concerns

Google's recently announced Latitude service has sparked a bit of concern among privacy advocates and the generally paranoid. I spoke with a Google Spokesperson about this. Google Latitude is a feature in Google Maps for mobile and iGoogle that allows you to share your location with your family and friends in real time.

Yesterday Google announced its Flu Trends tool, which tracks outbreaks of the Flu. Of course like with just about everything Google does, there are critics, and very often the concerns of these critics stem from privacy issues. This case is no different. So before the speculation and criticism spirals too far out of control, Google decided to nip it in the bud, and address these things right away. A post at the Official Google Blog says:

The leadership of Steve Jobs helped Apple become more than an iconic computer maker, by shifting it to a hugely profitable electronics business.

Things just keep looking worse for Facebook's Beacon: Coca-Cola and other advertisers are opting out of the program; there may be legal troubles ahead; and some investigative security work shows that Beacon sends information about user activity even when logged out of Facebook.

Google saw someone’s cat - and so it begins.  Earlier this week, the search engine giant released Street View, a Google Maps feature that allows users to see things from the perspective of a person driving down a public road.  Now privacy concerns are beginning to mount.

On Friday I mentioned that privacy advocates are becoming even more concerned with how much information Google knows and will know about us. Two recent events are causing the uproar. First is Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick, which would come with a large amounts of user data the ad company has collected over the years. Second is the slightly more recent expansion of search history to web history within Google’s personalized search. Both will give Google more information about our surfing and searching habits than any company has ever had.

Last week, the U.S. Patent Office lifted the 18-month window of secrecy on two patent filings from Microsoft that analysts viewed as attempts by the company aimed at achieving exclusive rights to RSS aggregation technology.

WebmasterRadio.FM has released a fascinating, if not alarming, story series based on the issues of click fraud and terrorist fund raising that is sure to be the subject of many water cooler sessions. As the story unfolds we will know more but here is a snippet that describes the concerns/accusations against the pay per click industry: