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On the New FCC Chief
What Fred said….
Category: Policy
Google’s AdWords: A “Grey Surveillance”?
Sent to me from Gary Price, a presentation on Adwords from the Berkman center: Google’s AdWords system serves ads alongside about a quarter of all web traffic. In the process of serving those ads, Google actively processes the user browsing data in order to target its advertising, making AdWords…
Sent to me from Gary Price, a presentation on Adwords from the Berkman center: Google’s AdWords system serves ads alongside about a quarter of all web traffic. In the process of serving those ads, Google actively processes the user browsing data in order to target its advertising, making AdWords one of the world’s most extensive processors of personal data. Hal Roberts presents on how Google’s use of the AdWords data seeds a network of grey surveillance that may not have direct effects on the individual surveillance subjects but does have important effects on our modes of creating and consuming content online.
Yahoo Has Good Timing on Trust: New Policy on Data Retention
Given the comments happening down below on whether you all trust Google, Yahoo seems to be pretty nimble with this announcement: Today, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO – News) announced a new global data retention policy that sets an industry-leading approach to user data privacy. This new policy strengthens Yahoo!’s relationship…
Given the comments happening down below on whether you all trust Google, Yahoo seems to be pretty nimble with this announcement:
Today, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO – News) announced a new global data retention policy that sets an industry-leading approach to user data privacy. This new policy strengthens Yahoo!’s relationship of trust with its 500 million users world-wide and enhances its longtime leadership on privacy.
Under the new policy, Yahoo! will anonymize user log data within 90 days with limited exceptions for fraud, security and legal obligations. Yahoo! will also expand the policy to apply not only to search log data but also page views, page clicks, ad views and ad clicks.
Well, This Will Be Worth Watching: Google and Net Neutrality
Recall my interview with Vint Cerf, the guru who Google hired to champion net neutrality, among other things? Where he said this: Here’s what (folks like Whitacre) are saying: “Well, we built this network and we can do anything we want with it. And by the way, the FCC…
Recall my interview with Vint Cerf, the guru who Google hired to champion net neutrality, among other things? Where he said this:
Here’s what (folks like Whitacre) are saying: “Well, we built this network and we can do anything we want with it. And by the way, the FCC has now essentially released us of any common carrier obligations we ever had, thank you very much, and so we can do whatever we want to and why don’t you just buzz off.”
That sort of grates a little bit. Gee, excuse me, but we don’t get a free ride at all. We spend an awful lot of money being connected to the public Internet backbone, in addition to which we pay a lot of money for our own Internet backbone that links all of our computer centers together at substantial capacity, which is necessary to do what we do.
Read MoreWell, That Says It All
From American Lawyer: Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. called off their joint advertising agreement just three hours before the Department of Justice planned to file antitrust charges to block the pact, according to the lawyer who would have been lead counsel for the government….
From American Lawyer:
Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. called off their joint advertising agreement just three hours before the Department of Justice planned to file antitrust charges to block the pact, according to the lawyer who would have been lead counsel for the government.
“Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly”
That's the last line of a Times piece over the weekend on the increasing size of our digital footprints. Hmmm. But it is the basis of the American constitution. Read the Times piece, which, if you've read The Search and watched the "Web Meets World" meme (that was the…
That’s the last line of a Times piece over the weekend on the increasing size of our digital footprints. Hmmm. But it is the basis of the American constitution. Read the Times piece, which, if you’ve read The Search and watched the “Web Meets World” meme (that was the theme for Web 2 this year), will not be new ground, but is a good overview of the issue right now.
Yahoo Google Deal- News
From a Weisel report emailed to me just now: On Monday (11/3) after the close, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google and Yahoo have submitted to the Department of Justice a revised version of their proposed search agreement. While we see little legal reasoning behind blocking the deal,…
From a Weisel report emailed to me just now:
On Monday (11/3) after the close, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google and Yahoo have submitted to the Department of Justice a revised version of their proposed search agreement. While we see little legal reasoning behind blocking the deal, we believe the DOJ is basically saying that Yahoo can’t be trusted to do the right thing for its business over the long term.
