Google has had several years of tussles now with privacy regulators. Three years ago European data protection commissioners began question what the company was doing with all the personal data it was gleaning from users of its search engine. In the past year, the company has faced outrage - at least in some pockets like Italy, Japan and Switzerland - over Street View, which provides panoramic, eye-level views of every street of major cities around the world.

Earlier this year, a leading privacy group called on the US Federal Trade Commission to consider shutting down Google’s web services until the company could better safeguard personal data. There have been a number of instances where Google Docs, Google Desktop and Gmail have had glitches which made users personal documents visible to others. Continue reading "Google’s ‘dashboard’ privacy controls are a good start"

From this week’s Digital Business edition:

The arrival of a giant chocolate eclair on the front lawn at Google last month had an extra significance, other than as the latest example of outlandish artwork installed at the headquarters of the world’s biggest internet company.

It joined a huge cupcake and a well-rounded doughnut, both sitting under the watchful eye of a large green robot.

Continue reading View from the Valley

Google is expected to launch its own self-branded smartphone before the year is out, according to Ashok Kumar, Northeast Securities analyst

It will follow up with a series of phones running its Android operating system, as well as launching a branded netbook running its new Chrome operating system early next year, the analyst told me. Continue reading "Google to take on iPhone with own phone - analyst"

Why is Google so tone-deaf to the interests of Wall Street?

The company’s latest quarterly earnings look good, and are enough to warrant Eric Schmidt declaring the search advertising recession well and truly over. All segments of advertising are improving again, he said, and pricing recovered from the second quarter (cost-per-click up 5 per cent.)

The earnings call that is currently underway, however, once again reveals the company’s lack of sensitivity to the way analysts work, and its over-enthusiasm for using technology to replace human interaction. Continue reading "Crowdsourcing Wall Street"

Part of Amazon’s success is attributable to the ease it has brought to the payments experience. Shopping on Amazon.com is made simple by Amazon storing much of a customer’s checkout information and minimising clicks, and a few years ago Amazon rolled out Checkout, which lets users on other websites pay using their Amazon credits or payments information stored on Amazon. (Amazon doesn’t reveal Checkout has been successful.)

Now Amazon has released a Mobile Payments Service. The programme will let e-commerce sites integrate the Checkout experience into sites designed for mobile phones, presenting yet another option for developers who are eager to encourage more mobile-commerce. Continue reading "Amazon gets into mobile payments"

While some cast yesterday’s news in the Google books saga as the death of the settlement that would have resolved the search king’s long fight with publishers, the bigger picture is that out-of-print books for all just got a lot closer to reality.

True, the New York federal court filing was officially a request to withdraw the deal Google struck late last year with publishers and authors, in the wake of objections Friday from the US Justice Department. But that version had a good chance of getting rejected by the judge, given that the regulatory concerns followed major objections from the non-profit world, other interested parties and the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo. Continue reading "Google to US: we can work it out"

Googlers will be breathing sighs of relief today that the European Court of Justice has indicated the search group can continue selling trademarked advertising keywords to anyone.

But for advertisers, the legal battle is far from over. Continue reading "The Google Adwords trademarks row is set to continue"

Google’s email service is finally returning to its original Gmail branding in the UK after a four-year absence, after Google settled a trademark dispute.

Google paid £226,324 for the intellectual property rights for Gmail to a small UK-based financial research firm, Independent International Investment Research. Continue reading "The curious case of the UK’s missing Gmail"