because “computers can't reliably distinguish between innocent pictures of kids at bathtime and genuine abuse. So we always need to have a person review the images.”

If a human viewer determines that a picture or video is indeed pornographic or otherwise indicative of abuse, the image will be given a “digital fingerprint” allowing the company to recognize it anytime it appears on a computer. And, of course, the three previous categories all fall under the aegis of “technical expertise,” which both Microsoft and Google have in abundance.

We certainly don’t envy whichever Google employees -- or, more likely, contract workers -- end us tasked with the job of looking at photos of children all day to ferret out signs of sexual abuse. But Schmidt’s emphasis on human oversight is likely meant to assuage any censorship or civil-liberty concerns the plan might raise.

Google has agreed to pay $17 million to settle charges that it violated consumers' privacy by tracking the web usage of Apple customers who thought their Safari web browser's privacy settings protected them.

“Privacy is paramount,” said Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, one of 37 state AGs who prosecuted the case against Google. “If a business improperly intrudes on consumers’ privacy, the Attorney General’s Office will pursue them.”

Google altered its coding to circumvent the Safari default privacy settings, without consumers’ knowledge or consent. This allowed advertisers to set third-party cookies on consumers’ Safari browsers, despite the fact those users believed their privacy settings protected them.

Through its DoubleClick advertising platform, Google’s search engine generates revenue by helping to transmit third-party advertising ‘cookies’ — small files set in Internet users’ Web browsers — that allow advertisers to gather information about those users. Depending on the type of cookie, the information collected could include the user’s web surfing habits and location.

Apple’s Safari Web browser generally blocks third-party cookies in its default privacy settings, including cookies used by DoubleClick to track a consumer’s browsing history.

Unfair practices

From June 1, 2011 until February 15, 2012, Google altered its DoubleClick coding to circumvent the Safari default privacy settings, without consumers’ knowledge or consent. This allowed advertisers to set third-party cookies on consumers’ Safari browsers and gather information, despite the fact those users believed their privacy settings protected them.

Google disabled this coding method in February 2012 after the practice was widely reported on the Internet and in media.

Washington and other states alleged that Google failed to inform Safari users that it was circumventing their privacy settings. They also allege Google misled consumers through earlier representation that cookies were automatically blocked for Safari users.

The attorneys general also alleged Google violated state consumer protection and related computer privacy laws by circumventing Safari’s default privacy cookie-blocking settings.

$17 million

Google has agreed to pay the states $17 million to settle the case. The funds may be used for civil penalties, attorneys’ fees and future consumer protection education.

Google also agreed to injunctive relief that requires the following: 

• Refrain from using code to override a browser’s cookie blocking settings without the consumer’s consent unless it is necessary to detect or prevent fraud, security or technical issues.
• Not misrepresent or omit information about how Google connects advertisements to consumers’ browsers.
• Improve provided information regarding cookies, their purposes, and how they can be managed by consumers using Google’s products or services and tools.
• Maintain systems designed to ensure the expiration of the third-party cookies set on Safari Web browsers during the period that Google had circumvented the default settings.

States involved

Washington was part of a 10-state executive committee that led the investigations, which also included Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Texas and Vermont. The multi-state settlement also included Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, District of Columbia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Normally, the defendant in a lawsuit drags its feet, using whatever delaying tactics it can come up with, thinking of appeals court only as a last resort.

But sometimes the defendant is Google. Deep pockets. Overwhelming strategic motivation to win. Business model at stake.

Seen in that light, it's perhaps not surprising that Google has asked U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh to let Google go directly to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in an attempt to overturn -- or wriggle out from under, depending on your point of view -- Judge Koh's September decision to allow a wiretapping case against Google to go forward.

In that case, lead plaintiffs Brad Scott and Todd Harrington claim that Google scans Gmail messages for words and content, and intentionally intercepts messages between Gmail subscribers and non-subscribers.

Google has said that emails are only read by computers and that, therefore, there is no invasion of users' privacy. But Judge Koh rejected Google's claims that wiretapping laws do not apply to its Gmail business and that consumers who email Gmailers have no reasonable expectation of privacy. 

