Privacy Awareness Week 2011

You might have noticed the talk around privacy this week. It just so happens to have been Privacy Awareness Week.



Privacy Awareness Week 2011 is all about you: what can you do to protect your personal information?



This week we’ve been tweeting some tips about protecting your privacy:

• The Google Dashboard is where you can change your privacy settings on all Google products from one easy location.
• You can find more information about protecting your privacy online at Your Online Choices.
• Check your privacy policy and settings on social networks you use.
• Have a look at our Privacy Centre, which contains specific info about all of our privacy tools and products.

As part of Privacy Awareness Week, the Asia Pacific Privacy Authorities are interested in hearing about your experience of privacy and social media. Take part in their survey and tell your story here.

Posted by Ishtar Vij, Public Policy and Government Affairs.

Privacy Impact Assessment for Street View in Australia

This week is Privacy Awareness Week — a week to put privacy front and centre. Last year, we worked with the Privacy Commissioner to support the investigation into what happened with our mistaken collection of publicly broadcast payload data (information sent over unencrypted WiFi networks) through our Street View cars. When the Commissioner concluded the investigation last year, we committed to working even more closely with them on the privacy implications of our product launches going forward. This blog post is an update on what has happened since that time.



First, you may remember that our ultimate goal was to delete the payload data. We can report that this was completed in February under independent supervision.



Second, one of the commitments we made to the Commissioner was to conduct a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) on any further Street View activities in Australia. Today we are publishing that PIA. We have carefully considered the potential privacy impact of Street View and how to manage present and future privacy issues.



In summary, we will continue to:

• Ensure Street View images are not real time.
• Use automatic technology to blur faces and licence plates before publishing imagery. If one of our images contains an identifiable face (for example, that of a passerby on the pavement) or an identifiable licence plate, our technology will blur it automatically, meaning that the individual or the vehicle cannot be identified.
• Provide the “Report a problem” tool which allows users to request further blurring or removal of any image or let us know if our detectors miss something.

In addition, we have made some changes to our process. We removed all WiFi equipment from our Street View cars and will not be collecting any WiFi data via the Street View cars. We have also taken steps to strengthen our internal privacy controls. Last October Google appointed Alma Whitten as our director of privacy across both engineering and product management. Her focus is ensuring that we build effective privacy controls into our products and internal practices. We have also enhanced our privacy training program for employees, and we require every engineering project leader to maintain a privacy design document for each initiative they are working on. This document records how user data is handled and will be reviewed regularly by managers, as well as by an independent internal audit team.



We want to reiterate to Australians that our collection of payload data was a mistake for which we are sincerely sorry. Maintaining people’s trust is crucial to everything we do, and we have to earn that trust every single day.



We are now looking forward to getting Street View cars back on the roads and continuing to provide a product that is useful for all Australians.



Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President, Engineering and Research

Privacy Awareness Week

It’s Privacy Awareness Week - a good time for a check up on your privacy settings.

At Google we are keenly aware of the trust that you place in us, and of our responsibility to protect your privacy. We make privacy a priority because it’s a core part of Google's culture and because our business depends on it.

We have five privacy principles that describe how we approach privacy and user information across all of our products:

1. Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
2. Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
3. Make the collection of personal information transparent.
4. Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
5. Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

At Google, we strive to design products that give you real and meaningful control -- this means choice and transparency.

The Google Privacy Centre has information and videos that explain in plain English what data Google stores and how we use it to provide you with services like Gmail, Search and more.

The Privacy Centre also contains information about privacy settings you can choose when you use our products. For example in our Chrome browser, you can choose to browse privately by selecting "incognito" mode, and since January we encrypt Gmail by default, becoming the first major email provider to do so.

From the Privacy Centre or from your account, you can link to the Google Dashboard (google.com/dashboard) which lets you take a look at your privacy settings and control the data associated with your Google Account.

And, if at any time you want to stop using a Google product, we do our best to make it easy for you to leave. Through the Data Liberation project (dataliberation.org) we work hard to make sure you can export any data that you create in (or import into) a Google product.

Why not take a moment to review your privacy settings?

Posted by Ishtar Vij, Policy Counsel, Google Australia and New Zealand

Transparency, choice and control — now complete with a Dashboard!

This is partially cross posted from the Official Google Blog

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Google Dashboard. Have you ever wondered what data is stored with your Google Account? The Google Dashboard offers a simple view into the data associated with your account — easily and concisely in one location.

Over the past 11 years, Google has focused on building innovative products for our users. Today, with hundreds of millions of people using those products around the world, we are very aware of the trust that you have placed in us, and our responsibility to protect your privacy and data. In the past, we've taken numerous steps in this area, investing in educating our users with our Privacy Center and making it easier to move data in and out of Google with our Data Liberation Front. Transparency, choice and control have become a key part of Google's philosophy, and today, we're happy to announce that we're doing even more.

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we've built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we're delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard. Watch this quick video to learn more and then try it out for yourself at www.google.com/dashboard.

Posted by Alma Whitten, Software Engineer, Yariv Adan, Product Manager, and Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience

Our commitment to privacy

We get asked about privacy a lot. We recently held a roundtable in Australia to discuss Google's approach to privacy. Here is a summary of what we discussed.

Privacy is a pretty modern concept. There was no such thing as privacy when we humans were all living in the same cave. In the post industrial revolution society, a fairly recent phenomenon in human history, each new information and communications technology - such as cameras, newspapers, radio, TV - has brought convenience and great services, and challenged and changed our notions of privacy.

The Internet has given millions of people access to vast amounts of information and created useful tools and services, and it also presents new challenges for protecting people's 'personal information'.

The concept of privacy is subjective and there is no one size fits all privacy standard. For example, people's attitudes towards sharing personal information about themselves online on social networking sites is more relaxed than in a direct face-to-face environment. Moreover, the privacy expectations of a 21 year old university student will be different from those of an 80 year old grandfather.

Online, companies are supremely accountable to their customers. Competition is one click away, and there is more transparency and accountability than ever. We're exposed to intense scrutiny, and that's a good thing.

Google's mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. We pursue innovative ideas and push the limits of existing technology to provide increased access to information. We recognise our responsibility to protect your privacy. We live and die by your trust. We believe it is possible to deliver leading-edge services and to give you control over your personal information.

Google's approach to privacy is founded on transparency, choice and security. We tell you what information we collect and what we do with it, and we build innovative tools and features that put you in control of your information. We don't hold data hostage. We protect your personal information and use it responsibly. We don't sell it, we don't collect it without permission, and we don't use it to serve ads without permission. Education is also important. The Google Privacy Centre, with a wealth of information and videos on each product, is linked directly from the Google home page.

Many Google services, including Search, can be used anonymously - without providing any personally identifying information at all. For products which you use with more personal information such as Gmail, Docs and Picasa, you need to have a Google Account and to log in. Signing in to your Google Account unlocks a personalised experience such as Web History to give you personalised search results based on your activity when you're signed in. We also give you the ability to share information between the services you use in a way that's transparent to you, such as accessing your Gmail contacts from your Google Calendar or adding an event mentioned in an email to your Google Calendar.

We use information in aggregate form in our server logs to work out how people are using Google and to make overall improvements. We don't need personal information to do this. For example, we use our aggregated server logs to figure out when something's not working properly or crashes, what website layouts are the fastest to load in your browser, how many users clicked on a particular ad or search result, or how many search results people click on before they find what they're looking for, as well as to detect spam, click fraud and viruses. There's more detail in this blog post from Hal Varian on how Google uses data.

Finally, we believe that the best privacy protection is in good product design. As the web evolves and our notions of privacy with it, Google will continue to innovate around privacy and build privacy protections into our products from the ground up, as we are doing today with Google Wave.

Posted by Iarla Flynn, Policy Team