Archive | Author: Margot Williams

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Amidst a surge in governmental requests for private user data, Google’s openness effort is lagging, as the release of Google’s second transparency report shows. The report, released Tuesday, is a welcome sign of the search engine’s commitment to openness, but it is not a big improvement over the initial report last April.

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Google has fired an engineer for accessing the user accounts of four minors, according Gawker media. David Barksdale stalked and spied upon the teenagers while working as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google’s Kirkland, WA, office. Google told Tech Crunch this is the second time it has fired an engineer for privacy violations.

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Google’s emergence as a major defense contractor was underscored last week when the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency tweaked its Aug. 20 announcement of a sole-source contract to the search giant for visualization services.

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Three Web pundits are asking: is the quality of the Google’s search product declining? These are not the defensive gripes of traditional journalists lamenting the demise of the newspaper business model. These are New Media partisans who say the quality of the Google search experience is declining.

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