At Tuesday's hearing, Judge Koh asked how an expedited appeal would help move the case forward.

“We think clarification from the circuit will advance the termination of the litigation, if the circuit finds there are grounds to dismiss the case,” attorney Kathleen Sullivan, representing Google, said, according to Law360.com. An appeals court review would also clarify similar arguments now being lodged against Yahoo and other tech companies, she argued.

The judge and the attorney for the plaintiffs asked Sullivan if Google thinks there is any limit to what it can do. Sullivan replied that Google's privacy policy and terms of service outline what it can and cannot do and that users of Gmail agree to those policies by using the service.

Sullivan noted that under federal law, only one of the two parties in an email exchange must consent to the interception of email for it to be legal, Sullivan said.

“If you communicate with a Gmail user, you assume the risk," she said.

Want to make big bucks by endorsing products in Google ads? It's easy, as long as you omit the big bucks part. Following in the footsteps of Facebook, Google plans to start selling its users' endorsements to advertisers.

This means that if you give five stars to a movie or coffee concoction on Google Plus or YouTube, your name, photo and comments may wind up in ads shown to your friends and just about everybody else on Google's network of about two million affiliated sites.

Facebook pioneered this practice, which many users find creepy or downright predatory, and found itself in hot water, not to mention a class action lawsuit. Google is proceeding with a little more caution, however. It is serving notice in advance of the Nov. 11 start date, thorugh changes to its terms of service and says it will post notices on its home page and elsewhere. Users will be able to opt out, Google promises. 

Google also says that only adults -- those over 18 -- will be featured in the endorsements. No kids allowed.

High praise

Advertisers love these endorsements. They're considered the highest form of praise -- basically your friends (or people who would be your friends if you ever met them) passing on inside tips on what's hot and what's not.

They're like the reviews on Yelp, ConsumerAffairs and other peer review sites, except -- hey -- they're all positive.

A federal judge has turned aside Google's attempt to derail a class action that accuses it of violating wiretapping and privacy laws through its electronic monitoring of its subscribers' Gmail.

Lead plaintiffs Brad Scott and Todd Harrington claim that the web-based service scans emails for words and content, and intentionally intercepts messages between Gmail subscribers and non-subscribers.

Google has said that emails are only read by computers and that, therefore, there is no invasion of users' privacy. But U.S. District Court Judge Lucy H. Koh rejected Google's claims that wiretapping laws do not apply to its Gmail business and that consumers who email Gmailers have no reasonable expectation of privacy. 

The decision finds that reading emails is not a necessary part of Google's business operations and that California's Invasion of Privacy Laws apply to opening and reading online communications without consent.

"Very big consumer victory"

"Google’s alleged interceptions are neither instrumental to the provision of email services, nor are they an incidental effect of providing these services," Judge Koh ruled. "The Court therefore finds that Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that the interceptions fall outside Google’s ordinary course of business."

Consumer Watchdog, a California non-profit, called Koh's ruling "a very big consumer victory for the right to use the Internet without having to give up one's privacy."

“This is a historic step for holding Internet communications subject to the same privacy laws that exist in the rest of society. The court rightly rejected Google's tortured logic that you have to accept intrusions of privacy if you want to send email,” said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project Director. “The ruling means federal and state wiretap laws apply to the Internet.  It's a tremendous victory for online privacy. Companies like Google can't simply do whatever they want with our data and emails.”

Koh explicity rejected Google's argument that because the monitoring was done by machines, it didn't count.

"The statute explicitly limits the use of service observing or random monitoring by electronic communication service providers to mechanical and service quality control checks," Koh wrote. "Accordingly, the statutory scheme suggests that Congress did not intend to allow electronic communication service providers unlimited leeway to engage in any interception that would benefit their business models, as Google contends. In fact, this statutory provision would be superfluous if the ordinary course of business exception were as broad as Google suggests."

So this is how the cookie crumbles -- Google crushes it and sweeps the crumbs off the table.

Consumers, parents, regulators and privacy advocates have complained for years about the tiny pieces of code called "cookies" that websites and advertisers place on users' computers, objecting to their use in "tracking" consumers around the web.

