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Google has been accused of bypassing the privacy settings of users of the Safari web-browser.

The Wall Street Journal said Google and other companies had worked around privacy settings designed to restrict cookies.

Cookies are small text files stored by browsers which can record information about online activity, and help some online services work.

However Google says the story "mischaracterises" what happened.

Advertisers can use cookies to track online behaviour, helping them to target the commercials they show to internet users.

Some think this use of cookies erodes online privacy. In May, European Union laws are due to come into force which will restrict the use of advertising cookies.

But cookies are also essential to some web services like those Google offers.

Cookie control

The Safari browser is produced by Apple, and is the browser used by the iPhone.

By default Safari only allows cookies to be stored by the web page a user is visiting, not from third parties such as advertisers.

However, Stanford University researcher Jonathan Mayer found that advertisers were still able to store cookies on the computers of internet users browsing with Safari.

It was his discovery that formed the basis of the Wall Street Journal’s story.

Many Google services use cookies, for example to remember when someone is signed in to a service, but they are also used by the firm to help personalise advertising.

It was when Google attempted to find a way to enable some of its services and personalised advertising to work on Safari that, Google says, it inadvertently stored cookies.

Side-stepping Safari

In a statement, senior vice president Rachel Whetstone said that last year the company had decided to "enable features for signed-in Google users on Safari who had opted to see personalised ads and other content".

She added: "To enable these features, we created a temporary communication link between Safari browsers and Google’s servers, so that we could ascertain whether Safari users were also signed into Google, and had opted for this type of personalisation."

Ms Whetsone said the company had created new systems to make sure the information it collected was anonymous, but this had led to unintended consequences:

"The Safari browser contained functionality that then enabled other Google advertising cookies to be set on the browser.

"We didn’t anticipate that this would happen, and we have now started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers. It’s important to stress that, just as on other browsers, these advertising cookies do not collect personal information."

The Wall Street Journal reported that Google "disabled the code after being contacted by the paper".

Google declined to provide further comment to the BBC.

Privacy warning

Online privacy advocates were highly critical of Google’s actions.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote: "It’s time for Google to acknowledge that it can do a better job of respecting the privacy of web users."

Although much of the criticism has been directed at the search giant, the Wall Street Journal said that in addition to Google, a number of advertising companies had been using the work-around which had been known about for some time.

An Apple spokesman said in a statement: "We are aware that some third parties are circumventing Safari’s privacy features and we are working to put a stop to it."

Story source: www.bbc.co.uk

Google has struck its biggest ever deal – to buy Motorola’s smartphone and tablet business for $12.5 billion in cash.

Both companies say the move will give a ‘supercharge’ to Google’s Android platform.

Android-based devices, which include Motorola’s smartphones and tablets – are the major rivals to Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

As such, the acquisition appears to be a decisive effort by Google to tackle to dominance of Apple head on.

Under the deal, Google will buy Motorola Mobility for $40.00 per share, a price that is 63% over the closing value of Motorola Mobility shares on Friday.

‘Motorola Mobility’s total commitment to Android has created a natural fit for our two companies,’ said Google chief executive Larry Page.

‘Together, we will create amazing user experiences that supercharge the entire Android ecosystem for the benefit of consumers, partners and developers.

‘I look forward to welcoming Motorolans to our family of Googlers.’

Analysts said access to Motorola’s intellectual property had clearly been a major motivating factor behind Google’s purchase.

‘What Google are actually buying here is not a mobile phone business at all,’ said Ben Rooney, technology editor at the Wall Street Journal.

‘What they are buying is this enormous suite of patents that Motorola – which is one of the oldest mobile phone companies out there – has built up over the years.’

The 17,000-strong patent portfolio which will pass into Google’s hands would shield it well in the ongoing patent war between smartphone and tablet makers, he added.

Following a split eight months ago, Motorola is a company of two parts.

As well as the ‘Mobility’ arm, which makes phones and tablets, it also has a ‘Solutions’ division, which develops technology systems for industry.

Mr Page admitted Google did not have experience with manufacturing devices, and as such planned to run Motorola Mobility as a separate business.

However he stressed that Google had a strong track record with acqusitions, having made 120 purchases in the past few years.

In order for the deal to go through, Google needs the approval of Motorola Mobility shareholders and competition regulators.

It said it was confident the acquisition would be cleared because it protected the future of Android, which is an open-source platform used by several other mobile device makers.

Yet this situation may prove to be an obstacle.

Other smartphone handset makers who use Android will want reassurance that the platform will not simply be tailored to Motorola’s requirements in future, analysts warned.

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Google+ added games, including the hugely popular Angry Birds, to the fast-growing social network vying with Facebook to be the hub for people’s online lives.

‘We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life,’ Google senior vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said in a blog post.

