We Want Schmidt's Head !
Google would like you to know they grabbed way more private information than they first let on, but it was completely, totally accidental :
Google Inc said its "Street View" cars around the world accidentally collected more personal data than previously disclosed, and that it was changing its privacy practices.
Regulators in some of the more than 30 countries where the cars operated are looking into the issue.Google's Street View cars, which are well known for crisscrossing the globe and taking panoramic pictures of the city's streets, collected the data. The company displays the pictures in its online street maps.
Google said it wants to delete the data as soon as possible. It disclosed the snafu in May, but said at the time that the information it collected was typically limited to "fragments" of data because the cars were always moving.
Well, if by “fragments” you meant “entire e-mails” or “passwords”, then it appears Google fragmented the hell out of the landscape. And after this massive breech of trust and invasion of privacy we have to trust them Google won’t ever, ever do it again :
Google said it has appointed Alma Whitten as director of privacy for engineering and product management, and that the company was adding new internal procedures requiring engineering product managers to maintain a privacy design document that records how user data is handled.
Google also said it was enhancing its privacy training for engineers and other important groups within the company.
But the most damning evidence, and one that would send a chill racing up the spine of any rational person, is this :
.Google said collecting the additional data was a mistake resulting from a piece of computer code from an experimental project that was accidentally included
So Google is experimenting with means to invade our privacy? Except for an incompetent engineer or thirty, we would not have any clue that Google was building the tools to invade privacy at will. And if it was bad in the spring, and worse now, what would it be like if we could force full, honest, and transparent disclosure from Google?
Are we alone, or does that whole ‘don’t be evil’ thing just appear to be a B.S. marketing slogan right now?
Money, Money Everywhere
... but not a dram of it for Android developers :
Google is talking about fighting piracy, but perhaps the first thing they should focus on is actually making it possible for users to buy apps. All users. Sounds rather logical, doesn’t it? So what are we talking about? The problem lies with Android Market.
You can only pay for apps in 13 out of the 46 or so countries where Android phones are available. For those of you who like stats, 13 in 46 works out to less than 30%. Contrast this with Apple’s App Store, which supports paid apps in 90 countries. This is a huge advantage iPhone developers currently have over Android developers.
This is, in our opinion, one of the main reasons why piracy is running rampant on the Android platform. If a large portion of the world’s Android users can’t even pay for apps, is it so strange that some of them turn to piracy?
Ruh roh, Rorge!
Google putting their interests ahead of their developers? Say it isn’t so! After all, isn’t the motto of Google to ‘do no evil’? Well, we can only speculate that money changes people and Google isn’t immune to that change.
Meanwhile, Google has a problem. It would appear the ‘wild west’ Android market has spawned some not-so-nice content :
The Android Market has things it’s not supposed to have. There are sex apps, work that violates the intellectual property of dozens of right holders, and apps that are technically illegal. Sadly, it also includes material that’s offensive.
That became clear last Friday when analyst Michael Gartenerg commented that there are pro-Nazi themes in the Android Market. The offending items were soon removed, sparking debates about free speech and the validity of having a pre-screening process like Apple.
We seem to recall a lot of the same people oh-so-hyped about Android were pooh-poohing Apple’s screening process. Android was going to just kill Apple and the iPhone because of its openness. Now those same people are discovering that adults being in charge is, well, a good thing. Well, except for Andrew Kameka at Androinica, whom we quote above.
Just when we believe he gets the point about adults being in charge, he leaves the reservation again :
While the Android Market system is certainly flawed, draconian pre-screening found in other platforms is not the answer.
Sigh. No, make that a heavy sigh. What he calls ‘draconian’ we call ‘responsible’. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but even the true ‘wild west’ was eventually settled by responsible adults and lawlessness done away with. Google may be able to postpone this reckoning, but thanks to our litigious society Google will not be able to stave it off perpetually.
And not to belabor the obvious but consider that maybe - just maybe, mind you - Apple hit upon the business model that actually works, draconian though it may be to some.
Larry's Really, Really Mad
Oracle declined to comment on Gosling's account of the Sun acquisition, but had this to say about its complaint: "In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property," said Oracle spokesperson Karen Tillman. "This lawsuit seeks appropriate remedies for their infringement."
Google dismissed the lawsuit as an unwarranted attack on the company and the open-source community.
This should shock absolutely nobody. The Android Marketplace is rife with copyright violations and violators. It was simply a matter of time before someone with deep pockets and a passel of ferret-faced shysters (thank you, Groucho!) dropped the hammer on Google.
But for Google to claim they are doing this for the ‘open-source community’ is just beyond the pale. They are doing it to protect the burgeoning cash-cow that is Android. Now if they were only as interested in protecting the rights of the copyright holders...
Waving Goodbye
No, friends. We are going nowhere. Google Wave, however, is :
"Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," Senior Vice President Urs Holzle said in the blog post. "We don't plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site, at least through the end of the year, and extend the technology for use in other Google projects."
Google Wave always struck us as a solution in search of a problem. As always, one must applaud Google for giving its engineers the freedom to roam and try new things; perhaps in this instance they roamed just a little too far afield.
But on a more positive note, those rascally scamps did find a way for you to log into multiple GMail accounts in the same browser. So the week hasn’t been a total loss.
Google Getting Personal
According to Lookout, a US-based security firm, more than 80 Google Android wallpaper apps were collecting mobile phone numbers and personal details, including unique subscriber numbers. Many of the apps also “dialled home” to their developers, transmitting unencrypted sensitive data back to remote servers.
That can’t be good.
There's the Right Way...
Software developer Jon Lech Johansen, who built an Android app for his music synchronization company DoubleTwist, published a blog post June 27 in which he noted that Google does not provide proper care and feeding for the Android Market.
"Unlike Apple's App Store, the Android Market has few high quality apps," Johansen wrote, citing a study from Larva Labs that Apple has paid out 50 times more money to developers than Google has.
Johansen added: "While the Android Market is available in 46 countries, developers can only offer paid apps in 13 countries. In addition, the price for foreign apps is not displayed in the user's local currency and developers do not have the option of customizing pricing by country.
"To make matters worse, you can't pay for foreign apps using your Amex card or carrier billing. There's also no support for in-app payments and changelogs (to communicate app changes).”
Johansen's biggest complaint is that the channel is loaded with trademark and copyright infringement, noting that there are some 144 spam ringtone apps clearly infringing copyright) that are being monetized through Google ads.
Perhaps Apple had it right when they decided a ‘moderated’ approach was the best way to maintain a high-quality marketplace for applications. After all, the ‘wild west’ died out for a reason...
Google Voice for the US
A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we’re excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required.
Ummm... if you are a phone company, this is the part where you go running screaming into the night.