Google is said to be baking up an alternative -- something that would provide better security and anonymity for users while presumably improving the advertising and marketing functions that keep websites in business.

No one likes advertising -- or at least few people admit to liking it -- but it does pay the bills, after all. Creating the content and managing the increasingly complex task of keeping websites operating smoothly is by no means cheap. Take away the anonymous tracking that now enables advertisers to target ads that likely to be, well, on target to specific audiences and you pretty much take away the Internet as we know it.

Tighter control

If Google, which after all has more Ph.D. engineers than most companies have paper clips, can perfect its still-secret new system, advertisers would have to come to Google to get the marketing informatiion that they now get from cookies.

There have been attempts to limit the use of so-called "third-party cookies" but so far none has succeeded. Just a few days ago, the ad industry pulled out of a group effort to impose new Do Not Track protocols. 

Just to be clear: A "first-party cookie" is one that is placed on your computer by a site you visit frequently -- Amazon, let's say.  It's basically your name tag when you return to that site. The first-party cookie makes it unnecessary for you to go through the log-in process each time you visit and it also enables Amazon to show you what amounts to a customized site -- one that features the types of products you've bought in the past and browed for recently.

Third-party cookies, on the other hand, are placed by advertisers whose ads you see in the course of clicking around the web each day. They enable the advertisers to see where you go -- what sites you visit and, perhaps, what items you order. Again, this enables the advertiser to show you ads based on your apparent shopping preference.

Sex toys & cigars

This sounds harmless but if you go shopping for, let's say, sex toys, you don't really want your screen festooned with ads for such gadgets the next time your spouse or significant other sits down to use your computer. Of if you promise your spouse you have quit smoking but your screen is full of ads for mail-order cigars, domestic disharmony may result.

If Google can get a lock on the tracking business, it could enforce privacy rules that would satisfy many of the objections that are floating around today. Of course, saying it could doesn't necessarily mean it would but it's at least a possibility.

The advertising industry is not exactly in a state of bliss over the possbility that it might have to bow down to the mighty Google and already is quibbling over the name that Google is said to have assigned to the project: AdID.

AdID, it turns out, is the trademark of the Association of National Advertisers and the 4As -- the American Association of Advertising Agencies. It's a digital coding technology for identifying and managing ads across various platforms.

OK, so maybe Google can't use the AdID name. It's easy enough to think up alternatives. At the moment, the problem is not a shortage of snazzy names, it's a surplus of cooks in the bakery -- and we all know the result of that. 

A massive class action case against Google has survived, at least for now, a motion for dismissal by Google. The case concerns Google's policy of scanning every email sent to and from Gmail users so it can pick out keywords that are used to target advertising to its users.

The plaintiffs in the case argue that Google is violating federal wiretapping laws and California state privacy laws by reading the emails. Google, for its part, has challenged the legal standing of the two lead plaintiffs because they don't live in California and has claimed its electronic eavesdropping is legitimate.

But U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh seemed lukewarm to Google's arguments and warned the parties to be ready to go to trial in 2014, Courthouse News Service reported. 

Google lawyer Whitty Somvichian argued that the company's practice of scanning emails is used solely for its targeted advertising scheme and to enhance its other services.

"It's a legitimate business function," Somvichian argued at the Thursday hearing. "All users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing."

Emails aren't postcards

But plaintiffs' attorney Sean Rommel fired back, saying Google's practices benefit Google alone.

"Emails are not postcards, they're private transmissions protected by Congress," Rommel said. "Google reads every single email sent. Advertising is the greatest smokescreen in the modern era."

While Google claims it gives adequate notice of its policies to its users who must agree to its terms of service to open a Gmail account, Rommel noted that Google reads the messages of non-Gmail users who write to Gmail users.

Those non-Gmail users have never agreed to Google's terms of service, he noted.

"Every Gmail user gives Google a lifetime license to use every email received and sent," Rommel added. "That's astonishing and the scariest thing I've ever heard." according to the Courthouse News Service report.

Google and a California non-profit, Consumer Watchdog, are hurling accusations and insults today over whether consumers should really expect their emails to be private.

The dispute grows out of a class action lawsuit that charged Google was violating federal and state wiretap laws by analyzing its 425 million users' emails. In a court filing, Google said that people can’t expect privacy when sending a message to a Gmail address.

In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Google said there is no reasonable expectation of total privacy when sending an email through the public Internet:

“Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their emails are processed by the recipient’s [email provider] in the course of delivery. Indeed, ‘a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.’"

Consumer Watchdog jumped on the motion and called on Google to "stop reading and analyzing the content of emails sent to its system."

In response, Google seemed to backtrack from the message in its court filing, saying:

“We take our users’ privacy and security very seriously; recent reports claiming otherwise are simply untrue. We have built industry-leading security and privacy features into Gmail — and no matter who sends an email to a Gmail user, those protections apply.”

Which is it?

Google can't have it both ways, Consumer Watchdog said, alleging that "Google is either lying to the court or lying to the public."

“If they take privacy seriously, then they must amend their brief and stop reading and analyzing the content of email we send to their system,” said Consumer Watchdog's John M. Simpson. “If Google stands by the claim of no expectation of privacy it asserted in the court filing, they cannot claim to respect users’ privacy. These two claims are obviously incompatible.”

Google has always insisted that the "processing" to which emails are subjected is automated and intended only to match advertising to the general context of the email or to sort emails into appropriate folders or categories.

In its motion, Google said the plaintiffs in the lawsuit were trying to "criminalise ordinary business practices" that have been part of Gmail's service since it was introduced.

The class action lawsuit, filed in San Jose U.S. District Court in May, charges that Google "unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people's private email messages." It quotes Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman as saying: "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."

The suit claims that "on a daily basis and for years, Google has systematically and intentionally crossed the 'creepy line' to read private email messages containing information you don't want anyone to know, and to acquire, collect, or mine valuable information from that mail."

The full text of the lawsuit was filed under seal because it details many of Google's confidential and proprietary business practices. A hearing in the case is set for Sept. 5 before Judge Lucy H. Koh.

Google has agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle a consolidated class action lawsuit over its alleged disclosure to third parties of users' search queries, a practice Google halted in October 2011 when it began encrypting search queries, Courthouse News Service reported.

The lawsuit claimed that Google passed on private information through "referrer headers," allowing others to see which websites users were visiting and also displaying the search terms typed in by the user.

The lead plaintiff, Paloma Gaos, argued that the headers could have revealed confidential information including the users' name, religion, medical conditions and sexual orientation. 

A similar case was filed in Illinois and the suits were later consolidated.

The preliminary settlement calls for Google to pay $8.5 million into a settlement fund that will cover administration expenses, incentive awards to the class representatives, attorneys' fees for class counsel and distributions to seven nonprofits that have agreed to use the funds for public awareness and research related to Internet privacy.

Google would also post disclosures on its website concerning user search queries, including information about whether users' search queries are transmitted to third parties.

The proposed non-profit recipients are World Privacy Forum, Carnegie-Mellon, Chicago-Kent College of Law Center for Information, Society, and Policy, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Stanford Center for Internet and Society, MacArthur Foundation and AARP Inc.

The feds have lately been hectoring Google about paid ads not being clearly distinguished from search results and now states are piling on with complaints of their own.

Three states that aren't normally thought of as thought-leaders in Internet matters -- Oklahoma, Nebraska and Mississippi -- are calling on Google to crack down on ads for illegal drug sales, while Washington and 22 other states are continuing to pressure Google to improve privacy protection for consumers.

In the case of the drug ads, the state attorneys general are irate about ads for prescription drugs popping up on Google's YouTube. They're also objecting to how-to videos on creating forged driver's licenses and passports, often accompanied by ads from immigration lawyers.

"We understand that YouTube is an open platform and that not all content can or should be policed. Nevertheless, the fact that Google actively seeks to profit from the posting of these types of videos on YouTube - a website known to be particularly popular among children and teens - is very troubling," the AGs said.

It was just two years ago that Google paid $500 million to settle a criminal investigation into allegations that it had made hundreds of millions of dollars for ads promoting illegal online pharmacies.

