FTC

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Even though the chair of the FTC has clear financial interests in the merger of Google and Doubleclick AND she was on the board deciding if the deal could go through AND she refused to recluse herself, the merger has been approved and there's no sign of any accountability on the way.

But it wasn't a unanimous decision. The Register tells of at least one dissenting member of the FTC who sees vast privacy implications in the future. No kidding.

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There's been a recent report about the Typo-squatting problem where they talk about mistyping a popular website name can get you served with a fake site full of ads, Malware - Viruses, Worms, and Trojans (Oh My!), or porn.

They mention the McAffee SiteAdvisor software that tries to alert you if you're on a site that probably isn't what you intended, but I offer this simple tool instead: Google. Set Google to your homepage and from now on, whenever you would normally type a site name into the address bar, hit the "home" button and type it into Google's search box instead.

If you misspelled it, Google will correct it and the first or second link will probably be the page you meant.

Substitute a different search engine if you must.

They dropped their "don't be evil" motto for a reason

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Google, trying to hold up their former image of being a rebel company who "doesn't do evil", has proposed a universal privacy standard that they say all companies should follow. The main idea is that there should be a minimum set of standards that everyone agrees to follow when dealing with private user data.

I sure hope it's not their standards since they hold your private data hostage for months.

They dropped their "don't be evil" motto for a reason

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This is pretty funny. First it was going to be 24 months and now they've changed it to 18. However, they want to "firmly reject any suggestions that we could meet our legitimate interests in security, innovation and anti-fraud efforts with any retention period shorter than 18 months".

They probably bent to pressure from many organizations including Privacy International who named Google the worst privacy offender of all (they were the only one to receive the ''black'' rating).

Google, not surprisingly, has challenged stating that Privacy International's report was based on misunderstandings of their services and policies. I'm not convinced.

So they "firmly reject" the idea that they could meet their interests with data less than 18 months? What interests could they possibly have with all your personal information tied to your search history other than selling your data? I'd like to hear that answer.

I went to their blog site and read their post on the topic. They state that they need search history data to refine their services (duh), but what does that have to do with linking it to individuals?

They dropped their "don't be evil" motto for a reason

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Privacy International has released a report of privacy scores for top Internet companies and Google was notably the only one to receive the lowest ranking.

Not everyone agrees with this assessment, but I personally tend to side with Privacy International.

I like Google and use it constantly because of it's clean, simple interface and solid dependable results. However, when it comes to privacy, I don't think they're where they should be. They recently announced they'd annonymize all search records after 2 years, but that only announced to the world that they track searches to individual people and store that information for 2 years!

They say they need it for optimization, but I still haven't heard of anything they do that actually needs personally identifiable information to be optimized other than revenue streams from selling the data.

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A new service from Google is taking their maps program down to the actual street level. You can browse around the streets of locations they've mapped like in a 3-d virtual game (though it's just pictures so not as smooth as an actual game… yet). What happens when they combine it with Fotowoosh?

The implications of this are currently unknown. For one, I suppose it gives you the opportunity to browse around a location before you actually go there so you can plan your trip better. Or if I was a terrorist, it makes it really easy to pick targets and become familiar with the neighborhood before the actual event. Another possibility is making game modifications like this one. Nothing like being able to wander around in Counterstrike blowing people away on your very own virtual street!

Don't get me wrong, it's neat technology and certainly better than live cameras. People and license plate numbers are all obscured at least. Then again, maybe not.

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While many applauded this (because at least they were going to anonymize it), many others say it doesn't go far enough.

When asked why they need personally identifiable information in the first place, their answer is for service optimization. I, as others, question what identifying someone has to do with search engine optimization at all.

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For a company who's motto is "Don't be Evil", they sure aren't putting up much of a fight in their slide towards wretchedness.

I love Google’s technology, don’t get me wrong. But I think Google has turned a page here. They have now enabled a piece of software that is hard to remove and forces users to look at a really bad page. In fact, Google knows that this provides users with a dramatically worse experience.

Of course, Microsoft has done this for years. If you type a wrong address into IE, it automatically comes up with an MSN search page. But I don't agree that it's hard to uninstall, just that people who don't know better won't realize that they CAN uninstall it.

I DO agree that this is a bad move on Google's part. If they are truly trying to create a better customer experience and make some money on the way, they made a bad move here. What they've done instead (and Dell too), is make some money by making a worse experience for the customer.

They dropped their "don't be evil" motto for a reason

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I love Google and almost all they do, but they've got to stop with the data brokering. Of course, of all data brokering companies, I trust them more since they keep they will actually fight to protect your privacy unlike some other companies.

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Lest we forget that computers sometimes make errors too, here's an article about Google maps including a direction for swimming the Atlantic Ocean to get to your destination. The guys at Google have a great sense of humor.