Ask.com allows erasing of past searches

Once, there was the thought that all the searches that you made were not anything to be worried about; that thought did not last very long as it became clear that search engines were storing searches along with information. Fine, but even then a person does not know who are you - after all, your name and address are not revealed. And then there was research done on the basis of using the various searches conducted by the same computer, and enough information was able to be extracted that the actual address and person could be found. During this time, the question of privacy came to be raised more and more, and there was increasing pressure on search engines to modify their search archival to address privacy concerns.
And now search provider Ask.com has thrown the gauntlet much further. It has announced a feature called AskEraser that seeks to project an image of handling customer-privacy concerns by allowing users to set that their searches on Ask.com be deleted from the company's servers:

When enabled by the user, the feature will completely delete search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers -- including IP addresses, user IDs, session IDs and the text of queries made, according to the company. In most cases, the deletion will take place within a few hours of the time a search is completed, the company said.
But there are important caveats to keep in mind, Chester said, Ask.com, for instance, will still collect and store user search data by default, unless the user specifically enables AskEraser, Chester said. And enabling AskEraser does nothing to prevent third parties with whom Ask.com has relationships from collecting and storing search data.

There are some exceptions, but this is a further movement in the area of search engines being more concerned about privacy. One wonders as to whether Google will react to this move in some way, after all, Google is seen as the market leader in search, and it needs to not be concerned about the privacy of its users. At the same time, Google has made change only after some amount of pressure in the past through privacy experts and through the media.

Tech Titans challenge copyright claims in the media

Sounds a bit long-winded, but is a simple thing. When you watch a baseball match or a football match, you will get bombarded with warnings that tell you what you can or cannot do with the thing that you are watching on TV. They never tell you what you can do, instead it is all about not reproducing nor transmitting it any form, coupling this with an official warning and with logos of the league. This practice is now being challenged by a tech association, Computer & Communications Industry Association (comprising such titans such as Google and Microsoft) who contend that these warnings do represent the whole truth, and hence are essentially misleading customers about their rights.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission Latest News about Federal Trade Commission stating that such organizations as Major League Baseball, the National Football League and NBC/Universal, to name just a few, have been misleading consumers for years about their rights under the fair use doctrine in copyright law.
"Every time an American consumer opens a book, plays a DVD or watches a wide range of broadcast programs, he or she is confronted by strong language warning of what they are not allowed to do with that product," the executive summary of the complaint reads. "By design or effect, many of these warnings are misleading and harmful to millions of American consumers, customers and businesses," it continues. In fact, these statements grossly misrepresent federal law, which allows use of this material in certain circumstances, the CCIA contends.
"Uses of copyrighted works unauthorized by the copyright holder are not only permitted by federal law," reads the complaint, "they are actively encouraged by it. Section 107 of the Copyright Act, for example, encourages the unauthorized use of copyrighted works for various purposes, including criticism, commentary and news reporting. Under some circumstances, fair use permits the reproduction of an entire work by consumers."
Further, it goes on to say, MLB's claim that news accounts or "descriptions" of the game cannot be "disseminated" is, no pun intended, completely off base. "No author may copyright facts or ideas. Copyright serves to promote the dissemination of information by ensuring that every idea, theory and fact in a copyrighted work becomes instantly available for public exploitation at the moment of publication.

This seems an important issue. For years now, viewers have been essentially threatened that even if they take a section of the recording for doing a critical commentary, it is illegal; and how many users are so aware of that their rights that they don't get dispirited by such challenges.
The concept of fair use is subject to a fair amount of interpretations, and with the rapid advance of technology, legislation and legal compliance is typically falling behind. And for fundamental issues affecting the First Amendment Rights of a citizen, it is even more difficult for a court to refer to the Constitution and interpret it in such cases. Not to talk about how this complaint may even be biased, since many of the complainant companies are running searches, user to user networks, on which many of these clippings get posted.

Gphone: Google Phone ?

There have been rumours of a Google phone (short form 'Gphone') for some time now. Now Google is a search company, or rather it is a company that is trying to do a lot of things, but which makes most of its money from search. It has tried to enter the mobile world through a tie-up with carriers about placing Google search in the mobile space. Now carriers are typically very hard creatures to work with; they don't allow much freedom.
And there was this revolution that happened. Apple released the iPhone in a tie up with AT & T, but shockingly for the telecom industry, it was Apple that called the shots. This was a new type of device with a lot of hype, and hence AT & T would have allowed this. But any such move does set a precedent that Google could easily try and copy:

The company, which has made billions of dollars in Web advertising on computers, is courting wireless operators to carry handsets customized to Google products, including its search engine, email and a new mobile Web browser, say people familiar with the plans. It wants to capture a big chunk of the fast-growing market for ads on cellphones.
Google has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the cellphone project, say people who have been briefed on it. It has developed prototype handsets, made overtures to operators such as T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless, and talked over technical specifications with phone manufacturers. It hopes multiple manufacturers will make devices based on its specs and multiple carriers will offer them.