Last June, Mississippi AG Jim Hood said he was prepared to subpoena Google as part of a probe into the illegal online sale of prescription products.

Privacy issues

On the privacy front, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said he and 22 other state AGs have been making progress in trying to persuade Google to improve its privacy protections for consumers and calling on the company to offer greater transparency and more meaningful privacy controls.

“With every click, consumers leave a trail of personal information that is used by companies for commercial purposes,” Ferguson said. “I will continue to focus on increasing consumer protection online.”

Last year, 36 state attorneys general wrote to CEO Larry Page expressing serious concerns with the way Google handles consumers’ privacy. This occurred after Google implemented a new unified privacy policy without giving consumers a meaningful opportunity to opt out. The attorneys general asked to meet with the company to address them.

Google, not exactly known for its journalistic expertise, has lately been lecturing newspapers and other news outlets about its objections to paid content on their web pages but now Google and the other big search engines are getting some sterner advice from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

This raises the question of which is scarier -- "advice" from a search engine that could put you out of business by dropping your site to the bottom of its search results or a stiff letter from a federal agency that could spend years investigating your operations.  

Be that as it may, the FTC warns the search engines that they must "clearly and prominently" distinguish paid advertising from "natural" search results, referred to for some reason as "organic" results by the technorati, saying that it is getting harder and harder for consumers to tell the difference.

Failing to do so "could be a deceptive practice," the consumer protection agency said. It called for "visual cues, labels, or other techniques to effectively distinguish advertisements, in order to avoid misleading consumers."

Growing tendency

The FTC said that over the last year or so, there has been a growing tendency for search engines to put paid listings above "natural" search results, causing users to think the ads are objective, unpaid search results.

Last year, Google revised its Shopping search service so that it includes only paid listings, thereby making it possible that consumers will not be shown the very best deals on a given item. The only indication that this is the case is a bit of grey text that says "sponsored" at the top right.

No doubt Google would be unhappy if news sites began writing only about politicians who paid to have stories written about them but it does not seem to feel any compunction about presenting only sponsored shopping information to consumers. 

"Consumers ordinarily expect that natural search results are included and ranked based on relevance to a search query, not based on payment from a third party," the FTC said in its letter. "Including or ranking a search result in whole or in part based on payment is a form of advertising. To avoid the potential for deception, consumers should be able to easily distinguish a natural search result from advertising that a search engine delivers."

Besides Google, the letter went to Yahoo, Bing, AOL, Blekko, DuckDuckGo and 17 specialized search engines. Google dominates search engine advertising with about 74% of the $17 billion spent annually on ads and paid search results.

In January, the FTC wound up a two-year antitrust probe of Google, saying it found no basis for action.

Perhaps feeling pressure from startups like Mailbox, Google is launching a redesigned Gmail today, trying once again to relieve inbox clutter and, perhaps, to promote Google+, something it now does incessantly.

Three years ago, Google added the Priority Inbox feature, which tried to bring some order to cluttered inboxes by sorting messages based on their perceived importance. How successful that was varies widely from one user to the next, we suspect.

But this time, Google says it has it right.

"We get a lot of different types of email: messages from friends, social notifications, deals and offers, confirmations and receipts, and more," said Itamar Gilad, a Google product manager writing on the company's official blog. "All of these emails can compete for our attention and make it harder to focus on the things we need to get done. Sometimes it feels like our inboxes are controlling us, rather than the other way around."

"Today, Gmail is getting a brand new inbox on desktop and mobile that puts you back in control using simple, easy organization," Gilad said, explaining that the new interface groups emails into categories that appear as different tabs -- Primary, Social, Promotions and Updates, among others.

On Android phones and on Gmail for iPhone and iPad, the Primary tab will appear as the default.

If you don't like the new options, you can switch back to basic view, or make adjustments when the Configure Inbox option appears in your Settings tab, Gilad said. 

The changes are being rolled out gradually, so it may be a few weeks before all users see the new format. 

Reuters is reporting that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) may be in the early stages of another antitrust investigation into Google, this time focusing on the search giant's advertising practices.

