Remember when Google threatened to leave Australia if the country implemented a "news media bargaining code" forcing social media platforms to pay news publishers? Google and Facebook did not leave; they paid up, striking deals with news organizations to pay for the content they display on their sites for the first time.

Now countries around the world are looking at Australia’s code as a blueprint of how to subsidize the news and stop the spread of “news deserts”—communities that no longer have a local newspaper.

Kyle Rankin: "In this post I’ll tell my story of how tightly Google was integrated in my life, the lengths I had to go to remove them, and what took so long."

Use of Google Analytics has now been found to breach European Union privacy laws in France -- after a similar decision was reached in Austria last month. The French data protection watchdog, the CNIL, said today that an unnamed local website's use of Google Analytics is non-compliant with the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) -- breaching Article 44 which covers personal data transfers outside the bloc to so-called third countries which are not considered to have essentially equivalent privacy protections. The U.S. fails this critical equivalence test on account of having sweeping surveillance laws which do not provide non-U.S. citizens with any way to know whether their data is being acquired, how it's being used or to seek redress for any misuse.

FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), Google's controversial project for replacing cookies for interest-based advertising by instead grouping users into groups of users with comparable interests, is dead. In its place, Google today announced a new proposal: Topics.

To say that Big Tech controls the internet might seem like an exaggeration. Increasingly, in at least one sense, it's literally true: The internet can seem intangible, a post-physical environment where things like viral posts, virtual goods and metaverse concerts just sort of happen. But creating that illusion requires a truly gargantuan -- and quickly-growing -- web of physical connections. Fiber-optic cable, which carries 95% of the world's international internet traffic, links up pretty much all of the world's data centers, those vast server warehouses where the computing happens that transforms all those 1s and 0s into our experience of the internet. Where those fiber-optic connections link up countries across the oceans, they consist almost entirely of cables running underwater -- some 1.3 million kilometers (or more than 800,000 miles) of bundled glass threads that make up the actual, physical international internet. And until recently, the overwhelming majority of the undersea fiber-optic cable being installed was controlled and used by telecommunications companies and governments. Today, that's no longer the case.

In a groundbreaking decision, the Austrian Data Protection Authority ("Datenschutzbehörde" or "DSB") has decided on a model case by noyb that the continuous use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR. This is the first decision on the 101 model complaints filed by noyb in the wake of the so-called "Schrems II" decision.

Unsealed court documents say the search giant sought help from Apple, Facebook and Microsoft to "find areas of alignment."

Apple and Google removed an app meant to coordinate protest voting in this weekend's Russian elections from the country on Friday, a blow to the opponents of President Vladimir V. Putin and a display of Silicon Valley's limits when it comes to resisting crackdowns on dissent around the world.

On Thursday, a judge ruled that Apple will have to continue fighting a lawsuit brought by users in federal court in California, alleging that the company's voice assistant Siri has improperly recorded private conversations. He ruled that the plaintiffs, who are trying to make the suit a class action case, could continue pursuing claims that Siri turned on unprompted and recorded conversations that it shouldn't have and passed the data along to third parties, therefore violating user privacy. The case is one of several that have been brought against Apple, Google and Amazon that involve allegations of violation of privacy by voice assistants.

A federal judge says the results of Google searches are covered by the law governing how companies handle personal information, a victory for people seeking a digital "right to be forgotten."

Ownership is simple, right? Something is either yours or it isn’t. Case closed. But who owns the space behind your airplane seat, the results of the DNA you took online, the Netflix password you got from your cousin’s roommate? The jury's still out, according to law professors Michael Heller and James Salzman. That’s because ownership isn’t binary or static: it’s a storytelling exercise, and we rely on just six stories to claim everything we own. In this revelatory conversation, Michael and James explain how those stories work, how you can use them to your advantage, and why they might be key to dismantling income inequality and arresting climate change.

Global.health enables open access to more than 5 million anonymized Covid-19 records from 160 countries. Each record can contain dozens of data points about the case, including demographics, travel history, testing dates, and outcomes.

Global.health enables open access to more than 5 million anonymized Covid-19 records from 160 countries. Each record can contain dozens of data points about the case, including demographics, travel history, testing dates, and outcomes.

Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model: Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) is potentially the most harmful of those new technologies.
read also: article on TechCrunch, Github W3C - Improving Web Advertising Business Group, and Google's framing as Privacy Sandbox

On December 2, after a protracted disagreement over the release of a research paper, Google forced out its ethical AI co-lead, Timnit Gebru. The paper was on the risks of large language models, AI models trained on staggering amounts of text data, which are a line of research core to Google’s business. Gebru, a leading voice in AI ethics, was one of the only Black women at Google Research.

Australia is presently embroiled in two major showdowns with superpowers. One is with China. The other is with Google and Facebook.

Google will deploy a function that can display color-coded overlays of the concentraiton of COVID-19 positive cases. Such data are mainly open data from Johns Hopkins, the New York times, and Wikipedia.

Following a complaint by noyb and a similar complaint by the French NGO “La Quadrature du Net”, the CNIL (the French Data Protection Authority) imposed a 50 million euro fine on Google over the company’s opaque privacy policy and lack of legal basis for personalized ads.

The Apple-Google design has been promoted as being more privacy-centric.

We are obviously at the beginning of what will likely be a long, contentious, and vital debate over how to manage personal health information in the digital age... patients have an undeniable right to privacy and control over their personal health data.

This week Google and the big Catholic health system Ascension inked a deal where all patient data in Ascension’s possession will be shared with The GOOG. This little data swap is called Project Nightingale. The song of this particular nightingale ain’t so sweet.

Google is teaming with one of the country’s largest health-care systems on an ambitious project named “Project Nightingale” to collect and crunch detailed health information of millions of Americans across 21 states.

Rick Osterloh suggests house guests have the right to know smart speakers are in use before entering.

It is disappointing—but regrettably unsurprising—that the Chrome team is cloaking Google’s business priorities in disingenuous technical arguments.

The Data Transfer Project wants to make it easy to move data between services but be sure to read comments from Paul-Olivier Dehaye and Lasse Rouhiainen on the data-sharing project as well!

The next big technological shift is to a world where every individual can manage and (optionally) monetise their personal data. Companies like Facebook and Google already make billions because they know everything about us via our online habits. What if we could take a cut? What if we could own and sell our data directly?

This is an incredible article by Shoshana Zuboff, the Harvard Professor that wrote 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism'. I strongly recommend you to read it as what she says also is related to what's being done in MyData. What she says is very much the essence of what we have to tackle.

Sofia from Numbers team (http://numbersprotocol.io) shared an article by CEO @Tammy Yang. And @Goeran Waogstroem added an article from the NY Times about 'A Brief History of How Your Privacy Was Stolen'.