For Google, the mobile market is the hottest new emerging market, and must be the focus of a lot of strategy sessions at Google headquarters. Carriers have been not so easy to convince, but Google's might and the precedent of the iPhone could change things. If Google does come out with a cellphone, then one would expect more Wi-Fi integration and other methods of browsing, something uncomfortable to carriers since that is outside of their data plans.
The further advantage of having ads on cell phones is that they can be targeted better, and hence Google can ask for and earn more revenue per ad. One thing is sure, Google will do all they can to get an entry into this business, even if it means buying up spectrum and launching itself as a carrier.

Sprint network to use Google Search

Google is already a leader in the Internet Search market, is competing with Microsoft in the desktop search, and now has made an entry in the mobile search market. It has announced a tie-up with Sprint Nextel Corp that will add the Google search and mapping services to Sprint's high-speed wireless network. This is a good deal for Sprint in the sense that Google is a world-leader in the area of search and has an excellent brand name.
Sprint's plan is to create a high speed WiMax network that will be 5 times faster than today's networks, and will cover a city wide area. It can be used by devices other than mobile phones, given that it is actually a wireless network accessible by all devices that support this kind of connection. Once this network is rolled out, it is a service that Sprint will charge for, and Google will be available on the home page of this network.

The agreement gives Reston, Va.-based Sprint the prestige of working with the most popular search engine, along with a source of revenue, West said. For Google, the deal brings a way to extend its search engine into the mobile-device market.
West said Google will pay Sprint as part of the agreement, declining to be specific. Sprint and Craig McCaw's Clearwire Corp. said last week they would use a technology called WiMax to build a wireless network that's more than five times faster than today's standard.

This deal is a big deal for Google. Given the speed with which the mobile platform is proliferating and the increased tendency to build devices that allow for internet access, it is important for Google to be available on this platform. In addition, given that there is a class of devices that use Microsoft's Mobile platform, one can be sure that Google will not be the default search on those devices, so Google needs to network with all other providers and platforms.

Ask.com goes for anonymous search

Google has faced some rough times over the past few years due to its policies on privacy getting thoroughly questioned by privacy experts. It has had to reduce the amount of time that it carries information about users, and is now down to 18 months, from the previous years and years that it used to carry such information. Well, Ask.com has thrown down the gauntlet significantly, and if another search engine were to implement such a policy, the pressure on Google would grow significantly.

Ask.com took a major step toward protecting protecting the privacy of its users when it announced yesterday that it would be launching a new tool that would allow users to use its search engine anonymously. The tool, called AskEraser, will ensure that users' search records will not be retained by the company in any form for any period of time. Users will be able to set AskEraser settings in their privacy preferences, and the company says that the settings will be clearly displayed on results pages so that users will always be aware of the privacy status of their Ask.com searches.
The move comes after Google's recent attempts to placate privacy advocates by shortening the lifespan of its search preference cookie (as long as users never return) and anonymizing its server logs after 18 months. Ask.com also decided that it will anonymize server logs after 18 months, ensuring that even users who don't make use of AskEraser will be able to rest easy knowing that their search histories won't be kept around forever.

This is currently a voluntary measure on Ask.com, and users will have to change their settings for this to work. However, one is always curious about this major fight regarding privacy, since all such time limits such as 18 months is based on the fact that a user does not return to Google, and it is hard to find people who have used Google once and not used again for 18 months, at which time the user's information will be wiped off from the servers.

Google wants court supervision of Microsoft to continue

In 2000, a federal judge had found that Microsoft had committed a violation of federal anti-trust law; forcing PC makers to use Microsoft software products on the computers sold by them as opposed to similar software made by other software makers. In a massive scare to the company, the federal judge had ordered the breakup of the company. The part about breaking up of the company was set aside by an appeals court, and the case went back to district court and a new judge did not order the drastic breakup step. Under the new settlement, Microsoft reached an agreement with the Justice department and nine states which ordered Microsoft to modify licensing and to provide competitors with adequate technical information such that their products would run on the OS as a first-class citizen, equal to Microsoft products.
This agreement was valid for 5 years, but Google wants this agreement to be extended, accusing Microsoft of a repeat behavior with regard to changes in the desktop search function introduced in Vista.

In a filing with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Google (GOOG) asked for permission to file a friend-of-the-court brief outlining its concerns. The filing came on the eve of a regularly scheduled hearing to update U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly on Microsoft's compliance with a federal consent decree. "Microsoft's hardwiring of its own desktop search product into Windows Vista violates the final judgment in this case," Google wrote.
In a filing last week, the Justice Department, 17 states and the District of Columbia detailed changes Microsoft agreed to make to its desktop search function, and said the measures would resolve any issues raised by the complaint. "Microsoft went the extra mile to resolve these issues in a spirit of compromise," Microsoft said in a statement. "The government has clearly stated that it is satisfied with the changes we're making. Google has provided no new information that should suggest otherwise in their filing."

Vista introduced a new search capability in Vista called 'Instant Search' that allowed users to search for items in the hard drive. In April, Google filed a complaint that this prevented other companies from providing their own desktop search function, and in a settlement, Microsoft agreed to make changes to its search function to resolve these issues.
With the change, Microsoft will allow computer manufacturers and end-users to select their own preferred search engine, similar to what is being done for other third-party programs. Google, however, does not believe that Microsoft has really turned a new leaf and wants the settlement period extended so that a check can be kept on whether Microsoft is indeed making the required changes.