The news service quotes unnamed sources as saying that the probe involves Google's 2007 purchase of DoubleClick, a purchase that basically provided Google's full-scale entry into display -- or banner --  advertising, supplementing its contextual text-based ads.

Other advertising companies have been complaining to the FTC that Google uses the leverage it gained with the DoubleClick purchase to push advertisers into using some of its other services.

Google is the No. 1 player in the $15 billion U.S. online display ad market with a 15% share. Facebook is close behind with 14%.

The Reuters report said that the supposed investigation is still in its early stages and Google has not been formally notified or asked to produce any documents.

Google is still enmeshed with European regulators and has reportedly offered to modify its search protocols to satisfy some of their concerns.

Earlier FTC probe

It was just four months ago that the FTC wrapped up a long-running antitrust probe of Google, saying that the "facts just weren't there" to support charges that it used its search dominance to display its products at the expense of other companies.

Pressed by reporters at a news conference, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said that by a 5-0 vote, the bipartisan commission agreed that it had not found evidence that Google search results were purposely biased to unfairly promote its own products.

Leibowitz said the commission had "examined 9 million pages of documents, interviewed numerous industry participants and took sworn testimony of key Google executives." 

Leibowitz conceded that while "some evidence suggested Google was trying to eliminate competition" through changes in the format of its search results and  frequent tweaking of its search algorithms, the commission had concluded that "Google's primary reason for changing the look and feel was to improve the user experience."

"Tellingly, many of Google's rivals engaged in many of the same design changes," Leibowitz noted.

What happens when you die? We're not talking theology here or trying to sell you life insurance. No, the question -- a thorny one, you must admit -- is what happens to your computer files and accounts when you leave the bricks-and-mortar world.

Actually, we're supposed to call them your "digital assets." It sounds better and it is more descriptive (kind of like "cremains"), since most of us store a lot of stuff in the cloud as well as on our hard drives.

In the event of your demise, figuring out what happens to all that information can be a huge headache for your heirs. Many, if not most, online services will not release user IDs and passwords to your survivors without making them jump through various hoops. At the very least, they will probably have to supply a copy of your death certificate. 

To the rescue comes Google, which has been known to have a few other good ideas. It is launching a new feature that makes it easier for you to instruct Google on what should happen to your digital assets when you die or become incapacitated.

The feature is called Inactive Account Manager and it is now available on  your Google Account settings page.

"You can tell us what to do with your Gmail messages and data from several other Google services if your account becomes inactive for any reason," said Andreas Tuerk, Google Product Manager on the company's blog.

"For example, you can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity," Tuerk wrote. "Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube."

Tuerk said that before Google takes any action, it will send a text message to your cellphone and an email to the secondary address you’ve provided.

So keep those smartphone batteries charged and keep your email addresses up to date. You don't want your stuff to be deleted before you are.

In a less than resounding settlement, 39 states and the District of Columbia have agreed to split $7 million from Google as a token penalty for its Street View mapping cars eavesdropping on unsecured wi-fi networks a few years ago.

“While the $7 million is significant, the importance of this agreement goes beyond financial terms," said Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen. "Consumers have a reasonable expectation of privacy. This agreement recognizes those rights and ensures that Google will not use similar tactics in the future to collect personal information without permission from unsuspecting consumers,” 

Google's Street View cars were equipped with antennae and software that the company acknowledged collected network identification information for use in future geolocation services. At the same time, Google collected and stored the content of Internet communications being transmitted over those unsecured business and personal wireless networks.

Google has always maintained that it was unaware the data was being collected. It has since disabled the equipment used to collect the payload data from the Street View vehicles.

Wi-Spy scandal wraps up

The agreement with the states appears to be the final chapter in the so-called Wi-Spy scandal, which has been a source of embarrassment for Google and consternation for privacy advocates for years.

While Google has always maintained the eavesdropping was accidental, it hasn't exactly won plaudits for its cooperation with investigators. The FCC  fined Google $25,000 in 2012 for willfully obstructing the FCC’s investigation into the incident.

"Google's motto has always been 'Do no evil.' It should also be 'Do no eavesdropping,'" said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, last year. "Google needs to fully explain to Congress and the public what it knew about the collection of data through its Street View program."

