Inside Google

The Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Watchdog and several other advocates are hosting a conference call Sept. 1 to make recommendations about how Congress may better regulate behavioral targeting. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all use behavioral targeting to better serve ads to Web surfers. The groups want to be heard by Congress, which is working on legislature to better protect consumer privacy online.

In recent months, two heavily detailed, annotated versions of
confidential Google slide presentations — one dealing with competition
issues, the other with behavioral targeting — have been published by a
Santa Monica–based group called Consumer Watchdog. The annotations are
highly critical of Google and seek to rebut the search giant’s
arguments.

L.A. City council is wrestling with a proposal to shift the city’s 30,000 email users and other computer applications to a system provided by Google.  Anytime a deal like this is under consideration, it’s worth checking the money trail. I examined records kept by the Los Angeles Ethics Commission to see who paid what to whom.

That Google can still be surprised by privacy concerns is in itself
surprising and suggests the company ought to approach privacy more
proactively. Google would benefit from doing so because greater attention to privacy
would defang its foes.

Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google’s
attempt to create what could be the world’s largest virtual library.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU of Northern California and
the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group wrote to Google to ask the company
to "assure Americans that Google will maintain the security and freedom
that library patrons have long had: to read and learn about anything…
without worrying that someone is looking over their shoulder or could
retrace their steps".  

Internet giant Google is seeking communications personnel to get its story out to the world and counter what it calls negative press.

According to an …

The Author’s Guild has urged
members to go along with a lawsuit settlement that would allow Google
to digitize millions of books from libraries and make them available in
its Book Search service. A prominent literary and talent agency has urged just the opposite. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice
currently has the settlement under review for possible violations of
antitrust laws. A federal court has extended the deadline to Sept. 4
for authors and publishers to opt out of the proposed agreement. The court has been inundated with proposed changes to the settlement,
including one filed by a group of California professors who suggest the
settlement isn’t fair to academic writers. Several groups, including The Internet Archive and Consumer
Watchdog, have also raised concerns about the issue to the Justice
Department in what many consider the literary flap of the century.

The Los Angeles City Council’s Information Technology and General Services (ITGS) Committee on Tuesday

A Los Angeles City Council committee on Tuesday takes up a …

Some interest groups are urging Los Angeles to rethink its plan to implement Google Apps.

Last month’s breach of a hosted Google Apps implementation used by
Twitter Inc. has heightened fears in some quarters that cloud computing
could pose significant security and privacy risks to users. Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group based in Santa Monica, Calif.,
said the Twitter incident raises questions about whether "Google’s
cloud as offered provides adequate safeguards." In a letter to several
Los Angeles city councilors, the group urged that city IT personnel
first test Google Apps with a small group of users, rather than
following the current plan of implementing it for 30,000 users by the
end of this year.