‘When you’re ready to play, the Games page is waiting.’

Along with global game sensation Angry Birds, the initial array of offerings available at Google+ included Bejeweled Blitz, Zynga Poker, and Dragon Age Legends.

Google is a latecomer to social networking but its new site, Google+, has grown rapidly to more than 10 million members since its launch on June 28.

While Google+ may be the fastest-growing social network ever, it remains to be seen whether it can pose a serious threat to the social networking titan Facebook, which has more than 750 million members.

Google has a billion users worldwide that could be drawn into the California-based internet giant’s social network.

Games are among the most popular activities at Facebook, where social game startup Zynga rose to stardom.

Most Google+ users — 6.4 million — are in the United States, followed by India, with 3.6 million, Canada, with 1.1 million, Britain, with 1.1 million, and Germany with over 920,000, according to online tracker comScore.

In unveiling Google+, Google stressed the ability it gives users to separate online friends and family into different ‘Circles,’ or networks, and to share information only with members of a particular circle.

One of the criticisms of Facebook is that updates are shared with all of one’s friends unless a user has gone through a relatively complicated process to create separate Facebook Groups.

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Author JK Rowling’s website devoted to fictional wizard Harry Potter will feature a bit of Google magic when it debuts later this year in the United States, according to the internet titan.

Rowling’s beloved Potter titles will be available on Google eBooks platform at Pottermore.com and Google Checkout will be the preferred payment system, according to Larissa Fontaine of Google Books new business development.

‘When you buy a Harry Potter e-book from Pottermore, you will be able to choose to keep it in your Google Books library in-the-cloud, as well as on other e-reading platforms,’ Fontaine said on Wednesday in a blog post.

The Pottermore team reportedly plans to use Google-owned video sharing service YouTube for online broadcasts.

‘Pottermore and Google are teaming up to integrate Pottermore with a number of Google products,’ Fontaine said. ‘Stay tuned for more Pottermore and Google wizardry on the web.’

In June, Rowling unveiled an interactive website featuring new material about the boy wizard’s world, while his adventures will also now be sold as e-books for the first time.

The free website, www.pottermore.com, will go live from July 31 for one million Potter fans who pass a special online challenge, and to the general public from October.

The seven e-books will be available through the website from October in partnership with Sony.

Rowling said Potter fans will be able to register on the free website using one of the young sorcerers from the books as their online identity, then play games and interact with elements of the fictional world.

The site will also have previously unpublished material that she has written on the backgrounds to the characters and their lives at Hogwarts Academy, a fictional school for young wizards.

The author laid down her pen – and Harry’s magic wand – when she finished the seventh book in 2007, with a stunning record of 400 million copies of the series sold around the world.

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Google, the king of internet search but not on the social front, has launched its rival to Facebook, a social networking service called Google+.

“Online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it,” Google’s senior vice president for engineering Vic Gundotra on Tuesday said in a blog post about the long-awaited social networking initiative from the internet giant.

Unveiling Google+, Gundotra stressed the ability it gives users to separate online friends and family into different “Circles,” or networks, and to share information only with members of a particular circle.

“We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software,” he said.

“We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships and your interests.”

One of the criticisms of Facebook is that updates are shared with all of one’s friends unless a user has gone through a relatively complicated process to create separate Facebook Groups.

“Not all relationships are created equal,” Gundotra said.

“So in life we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss.

“The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food – wrapping everyone in ‘friend’ paper – and sharing really suffers,” he said.

Google+, located at plus.google.com, is currently being tested by a small number of people or is available by invitation only.

But Google said in a message on the site that it “won’t be long before the Google+ project is ready for everyone”.

Google unveiled several new tools integrated into Google+, including “Hangouts”, which allows for video chatting among friends, “Mobile” for location-sharing and “Huddle” for group text messaging.

Photos and video can be uploaded and shared among Circles using a feature known as “Instant Upload”, while an online sharing engine called “Sparks” delivers content from the web into a user’s feed.

Google dominates internet search but the Mountain View, California, company has failed to make inroads on the social networking front, where Facebook has accumulated nearly 700 million users and Twitter about 200 million.

Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, speaking at the AllThingsD technology conference last month, took responsibility for the company missing the wave when it came to making services social, saying “I screwed up”.

Google’s last major foray into social networking – Google Buzz, launched in February 2010 – spawned a slew of privacy complaints and led to a slap on the wrist from the US Federal Trade Commission.

Under a settlement between the US regulator and Google announced in March, Google is required to implement a comprehensive privacy program and will be subject to independent privacy audits every two years for the next 20 years.

Google+ makes its debut as Google and Facebook wage a fierce battle over online advertising dollars and how people navigate the internet.

Google does not send people to Facebook and vice versa, and both companies are seeking to become the chief gateway to the internet.

In May, Facebook was left red-faced after acknowledging it had hired a prominent public relations firm to draw attention to privacy practices at Google.

Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of technology blog SearchEngineLand.com, said in a blog post it was “anyone’s guess” as to whether Google+ would be successful.

“If you’re happy using Facebook, there seems relatively little to make you want to switch over to Google Plus, at the moment,” said Sullivan, who received an early glimpse of the new service from Google.

“Perhaps if there are people who want a Facebook alternative, Google’s now got a core to build on for them.”

Story by Chris Lefkow www.ninemsn.com.au

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The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is poised to open a formal antitrust probe into whether internet search giant Google has abused its dominance on the web, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The newspaper, citing ‘people familiar with the matter,’ said the FTC is preparing to serve Google with civil subpoenas ‘signalling the start of a wide-ranging, formal antitrust investigation’.

The Journal said the five-member commission will send Google the formal demands for information ‘within days’ and other companies were likely to receive requests for information about their dealings with Google.

The FTC declined to comment on the report and there was no immediate response to a request for comment from the Mountain View, California-based Google.

Google, which controls around 65 per cent of the lucrative US internet search market, has been the target of numerous antitrust investigations by the FTC and the US Department of Justice in recent years.

But the Journal said the FTC’s probe ‘is the most serious to date’ in the United States because it will examine ‘fundamental issues relating to Google’s core search advertising business’.

Google makes most of its money from search-related advertising.

The Journal said the probe will look at whether Google ‘unfairly channels users to its own growing network of services at the expense of rivals’.

European Union competition watchdogs opened an investigation into similar allegations in November.

Google has faced increasing scrutiny from US and European regulators as it has grown over the years from a scrappy startup into an internet powerhouse.

In April, the US Justice Department approved Google’s entry into the online travel sector with its $US700 million ($A665 million) purchase of flight data firm ITA Software but it insisted on a number of concessions from Google.

Several online travel sites, including Expedia, Kayak and Travelocity, had sought to block the Google-ITA deal, claiming it would give Google too much control over the lucrative online travel market and lead to higher prices.

In late March, the FTC reached a settlement with Google over Google Buzz, the social networking tool rolled out last year which spawned a slew of privacy complaints.

Under the settlement announced by the US regulator, Google is required to implement a comprehensive privacy program and will be subject to independent privacy audits every two years for the next 20 years.

Also in March, a US judge dealt a setback to Google’s plans for a vast digital library and online bookstore, rejecting a copyright settlement hammered out by the internet giant with authors and publishers.

In 2008, Google abandoned a plan to forge a joint search advertising partnership with Yahoo!, citing a desire to avert a ‘protracted legal battle’ with US regulators.

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A Google search has helped tracked down an Australian girl US police believe was one of many young victims of alleged child predator Stephen Vosilla.

US Authorities recognised a logo on a video of one of Vosilla’s victims and logged on to the internet search engine, Google, tapped in the logo, and within seconds he was able to identify the logo was Australian and the young victim was likely from Australia.

Officers tracked the girl down in Australia, who then provided a statement for Tennessee investigators.

An investigation was launched that led investigators to Vosilla’s residence in Talbott, Tennessee,

A grand jury in Tennessee has indicted Vosilla on two counts of especially aggravated sexual exploitation of a minor and four counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. He remains in Tennessee’s Hamblen County jail in lieu of $US100,000 bail.

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Google has paid tribute to US dance pioneer Martha Graham by transforming the celebrated logo on its homepage into a dancing animation.

Instead of the usual colourful logo, the internet search giant’s homepage features an animated dancer who spells out the word “Google” in a series of elegant dance moves made famous by Graham.

Graham, founder of the Martha Graham Dance Company, was born on May 11, 1894 and died on April 1, 1991.

The Mountain View, California-based Google frequently changes the “doodle” on its famously spartan homepage to mark anniversaries or significant events or pay tribute to artists, scientists, statesmen and others.

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Software engineers reverently refine Google’s search algorithm so consistently that it often ends a day a tad different from when it started.

Scott Huffman’s team tested ‘many more than’ 6,000 changes to its search engine in 2010, with 500 of them passing the grade to become permanent.

‘We have changed engines on a flying plane so many times it has become second nature to us,’ Google fellow Amit Singhal said, referring to how internet firms modify services while they are live online.

‘Alongside changing the engines, the plane has become quieter, the ride got more comfortable, and we even changed your seat while you were sleeping,’ he continued.

‘We just do it in small steps that go unnoticed.’

Singhal said Google’s search is tweaked, on average, twice in a working day.

‘On the one hand, we want to be moving quickly and we want to make great changes,’ Huffman told AFP.

‘On the other hand, we don’t want people to come to Google and say they don’t recognise it.’