Other key elements of the agreement with the states require Google to run an employee training program about privacy and confidentiality of user data and continue the program for at least 10 years. Google must also conduct a public service announcement campaign to help educate consumers about steps they may take to better secure their personal information while using wireless networks.

States participating in the settlement are: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Washington. 

Not too long ago, there was a search engine named Google. You could use it to find things and then go look at them. For example, if you wanted to buy a car, you could run a search and find the websites that had the car you were looking for.

This helped businesses like Cars.com, Autotrader.com and Edmunds.com  prosper and grow.

But what Google giveth, Google eventually taketh away, as just about every business sector has learned by now. And it appears that online car sites are about to be the latest to learn this sometimes bitter lesson.

Since last summer, Google has been experimenting with running its own car-listing service in the San Francisco area, allowing consumers to browse dealers' inventory and check prices without leaving Google's pages.

That pilot is now about to be extended throughout California and, presumably, into other states. Google did something similar with travel information last year. You can now check flights from SFO to IAD, for example, and get an instant answer right on Google's search page.

This has perhaps not been a good thing for Expedia, Kayak, et. al. but we haven't heard any consumers complaining. For one thing, the results are rendered instanteously, without the lengthy waits would-be travelers used to encounter. For another, they appear to be objective -- not favoring one carrier or agent over another, something that isn't necessarily true with many travel sites.

Come on down ...

Of course, it's not like Google will be selling cars directly. You'll still have to go to a dealer or the individual who's trying to sell what you're hoping to buy, at least for now.

And it's not like this is something completely new. Dealers say that more than 90 percent of car buyers begin their shopping online and something like two out of every three visitors who wander onto a dealership's website get there through a Google search.

According to Automotive News, dealers who sign up with Google will be able to  list their new-vehicle inventories with no upfront or monthly fees. They will, however, pay Google for the leads they get. As with all things Google, dealers will have to bid for placement in the results. It's thought the average per-lead fee will be around $15. 

Ever so grudgingly, Google is adding a "do not track" option to its Chrome browser by the end of the year. There's been a lot of foot-dragging by everybody but Google has managed to come in dead last. Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer already offer the do-not-track option. Microsoft even makes it the default.

Google and other Internet dynamos agreed in February to support the idea but it took some serious jaw-boning by the White House to get them to reluctantly get on board.

The White House had called for Congress to pass a "consumer privacy bill of rights" that would give consumers more control over the personal data that Internet companies collect about them.

“American consumers can’t wait any longer for clear rules of the road that ensure their personal information is safe online,” said President Obama in February. “As the Internet evolves, consumer trust is essential for the continued growth of the digital economy.

Not very excited

Google still is making no pretense that it's excited about giving consumers a little bit of private time.

"We undertook to honor an agreement on DNT that the industry reached with the White House early this year," a spokesman for the company said in a statement emailed to the Los Angeles Times. "To that end we’re making this setting visible in our Chromium developer channel, so that it will be available in upcoming versions of Chrome by year’s end."

Big G isn't saying when the option will available but says that when it is, consumers will be able to go into Chrome's settings panel and select "Do Not Track."

No guarantee

So then Google will flip a big switch in the Cloud that turns off tracking, right? Well, not exactly. Rather, it will send a message to every website the consumer visits saying that the consumer doesn't want to be stalked. It's then up to the individual sites to follow through. Or not follow, to be more precise.

This is the same methodology used by other search engines and many consumer and privacy advocates worry that unscrupulous advertisers will simply ignore the notification and continue tracking consumers around the Web.

By instilling a false sense of security, the do not track option could make matters worse, these advocates fear. 

Hoping to juice up its local reviews, Google is buying the Frommer's Travel brand from publisher John Wiley & Sons. 

Google said it hasn't decided whether it will continue to publish the printed Frommer's guidebooks, which have lined the pockets of generations of world travelers, tramps and tourists.

It's possible the Frommer's brand will be meled with Zagat, which Google bought in September 2011. 