Google bows before EU data privacy requests

How these mighty corporations tumble before government pressures. Google has done that in the past, with creating a censored version of search for China (http://www.google.cn/), bowing down to pressures from governments about the level of details displayed for Government and military structures in Google Earth, and so on. Well, here is one more.
Google saves search data (that could be used to identify actual people after some research) and uses that for commercial purposes, to better target advertising. Earlier, it used to save this data indefinitely, then changed that to 24 months after some pressure from privacy advocates.
Then in May, Google got another blast on this topic. It got told by the European Union data watchdog (representing 27 EU countries) that the 24 month period was unacceptable under privacy concerns, and asked Google to reply by mid-June about how these concerns could be addressed. Well, now Google seems to have buckled under pressure and is now reducing the time that this data will be stored to 18 months (from the earlier 24 months). Refer this article:

The European Union's top security official lauded Google Inc's. decision to scale back how long it keeps personally identifiable data accumulated from its Web users as a step towards addressing privacy concerns.
The world's top provider of Web search services said this week it was ready to curtail the time it stored user data to a year and a half, seeking to mollify an EU watchdog that has questioned its privacy policies.
Each time a Google user searches the Web, the company gathers information about that customer's tastes, interests and beliefs that could potentially be used by third parties such as advertisers. Google shares general user statistics but is adamant it never shares personal data outside the company.

However, this is still right now only Google that has made the concession. To some extent this is justified since Google controls 60% of the search market, but a lot of other searches such as MSN, Yahoo, etc and other companies such as Microsoft, Apple, MySpace, AOL, eBay, Amazon, also have not disclosed as to how long they retain customer data. It would be their turn eventually; it just requires an accidental release of data from any of these places, and they will face the same amount of pressure as Google.

Google in trouble with EU over privacy

Privacy experts have always been somewhat hesitant about the level of information gathered by Google about the people using the services provided by Google. People reveal a lot about themselves through the items they search for, and along with their IP addresses, a lot can be gleaned just from these records. And Google will maintain all such records for a period of 2 years. This data helps Google fine-tune its advertising, using these records to direct ads more efficiently at users.
However, the European Union is pretty gung-ho about maintaining adequate security and the time period that Google maintains does not seem to be acceptable to it. And this issue is getting heated up. In addition, the EU packs a hefty punch. It has 400 million consumers for Google, a very large number.
In a escalation, data protection chiefs from the 27 EU countries wrote to Google asking for a justification of its policies on data retention and storage. Refer this article:

In the latest example of a U.S. technology giant potentially being called on the carpet in Europe, Google has been warned that it may be violating European Union privacy laws by storing data on its users for up to two years.
Privacy experts said the letter was the first salvo in what could become a determined effort by the European Commission to force Google to change how it does business in the EU, whose 400 million consumers outnumber the United States.
Any EU effort to impose limits on Google, which as a U.S.-based firm operates under U.S. law, would be the latest in a series of increasingly aggressive actions taken by European policymakers to reign in global technology companies.
According to one member, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak for the group, the panel is concerned that Google's retention period is too long and is designed to serve commercial interests.

Google in the past has shown that it is responding to privacy concerns by setting an absolute time limit of 2 years for how long the data will be stored (from the earlier infinite time interval). However, if this time period is not good for EU officials, then Google can be in for a fair amount of trouble. The EU have showed that they can take on large corporations, having taken on Microsoft earlier.
More interesting is whether Google will comply, and what that will mean for other search providers such as Microsoft and Yahoo that are not yet disclosing the interval to which they store their records. My feeling is that if pushed hard enough, Google will accept to reduce the time interval by a few more months to get a compromise.

Something to keep watching on Google: Top searches

Google came out with new information that will typically bring in a large number of people on a regular basis. People running blogs geared about adsense, researchers looking at social trends in terms of large searches, culture icons and their fans, etc. So what is Google doing ? It is going to start listing 100 top searches of the day at this website on Google Trends, HotTrends. Refer this story:

A feature listing the day's 100 fastest-rising search requests has been unveiled by Google.
The chart, part of the search system's trends service, will be refreshed several times a day using data from millions of searches, the company said.
Requests for pornography, the weather, popular websites like MySpace.com and some celebrities will not be included.
Instead, Hot Trends will provide a glimpse of what is baffling and interesting web users from day to day. The service merges elements of Zeitgeist and Trends - two existing products which give a glimpse of search habits but only based on weeks-old data.

Can you imagine the trends coming out from this ? Some examples I can think of:
1. Like 15 minutes of fame, you will now get your 15 hours of Google Top 100 ranking
2. Celebrities will be able to rank themselves on how many people search for them: Britney Spears telling Paris Hilton, "Sorry Paris, more people hunt for me, you are an also-ran!"
3. Serious writers bemoaning people in the US searching for what a celebrity said rather than hunting for information about Darfur or global warming
4. PR agents will be evaluated for how they can somebody into the Google top 100
You can just let your information run riot