Shortened Duration: The reported revised plan shortens the partnership from 10 years to 2 years, forcing Yahoo to avoid lowering its search monetization capability if the company can’t rely on Google for a decade.
Read MoreSo…Why Is Google Reminding Folks How to Block Advertisers…Now?
Check this out from the AdSense blog: When we notice a spike in readers who are interested in a specific topic, we like to address it as soon as we can. There's been some interest in filtering ads from publisher pages, so here's a quick refresher on the filtering…
Check this out from the AdSense blog:
When we notice a spike in readers who are interested in a specific topic, we like to address it as soon as we can. There’s been some interest in filtering ads from publisher pages, so here’s a quick refresher on the filtering tools we offer:
Competitive Ad Filter
You can restrict contextually-targeted and placement-targeted ads from appearing on your pages by adding the URL of each ad to your Competitive Ad Filter. After logging in to your account, click the AdSense Setup tab and visit the ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ page. You can also find full instructions and tips for entering in specific URLs in our Help Center. To determine the URL of an ad, try the AdSense Preview Tool or follow these steps. Please keep in mind that it may take several hours for the filter to take effect.
Look, I run a network of high end publishers, and many of them use Google and other remnant networks to backfill ad inventory. So I see this too. And I can give you exactly one reason why this came up. For those of you too lazy to click the link, Google came out against Proposition 8 a while back, and I applaud them for doing so. And the spike they are referring to? Most likely (I have not confirmed this) it’s because the Yes on Prop 8 folks are aggressively spending on Google right now, and a ton of publishers are seeing Yes on 8 ads on their site, and they don’t want to allow those ads.
For the record, I am openly against this proposition. If that means another group of readers (yeah, I am for Obama too) stop reading me because they think my views don’t fit theirs, well, sorry to see you go, folks. Most likely, most of you left me already given my views on the presidential electon. Somehow, I sense, in a decade or two, this will all seem like a pretty stupid debate.
Onwards.
Yahoo and Google Falling Out of Tree?
Just in time for my interview with Jerry Yang next week at Web2, this report from the Journal (via Reuters): Google Inc (GOOG.O) and Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) could announce a decision to walk away from their search deal by the middle of next week, The Wall Street Journal reported…
Just in time for my interview with Jerry Yang next week at Web2, this report from the Journal (via Reuters):
Google Inc (GOOG.O) and Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) could announce a decision to walk away from their search deal by the middle of next week, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Google Inc (GOOG.O) and Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) could announce a decision to walk away from their search deal by the middle of next week, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The two Internet companies have so far failed to reach an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice on implementing their search advertising partnership.
I spent a very engaging hour or so with Jerry earlier this week and we discussed this deal, among a lot of other things. I wonder if we’ll get confirmation by the time he and I have our chat Weds. afternoon.
OpenID
I'm watching this unfold, OpenID, Facebook Connect, Y!OS, Microsoft support, Google support…it's supposedly a big group hug, but it feels like a war, folks. And it's not pretty. Note this: A couple of hours ago, the Google Security Team posted an article claiming that Google’s made the switch to…
I’m watching this unfold, OpenID, Facebook Connect, Y!OS, Microsoft support, Google support…it’s supposedly a big group hug, but it feels like a war, folks. And it’s not pretty. Note this:
A couple of hours ago, the Google Security Team posted an article claiming that Google’s made the switch to OpenID, joining Yahoo! and Microsoft in the ranks OpenID providers.
But it looks like someone may have been a bit to hasty to pull that switch (perhaps itching to get some of the limelight Microsoft has been receiving for adding OpenID to all Live ID accounts just the day before yesterday)… because whatever it is that Google has released support for, it sure as hell isn’t OpenID, as they even so kindly point out in their OpenID developer documentation
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