With the Frommer purchase, Google hopes to expand its local reviews beyond restaurants, Zagat's primary focus. Frommer's also reviews hotels and includes information about transportation options and local attractions in thousands of cities worldwide.

Frommer's series of guidebooks began in 1957 with the publication of Arthur Frommer's book, Europe on $5 a Day. It expanded to more than 350 guidebooks and a Web site that covers more than 3,500 destinations.

Motorola cuts

Meanwhile, Google says it will cut 20% of the workforce of Motorola Mobility, the money-losing cellphone maker it bought for $12.5 billion last year, and shut nearly a third of Motorola's offices worldwide. Two-thirds of the jobs are outside the U.S.

"These changes are designed to return Motorola's mobile devices unit to profitability," Google said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

As expected, Google will pay $22.5 million to settle federal charges that it disregarded consumers' privacy settings on Apple's Safari Web browser. It is the largest civil penalty ever assessed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for violating a Commission order. 

Perhaps more significantly, in a conference call with reporters, an FTC official said the commission finds it "troubling" that Google says the privacy violation was inadvertent.

Google has said the whole affair was a "mistake" and said it stopped placing unauthorized cookies on users' machines as soon as the Wall Street Journal published a story about it.

"I think that defense raises red flags to regulators," said David Vladeck, Director of Consumer Protection at the FTC. "Their intent is immaterial."

Like a police officer talking to a motorist who argues he didn't know there was a speed limit, Vladeck spelled it out: "Their intent is immaterial. It's troubling to us that Google says they didn't know it was going on. A company like Google is the steward of personal information from hundreds of millions of people and they have to do better."

Google has never publicly apologized to consumers who were misled.

Cookies disabled

In addition to the civil penalty announced today, the order also requires Google to disable all the tracking cookies it had said it would not place on consumers’ computers.  

In the conference call, James Kohm, Associate Director for Enforcement at the Commission, said that most of the illicit cookies have already been removed but said that under the terms of the order, Google has until February 15, 2014 to remove all of them.

"The extra time is because they can only remove the cookies when somebody visits a site in their ad network," Kohm said. "The stragglers are those who haven't gotten to those places yet."

Kohm said that, besides an outside auditor, the FTC has "a very active monitoring compliance program." 

Wired was wrong

Kohn and Vladeck disputed published reports in Wired magazine and elsewhere that the FTC did not know of the issue until a Stanford researcher went public with his discovery of the privacy violations.

"Don't believe everything you read in magazines. We were aware of this problem very early on," Vladeck said. "We were investigating this well before any publication in the Wall Street Journal or otherwise. The Wired article was wrong.

"We were on this shortly after this problem arose," Vladeck insisted. "It takes time to build a case that will stand up in court. As a law enforcement agency, we operate under legal constraints and our investigations are not public."

Long rap sheet

It's the latest in a long series of "accidental" privacy violations by Google. It pales in comparison to the so-called "Wi-Spy" case back in 2010, when Google admitted it invaded Wi-Fi networks and downloaded private data from those networks as its fleet of gadget-encumbered cars crept through neighborhoods around the world, collecting information for its street-mapping project.

The commission in April fined Google $25,000, saying it was obstructing the agency's investigation of the matter. Google, as usual, said any such obstruction was inadvertent. It didn't apologize. 

Last year, in a settlement with the Justice Department, Google agreed to pay a $500 million penalty for promoting and advertising unlawful sales of prescription drugs through its ubiquitous AdWords program. It said its role in establishing a global network of illicit drug sites was unintentional.

Heavy price

Responding to questions about whether the penalty was adequate, Vladeck said Google was "paying a heavy price."

"$22.5 million may not seem like a lot of money to Google but given the magnitude and duration of this violation, we think it's quite substantial," he said. "We have Google under order for another 19 years and this sends a message that the FTC isn't kidding around," he said.

Ads, ads, ads

Google, the developer of the world’s most popular Internet search engine, generates billions of dollars in revenues annually from selling online advertising services, including the delivery of targeted ads online.  Cookies are small pieces of computer text that are used to collect information from computers and can be used to serve targeted ads to consumers.  By placing a tracking cookie on a user’s computer, an advertising network