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In 2009, Spanish citizen Mario Costeja González objected to the fact that an auction notice from 1998, when his home was repossessed, was still accessible on the website of the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia and the first thing people saw when they searched for him on Google. When the courts declined to order the newspaper to remove the announcement, Costeja asked Google Spain to stop linking to it in search results on his name. When Google did nothing more than forward the complaint to its…
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In 2012 the US Consumer Watchdog advocacy group filed a complaint against Google alleging that the company had violated its 2011 consent decree with the US Federal Trade Commission in the case about Google Buzz. The complaint was based on February 2012 revelations that the site was failing to honour do-not-track settings in Apple's Safari web browser. The browser itself was set by default to refuse to accept third-party cookies, as these are often used to track users across the web. Google's…
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In 2010, increasing adoption of social media sites such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr led Google to develop Buzz, an attempt to incorporate status updates and media-sharing into its Gmail service. Users could link their various social media feeds, including Picasa (Google's photo-sharing service) and Reader (Google's RSS news reader), directly into Gmail. Via the integrated feed, Gmail users could see not only the content produced by those they followed, but those they didn't if their…
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In July 2011, the established writer GrrlScientist tried to log into her Google account and found that it was suspended, barring her access to Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Google Reader, and the newly launched social network Google+. It turned out that the reason was then when Google launched its Google+ social network in June 2011, it included among its terms and conditions a requirement to use "the name your friends, family, or co-workers call you". In July 2011, Google began suspending the…
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In 2010, Google revealed that a data audit required by Germany's data protection authority had revealed that since 2007 the cars deployed to capture images for its Street View project had accidentally captured 600GB of data from local wifi networks, including personal web browsing histories. Google said it used network names (SSIDs) and router identifiers (MAC addresses) to use for its location services, but did not use any of the payload data, which the company said consisted only of fragments…
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In May 2007, Google launched Street View, an add-on to its Maps service that allows users to see and "drive" through images of streets and buildings. Almost immediately, the service provoked controversy when users realised that these images included pictures looking through the windows of their homes and images of license plates, or that caught them in embarrassing or even illegal situations on the street. Google argued that Street View only captured images taken on public property. In August,…
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Google launched its first version of Android in 2009. Based on a modified Linux kernel and other open source software, Android provides the operating system for mobile phones, tablets, televisions, cars, wrist watches, and many other devices including digital cameras, game consoles, PCs, and personal video recorders. By 2017, Android had become the best-selling operating system in the world, with over 2 billion monthly active users. Even in 2009, critics warned that the operating system, which…
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In 2005, Google launched its web analytics service, which tracks and reports website traffic. The most widely-used analytics service on the web, Google Analytics comes in three versions: free, the subscription enterprise service 360, and a mobile service that collects analytics from both iOS and Android apps. The service works by storing cookies on computers that visit the websites on which Google Analytics is installed; the cookies contain a unique "cookie ID" identifier; this enables website…
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The first example of internet users being blindsided by the retention of information they had thought was ephemeral was Usenet, a worldwide collection of discussion groups ("newsgroups") created in 1979. At the beginning, computers called each other directly to swap and distribute new postings; as the internet became available it became the primary medium for propagating Usenet's burgeoning collection of newsgroups. At its peak in the 1990s Usenet was a huge open system used by millions of…
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When Google launched Gmail in 2004, the new service rapidly gained acceptance because it offered far more storage space than any other comparable service. From the beginning, however, Gmail scanned the contents of emails to help the company generate contextual ads. Scanning has never applied to the email service it offers paying corporate customers as part of G Suite. In 2017, Google announced it would end scanning email in the consumer service, largely to end confusion among the corporate…
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To personalise the services it offers, Google retains user data such as search histories and as well as the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and other digital identifiers that enable the company to link search queries to the specific computer where they were generated. Until March 2007, the company kept this data indefinitely. At that point, it announced that in response to privacy advocates' concerns it would begin anonymising the data after 18 to 24 months. While some welcomed the change,…
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Princeton University's WebTap - Web Transparency and Accountability - project conducts a monthly automated census of 1 million websites to measure tracking and privacy. The census detects and measures many or most of the known privacy violations researchers have found in the past: circumvention of cookie blocking, leakage of personally identifiable information to third parties, Canvas fingerprinting, and many more. The research also examines the effect of browser privacy tools and cookie…
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A report for the US National Academy of Sciences explains the methods used by a team of computer scientists to derive accurate, neighbourhood-level estimates of the racial, economic, and political characteristics of 200 US cities using the images collected by Google Street View in 2013 and 2014. The key element: the pictures captured of 22 million cars parked along or driving down those streets. The scientists trained a computer algorithm to recognise the make, model, and year of each…
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Some of the Google Home Mini units distributed before release to the tech press and at "Made By Google" events had a defective touch panel. The devices were meant to turn on recording only when the owner woke it up with "OK, Google" or applied a long press to the centre of the touch panels. Instead, the defect meant that the devices turned on recording thousands of times a day and attempted to respond to random noises rather than waiting for the "OK, Google" prompt or long press. The problem…
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As speech recognition and language-processing software continue to improve, the potential exists for digital personal assistants - Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google Assistant - to amass deeper profiles of customers than has ever been possible before. A new level of competition arrived in 2016, when Google launched its Home wireless speaker into a market that already included the Amazon Echo, launched in 2014. It remained unclear how much people would use these assistants and how these…
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The price of using voice search is that Google records many of the conversations that take place in their presence. Users wishing to understand what Google has captured can do so by accessing the portal the company introduced in 2015. Their personal history pages on the site include both a page showing activity on the web and a separate specific audio page that lists the captured recordings. The information made available there includes when and how by what device or app the sound was recorded…
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In 2016, Facebook and Google began introducing ways to measure the effectiveness of online ads by linking them to offline sales and in-store visits. Facebook's measurement tools are intended to allow stores to see how many people visit in person after seeing a Facebook campaign, and the company offered real-time updates and ad optimisation. Facebook noted that information will only be collected from people who have turned on location services on their phones. The company also offered an Offline…
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In 2012, London Royal Free, Barnet, and Chase Farm hospitals agreed to provide Google's DeepMind subsidiary with access to an estimated 1.6 million NHS patient records, including full names and medical histories. The company claimed the information, which would remain encrypted so that employees could not identify individual patients, would be used to develop a system for flagging patients at risk of acute kidney injuries, a major reason why people need emergency care. Privacy campaigners…
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In April 2016, Google's Nest subsidiary announced it would drop support for Revolv, a rival smart home start-up the company bought in 2014. After that, the company said, the thermostats would cease functioning entirely because they relied on connecting to a central server and had no local-only mode. The decision elicited angry online responses from Revolv owners, who criticised the company for arbitrarily turning off devices that they had purchased. The story also raised wider concerns about…