Google CEO Releases 'Mega Ambitious' Letter, Still Not Evil
Integration, integration and more integration.
At the end of a miserable 2010 filled with privacy blunders including the disastrous Google Buzz fiasco , Google appointed Whitten to the position of privacy director. Since then, Whitten has instituted what she calls a "culture of privacy" at the company. So far it has been paying off.
How Google keeps your secrets private - Jan. 26, 2012
One way Google achieved that was by linking privacy to staff evaluations. When Googlers are up for promotions, one factor that's weighed is whether they ingrained privacy into their products and effectively used the Privacy Working Group by Jan 26
Whitten created an internal structure called the Privacy Working Group. Google hired people with expertise in specific areas of privacy like data anonymization, location awareness, and advertising. The company then put those experts into sub-groups.When a new product comes along, the subgroups analyze the products and determine things that the engineers may have missed, such as whether a user's location data is sufficiently separated from data that goes to advertisers.
The company also put in place several fail-safes to ensure that privacy decisions are never made by just one person. by Jan 26
Google on Tuesday made the major announcement that it has streamlined its privacy policy. Instead of 70 policies across each of its products -- search, maps, Gmail, etc. -- Google will consolidate most of them into a single, shorter, privacy agreement. Whitten wrote in a blog post Tuesday that the move is designed to add clarity to Google's privacy stance.
Last March, Google agreed to submit an independent privacy review to the government for the next 20 years after the company inadvertently revealed some users' e-mail contact lists to the public in its February 2010 release of the Buzz social network. by Jan 26
Who Buys All Those Google Ads? An Infographic Breakdown | Epicenter | Wired.com
Google cleared $37.9 billion in 2011 revenue, which equates to more than $3 billion a month, mostly from those little text ads next to your search results that neither you or anybody you know will admit to ever clicking on.Eric Schmidt: 'Google grew out of a system that rewarded innovation' – Erin Burnett OutFront - - CNN.com Blogs
More data, more transparency around government requests
How do governments affect access to information on the Internet? To help shed some light on that very question, last year we launched an online, interactive Transparency Report . All too often, policy that affects how information flows on the Internet is created in the absence of empirical data.
