Up until March 1, 2012, the data Google collected on you when you used YouTube was carefully cabined away from your other Google products. So, in effect, Google could use data they collected on YouTube to improve and customize the users’ YouTube experience, but couldn’t use the data to customize and improve user experience on, say, Google+.
The same siloing took place for your search history. Previously, Google search data was kept separate from other products. Even when users were logged in, Google promised not to share the information they gathered about you from your Google search history when customizing their other products. Considering how uniquely sensitive user search history can be (indicating vital facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and much more), this was an important privacy protection.
It looks like the new Google privacy policy does make a substantial—and very detrimental—change: it took questions from Congress and this belated EFF article for me to realise the extent to which Google’s invasion of its users’ privacy has just got substantially worse. I now use Duck Duck Go, combined with the !gbang added to the search, to search Google securely and anonymously, without being tracked, even if I’m actually logged in.
When Google shipped its Search, plus Your World update earlier this month, it turned out better than expected. Google left users the ability to click back and forth between personal and global modes or opt out altogether. [...]
Google does make some effort to identify content from other networks. But some SPYW features only highlight Google+ material, even when other services are more relevant. If Google favors its own product over a better result, users get the short end of the stick. [...] But what about Google+ users? For them, Google+ results are the better result. Arguably, Google should cater to them, as users of its service.
I’ve been feeling from the beginning that criticism of Google suddenly turning evil, of which this post is a good example, is misplaced: you can opt out of Google Search, plus Your World; and if you have a Google+ account, it unquestionably makes your search results better. I’ve actually found Google Search results have improved very significantly since I complained about them just under a year ago.
The Megaupload affair illustrates that additional legislation of the type of that proposed under SOPA and PIPA is hardly necessary to enforce copyright law. The global, libertarian environment, largely free of government interference, which made the Internet possible is something that must be preserved. But the existing body of US legislation and case law (Fair Use, DMCA, in particular) governing the digital economy meet those standards of fairness and proportionality—although France’s HADOPI does not. There is a distinction to be made between libertarianism and anarchy—an environment in which there are no enforceable standards at all, and all that the steps taken this week against Megaupload indicate is that there was sufficient evidence to warrant indicting its alleged founder and two corporations he and his associates control, for engaging in some pretty serious crimes.
Ultimately, the issue behind yesterday’s successful SOPA strike is this: the emergence of the Internet has made the business model on which the entertainment industry made billions of dollars for years obsolete—and it is prepared to destroy it to postpone the consequences for as long as possible. Yet censorship, in any circumstances, should be available only as a last resort, as part of a proportionate procedure and subject to due process—a basic principle incompatible with delegating it to a private entity. Rarely has a battle of titans implied such high stakes: in the fifteen years or so since it became ubiquitous, the Internet has empowered individual citizens in an unprecedented way, giving them instantaneous access to a range and depth of information in a hitherto unthinkable manner. Yesterday’s blackout went long way to demonstrating that new-won freedoms can never be taken for granted, even in the world’s richest nations and greatest democracies. Yet SOPA and PIPA’s sponsored have not laid down their arms.
Apple, for all the shit they get for being “closed” and “evil”, has actually done far more to wrestle control back from the carriers and put it into the hands of consumers. Google set off to help in this goal, then stabbed us all in the back and went the complete other way, to the side of the carriers.
This article by MG Siegler is an absolute must-read: it sums up more clearly than anything I’ve read in the past two years why Google’s strategy with Android—which it had to turn on its head after just a few months because the original one was killed off by the carriers—is disingenuous in the extreme.
[…] public G+ posts count as websites now, as far as Google search is concerned. Furthermore, Google search now obscures natural Web results whenever possible, giving Google+ results from users’ networks instead. And it hit me: True Believers of the Holy + might see this re-shared Google+ post of an almost-unattributed rip of my story instead of the original. Google+ hates the Internet!
Although I’m not seeing this for my posts yet, I think ReadWriteWeb is right: it’s increasingly looking like Google+ is a mess, not just in itself, but also in its implications for Google’s core business, search. Is Google+ messing up the Internet? Looks like it’s going in that direction at any rate.
The Sarkozy administration has accumulated mistakes in the sensitive areas of tech and data protection since it assumed office in 2007. As the incumbent can be expected to seek re-election in 2012, these issues will be part of the wider debate during which policy for the next five years will be shaped. Much is at stake in both areas: data protection has traditionally been a sensitive area in France, for historical reasons; and the Internet has the potential to become a much bigger contributor to economic growth in one of Europe’s most deficient and stagnant economies if recent mistakes are reversed.
In this post, I’ll explain in detail how I switched my WordPress-powered blog from Media Temple’s standard-issue (dv) server to an entirely customized (ve) server. Beginning with the lean, bare-bones setup with which the (ve) is provisioned, I tweaked things to suit its performance exactly to my needs as a WordPress blogger. I then separated resource-intensive dynamic content, which I kept on the server, from static content, which I moved to an edge cast CDN. This resulted in a significant increase in performance, despite the fact that the hardware configurations for the two servers were equivalent.
In this post, we’ll see how to use a combination of simple PHP conditional comments and short Google inline tags to control precisely which content of your site is indexed by Google and appears in searches. Using this method, it’s easy—without using a plugin—to ensure only your freshest, most relevant content is indexed and that the numerous index pages generated dynamically by WordPress are used for their intended purpose, helping navigation within your site, without cluttering Google’s index with duplicate content that’s irrelevant to the subjects treated on each of your actual blog posts.
Effective this week, this site is moving to a new domain, donaldjenkins.com, which replaces donaldjenkins.net. RSS feeds and links will update seamlessly. A new layout—the Belgravia theme—replaces the short-lived Chelsea theme as a more mature version of the blog’s html5 deployment. It’s got quite a few new features and is with checking out. Wordpress continues as the site’s platform, although a switch to static CMS Octopus may be on hand.