Google begins rolling out free internet to public housing in Fiber cities
This is a big deal. I worked at the Philadelphia Housing Authority for years and talked to a lot of kids and adults about their desire to get online. Philly isn’t yet on Google’s Fiber expansion roadmap, but this is a great development.
Ex-Googler says she exposed company-wide pay inequality with crowdsourced spreadsheet
Kristen V. Brown wrote for Fusion about Googler Erica Joy’s recent salary spreadsheet. Google had no response to her request for comment, which is the worst kind of response to something like this. Apple released, deliberately, a dismal diversity report (read: majority male, majority white) last year, and Tim Cook took responsibility for fixing it.
If there is a pay disparity problem at Google, or even the illusion of a pay disparity problem, Google PR needs to be on top of this story. The only time silence is ever okay is when you’re prepping a statement that will include unequivocal evidence that there is no disparity.
Crisis shelter workers want Google Maps to hide the locations of their shelters
Selena Larson reports at The Daily Dot:
Crisis shelters provide a safe haven for victims and their families; they are a refuge away from abusers. By publicly listing shelter locations online, Google is endangering victims of domestic abuse, says Jeremy Janice, a facilities coordinator at a Louisiana crisis center.
It’s yet another example of my white American cis-male privilege that it never even occurred to me that this is problematic. I hope Google comes up with a solution that helps keep people safe. I’m not sure how effective Change.org petitions really are, but you can sign the one relevant to this issue here.
The image is a blurred Google Maps image depicting domestic violence shelters in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.
This is another post that began as a mere link post and became, by the time I was done writing it, an article in its own right. When I’m doing more than brief commentary, an article of my own feels more appropriate. There’s more room for opinion in a full article, and I like few things more than expressing my opinions.
I was heartened to read that Google Plus will allow custom gender self-identification. Googler Rachael Bennett announced the new gender options, appropriately enough, on her Google Plus page, saying:
When “Custom” is selected, a freeform text field and a pronoun field will appear. You can still limit who can see your gender, just like you can now.
This may not seem important to cisgendered1 readers, just as naming a state anti-discrimination law after Apple CEO Tim Cook may not seem like a big win for the LGBTQ community at large.
Google’s recent move, though, exceeds even Facebook’s more than 70 custom gender options. Many of us use our social networking profiles as an important or even primary way of presenting ourselves to the world. It’s therefore important that we can be as vague or as specific as we want to be on those social networks, so we maintain control over our own identities.
But people who are comfortable with their gender or sexual orientation “in real life” may, in the online world, suffer the reverse of being “outed.” Namely, that while they live “out” in real life, limited options for expressing their gender or sexual orientation might force them to misrepresent themselves online.
And people who aren’t yet “out” in real life may see a lack of options for accurate self-expression as yet another point of social pressure on them to delay coming out. The two problems, though opposites, are equally disturbing. Such circumstances can be degrading and depersonalizing, and Google’s change to gender options is a small but important step toward solving those and similar problems.
Sexual orientation and gender identity are too often viewed, especially by cis people, as binary, non-fluid characteristics. The truth, as I understand it2, is that sexual orientation and gender identity are often composed of an interplay of continuums. More than that, for many people the two are not fixed points, but fluid and shifting throughout life, especially young life. That makes the proliferation of custom self-identification options on social networks a great thing.
The law, of course, has a very long way to go in this area, but that’s a matter for another article altogether.
FBI Director dislikes encryption on Apple and Google devices
Encryption of data on mobile devices is a big selling point in our post-Snowden world. But FBI Director James Comes isn’t happy about it:
What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law.
David Kravets of Ars Technica reports Comey has “reached out” to the companies about the issue. Absent new or amended legislation, though, there is little he can do about it, precisely because there is such a sales incentive to marketing encryption these days.
Judge calls Google book-scanning fair use
Great news for fair use doctrine, and a big win for word geeks.
Judge Denny Chin said much in his ruling granting Google’s motion for summary judgment, but this part stuck out to me:
Google Books permits humanities scholars to analyze massive amounts of data — the literary record created by a collection of tens of millions of books. Researchers can examine word frequencies, syntactic patterns, and thematic markers to consider how literary style has changed over time.
The decision is up on Scribd. I shall geek out further about it after I have a chance to read it through.
Google “zealously” private about mystery barge
I thought this was interesting but not really worth mentioning here, until the Coast Guard visited, apparently, as USA Today reports, under a presumably Google-imposed gag order.
I’m an avid Google user, incredibly open on the internet, and something of an apologist for the utility of systems that know a ton about me. But I still think it’s rich that, as Michael Winters writes in the article, Google “is zealously guarding its privacy” around the barge.
So rich.
UPDATE: It’s a party barge. No, seriously.
One Google, two different privacy rulings
Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, in an email to the Wall Street Journal’s Elizabeth Dwoskin and Rolfe Winkler:
Courts are doing pretzel twists to slot modern electronic privacy issues into antiquated statutory schemes. Congress badly needs to update the nation’s privacy laws; we can’t leave the courts with so little guidance and expect consistent results.
The inconsistent application of the law across states suggests the issue may be ripe for appeal on both fronts, and may be on a long journey to the Supreme Court. The Delaware court saw no harm in Google’s circumvention of browser-based privacy settings and thus no cause of action.
What interests me is that the information you can collect via someone’s browsing behavior with a cookie is probably similar to the information you can collect by scanning their email, the action at issue in the North Carolina case, in which the judge denied Google’s motion to to dismiss the suit.
Thus, it’s the difference in the method of collection, even where the subject of collection is the same, that may be triggering the proliferation of multiple interpretations of privacy law.
Of course, it’s worth noting that the wiretap law refers specifically to communication interception, which applies directly to email. While browsing history can tell a great deal about someone, it’s not, strictly speaking, a mode of communication, so plaintiffs probably need to rely more on the common law.
I wish I had more time to sink my teeth into the issue, but I’ll have to settle for sharing a few useful links on privacy law for those interested in learning more:
Apps for storing your photos in the cloud
At the end of the day, expertise or a lack of it will define your requirements in this space. Less savvy folks love Google+ Photos because the auto-upload is effectively unlimited for them with the appropriate size setting.
If you follow one link from my blog this week, make it the one above. It’s well-written and disturbingly possible-seeming.
How the death of Google Reader is saving RSS
Ben Popper, at The Verge1:
Some Reader partisans may have given up on RSS after the shutdown, but the majority seem to have migrated to other platforms. In the weeks following the announcement, Feedly saw 3 million Google Reader refugees sign up and Newsblur says it now has 25 times the paid subscriptions it did in March.
Interesting. It looks like Google inadvertently revived the very market Reader killed when it debuted.
I’m still relying on Feedly right now, and they’re the paid option I’m most likely to go with whenever they begin offering a premium tier, but the options are admittedly plentiful.
And there’s no denying that the death of Reader, in retrospect, was probably the best thing to happen to RSS since, well, the birth of RSS.
I like my headline (above the quote) better than Mr. Popper’s, which is “A month after Google killed its beloved Reader, the market for paid RSS tools is booming.” His is more informative, but for some reason mine just feels better. Arrogance? ↩
Select YouTube partners exempt from fair use policy
YouTube’s well within their rights to refuse to leave a video up, or to re-post it after fair use has been reasonably well-defended. But it’s another reminder that when stuff is free for consumers, the interests of the producers providing the content will always take precedence.
Google fighting National Security Letter
The letters, issued by federal authorities investigating national security concerns, prohibit recipients from disclosing that they have received them, let alone what they’re asking for. The Judge in Google’s case1 struck down the law’s gag order provision as violative of the First Amendment, but has stayed the effect of that decision while the government pursues an appeal.
I should note that I essentially paraphrased the Wikipedia article for that second sentence, as my knowledge of NSLs is limited. I look forward to reading more on them, and I’m glad to see a company with the clout and caliber of attorneys that Google has questioning the legality of the NSL framework.
At first glance, it may seem odd that a company that siphons so much data about its users would be so protective of it when the government is asking for it.
But it makes sense for Google to defend user information: it needs that information to make its advertising products more relevant, Many accept the trade of having their documents and emails scanned and anonymized by Google in exchange for exceptional and free services. If Google fails to protect that information from surveillance via legal tools of questionable constitutionality, the balance of that trade may tip too far for many users.
Thus, this is one of those rare cases where corporate goals and user concerns are aligned.
The caption for the case in question is In Re Google Inc.’s Petition to Set Aside Legal Process, 13-80063, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco) ↩
Make Feedly look more like Reader
If you like Feedly but prefer Reader’s white space and width, grab this handy script. Chrome users like me should install Tampermonkey first.
Evernote will be just fine, despite Google’s recent announcement of a new note-taking app called Google Keep, currently available for the web and Android. Keep allows for text, audio, and images to be added to a single notebook and synced between the web and Android devices. You can even add stuff via Google Now. It’s neat, but it’s no Evernote killer.
The two products cater to very different use cases, and Keep will not be able to replace Evernote for its core customers. Evernote had 1.5 million premium subscribers in November 2012. At 45$/year, that’s around $67 million annually, and the number of subscribers has been rising for years.
It doesn’t make them profitable, at least at the moment, but it helps. Coupled with Business accounts and other endeavors, Evernote isn’t worried. For those premium users, who pay because they make the most of Evernote’s vast feature set, Keep won’t be good enough. And I suspect that even if every user of Evernote’s free tier left the product, Evernote would hardly notice from an operational standpoint (if anything, operational costs would decrease).
Instead, makers of task management apps should be concerned. Google Tasks is as neglected as Google Reader was, and we all know what happened to Reader. Keep looks like an elegant upgrade to Google Tasks, and while Evernote has hinted at its own task management solution, I don’t think the future of their business will depend on it.
It’s worth remembering: there just aren’t as many zero-sum games in the apps and services spaces as many, especially in the tech press, would have us believe. Design, feature set nuance, and adaptability to users’ current workflow all allow for multiple apps to be successful in the same space. The Keep/Evernote dichotomy is no different.
This article was adapted from a comment I left on The Next Web’s post about Keep.
This is a great article, especially if you don’t know much about the history of Android. However, Adrianne Jeffries of The Verge ends her article with a silly quote from Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg. Perhaps analysts have a legitimate role to play in the consumer electronics industry, but this statement doesn’t support that thesis:
"I think Google doesn’t necessarily know what it’s going to do until Google has done it," said Gartenberg, the Gartner analyst. "I’m sure there’s going to be some experimentation here."
Google, the data-driven engineer’s paradise knows what it’s doing before it has done it. Experimentation is not, in Google’s world, akin to musical improvisation. Experiments in any setting are, if done right, rigorously planned and researched, and then executed with careful precision.
Google will heed the data, and the market climate, and the reaction to rumors about a commingled Android/Chrome OS, and myriad other factors. And they will definitely know what they’re doing before they do it.
‘Babble’ to consolidate Google’s chat tools under one brand
Geek.com's Russell Holly:
Google’s recent decision to block non-native XMPP requests is the first step towards building their own closed communications platform. In order to use Google’s chat service, especially the new Babble service, you’ll need to be using it the way Google wants you to use it.
This doesn’t sound very open. John Gruber of Daring Fireball has been tracking this issue for a while, most recently citing Google’s abandonment of CalDAV.
Google isn’t doing themselves any favors on the “open” front. I wouldn’t be surprised if they abandonment that mantra altogether going forward.
Google+ lead asks for advice from Google Reader fans
Google+ architect Yontan Zunger meant well, but Google+ will never be sufficient as a reader. Brands maintain a curated presence there for audience outreach and building purposes, not to provide readers with a convenient way to determine what content in that brand’s firehose of updates readers may wish to read further.
Note: I cross-posted this from a comment I wrote on Google+.
Transitioning from Google Reader to feedly
From the Feedly blog:
We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end. So if you are a Google Reader user and using feedly, you are covered: the transition will be seamless.
Feedly is my top contender for a Reader replacement right now: multi-platform, ready to clone my Reader feeds, and prepared to essentially take over much of Reader’s core subscribe-and-sync functionality when Google pulls the plug.
Also, I can’t help but assume that they’re calling it Normandy because there are tens of thousands of Google Reader users suddenly storming their shores.
I don’t even know what to say about this. Reader is an integral part of my workflow and I need to figure something else out. If you have any alternatives to suggest, please let me know.
ECPA amendment would require warrant even for email older than 6 months
Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Ted Poe (R-Texas), and Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) are pushing an amendment to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that would require a warrant for authorities to obtain any email, instead of allowing free access to messages older than six months.
I wrote in January about Google’s decision to require a warrant even where the law does not, so the ECPA’s shortcomings in the digital age (the law is more than twenty years old) are sometimes mitigated by responsible corporate policies.
But a legitimate amendment like Lofgren’s would apply Google’s common sense approach to 4th Amendment rights to all such service providers. There’s simply no excuse not to get this done.
Google’s answer to AirPlay comes to YouTube for iOS, sends video to consoles and TVs
I’ve been doing this from my Galaxy Nexus for a while now. I paired my phone to my Xbox 360 so I can pull videos up on my phone’s YouTube app (which is much easier to use than the Xbox app) and then send to my TV via the console. It’s a great experience.
If you need some YouTube content to try this out with, consider the massive Slenderman collection I linked to at my personal blog yesterday.
At Google, Constitution trumps statute
David Kravets quotes a Googler:
“Google requires an ECPA search warrant for contents of Gmail and other services based on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which prevents unreasonable search and seizure,” Chris Gaither, a Google spokesman, said.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act isn’t always as demanding as Google, and their assertion that the policy is based on Constitutional requirements implies that the ECPA does not comport with the same requirements. That’s a bold legal position to take, but as Mr. Kravets explains at Wired, Google isn’t necessarily alone.
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