Archive | Author: James Temple

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Another lingering concern about driverless cars is privacy. The machines will have to collect and store certain information about a person’s movements as part of their basic functioning, as well as to improve their performance over time. Because of pressure from privacy advocates, the law requires manufacturers to provide written disclosures describing the data collected. But John Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog’s privacy project, says that doesn’t go far enough.

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The group Consumer Watchdog and some lawmakers asked publicly whether Google had violated last year’s settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission over an unrelated privacy breach. Some tech watchers said that while the company’s actions are certainly questionable, the full extent of the breach probably exceeded what Google had intended to do, as Google itself maintains.

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John Simpson of Consumer Watchdog said it’s still unclear whether any of the federal measures will pass and, in any case, there’s no reason for the Golden State to wait. It could put pressure on federal legislators and regulators to catch up. He noted that a law implementing the “Do Not Call” register, which many see as an analog to “Do Not Track,” passed in California before a federal law was enacted.

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At least one vocal critic of the company said the report overstates Google’s contributions. The company didn’t generate this economic activity so much as facilitate it, said John Simpson of Consumer Watchdog. There were other businesses that connected companies with customers before Google was founded 12 years ago, and the report failed to take into account lost revenue and jobs within those industries, notably media and advertising, he said.

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Consumer Watchdog, the Santa Monica group that’s proving a perpetual thorn in the side of Google Inc., plans to call on the Justice Department to launch an antitrust action against the search giant and seek remedies including a possible break up.

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It’s these highly personalized capabilities that raise the hackles of
privacy advocates, however. They raise a host of questions about "how
the data is used and manipulated without the consumer understanding,"
said John Simpson of Consumer Watchdog. Those concerns are only
heightened by the proposed acquisition by Google, which he said could
bore deeper into personal information by coupling its rich user
databases with AdMob’s.

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