Google in February took the unusual step of spotlighting an improvement to its secret search formula in the United States.

The move was part of an ongoing duel between the search titan and low-quality websites that feature only content copied from elsewhere on the internet or use techniques to trick their way to scoring high in results.

‘The feedback has been tremendously positive from users,’ Singhal told AFP at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.

‘Overwhelmingly, the change raised ranks of high-quality sites and dropped ranks of low-quality sites.’

Huffman’s team is responsible for ensuring that ideas for improving Google search results do just that.

‘People are not just expecting a search engine to return every document that has most of the words typed in a query box,’ Huffman said.

‘They want the context understood; there are a lot of nuances hidden within that.’

For example, someone searching with the word ‘Japan’ is likely interested in real-time news about the tsunami tragedy there as well as other information about the nation.

One of Huffman’s favourite ‘broken queries’ from a couple of years ago was the term ‘Thai restaurant.’

General web searches kept giving top rank to a Thai restaurant in the upstate New York city of Schenectady.

‘I used to go complain to the ranking people,’ Huffman recalled with a laugh.

‘I’m in Mountain View. It might be a great Thai restaurant but I’m not going to Schenectady to get Pad Thai.’

Google began letting users set locations so the search engine could factor proximity into results when appropriate.

Proposed changes to Google’s formula are first tested on a separate set of computers that imitate real-world search.

Those deemed worthy are next sent to evaluators around the world who act as online searchers and rate the relevance of results in various languages and regions.

Google then does live testing, with promising algorithm enhancements carefully blended into results served up by the main search engine.

‘At any given time, some percentage of our users is actually seeing experiments,’ Huffman said.

‘It is interesting because users don’t know what is happening,’ he continued.

‘Of course, we don’t put things out there that are terrible; we have filters to know when something is bad.’

Plenty of improvements are ahead, particularly regarding the ability to understand and derive inferences from the world’s many languages, according to Huffman.

He bristles at any suggestion by Google critics that results are tampered with to favour advertisers or achieve other business goals.

‘If you think of the scale of what we are talking about, it is almost absurd to say we could rig results,’ Huffman said, noting that Google handles more than a billion searches daily.

For five and a half years he has run weekly meetings at which changes to Google’s search algorithm are decided.

Revenue implications of changes have never been brought up at those meetings, according to Huffman.

‘Not only do we not make decisions that way, we don’t even look at those numbers,’ Huffman said.

Google believes that delivering the most relevant search results to people as fast as possible is best for the California company’s bottom line and, by extension, steers away from useless ‘spam’ websites and ‘content farms.’

‘If we care about our users – don’t care about money – everything else just falls in line,’ Singhal said.

‘A healthy Web and happy users are key to our future.’

Singhal pictured a day when search engines understand users so well that they predict what people wanted to know and cue them with messages on smartphones.

‘That is the ultimate dream,’ Singhal said.

‘We are nowhere close to that yet.’

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Janrain, a user management platform that enables third party sign-in with 18 different providers, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter; is releasing its Q1 2011 report today. Janrain’s report analyzes data from networks for social login and social sharing across the 350,000 websites worldwide that use Janrain sign-in product, Engage. For the first time in a year, Facebook has surpassed Google as the consumer preference for signing into Internet sites using Janrain.

During Q1 of 2011 (January 1 through March 31), 35% of online users chose to sign-in to sites with a Facebook account compared to 27% in Q4 of 2010. And 31% of users chose their Google log-in in Q1, followed by Yahoo with 13% and Twitter with 7%.

Janrain actually analyzed sign-in data by type of site as well.

For example, Facebook is the most popular sign-in choice on news media sites for the second consecutive quarter, with 34% share, up from 32% in the previous quarter. Yahoo commanded a 28% share of all social logins in the news sector. Of course, Facebook’s share could increase more with the introduction of Facebook’s new commenting system.

Facebook has also picked up momentum in the retail space, says Janrain, with a quarterly growth rate of about 5% over the past three quarters.

The startup says that this increase is at the expense of Yahoo, as opposed to Google, whose share has held steady over the past four quarters. Facebook’s login share on retail sites is up 10% over the past year, and Yahoo’s login share is down 11% year-over-year.

On mobile devices, Facebook and Google lead the pack by a considerable margin. Twitter’s share (11%) is greater on mobile devices than desktop platforms.

The data above examines logins in the U.S., says Janrain, and the data internationally presents different trends. For example, Windows Live is twice as popular in Europe as a sign-in choice when compared with the U.S. Hyves commands as much as 60% share of all social logins on websites in the Netherlands, and regional portals such Web.de and GMX are popular in Germany. In Southeast Asia, Yahoo is the popular social login choice, and Google performs well in Brazil due to the popularity of Google’s social network Orkut.

Story source: techcrunch.com

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