Google defends data policy

PARIS, France (Reuters) -- Google will tell Brussels it needs to hold on to users' search data for up to two years for security and commercial reasons after being warned it could be violating European privacy laws by doing so.
The world's top Internet search engine on Friday said it would respond by June 19 to a letter from a European Union data protection advisory group expressing concern it was keeping information on users' searches for too long.
"The concern of EU law is that a company that collects data on its customers should keep it as long as it is necessary, but not longer," Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
With every search, Google gathers information about a customer's tastes, interests and beliefs that could potentially be used by third parties such as advertisers, but the company stresses it never passes it on.
Google last week received a letter from the Article 29 working party, a group of national advisory bodies that counsels the EU on privacy policy, which asked the company to justify its data retention practices.
"I will tell the working party that Google needs to hold on to its log database to protect itself and the system from attacks and refine and improve the effectiveness of our search results," Fleischer said.
He said Google, at its own initiative, had decided in March to limit the time it kept engine search information to between 18 and 24 months. The company previously had no set time limit.
He called on rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft to clarify their data retention practices and policies.
"Will the working party focus on other players in the industry?" Fleischer asked.
Copyright 2007 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Citywide Wi-Fi struggles to reach users

(AP) -- Adam DuVander likes to surf the Internet from his laptop wherever he happens to be -- at home, a coffee shop or a neighborhood park. He has been able to do so in recent years thanks to wireless hotspots set up by networking activists in Portland, Oregon.
So when Portland announced it would try to blanket the entire city with similar Wi-Fi technology, the Web programmer and blogger got excited -- until he tried using it.
"For me ubiquitous access means I don't have to base my life around wherever my office is," DuVander said. "I tried it out as soon as I could and found that it wasn't for me. The quality of the connection is not up to my standards."
Blame physics and the use of a short-range technology designed for smaller quarters, not citywide deployments.
Simply put, signals don't travel far or penetrate building walls well.
That's fine for a coffee shop. The equipment is indoors, as are its users. That's also fine for a park. There are enough users concentrated there to justify installing lots of wireless antennas.
But it wouldn't be economical to place an access point inside every home and on every street lamp.
Portland's contractor, MetroFi Inc., is putting roughly 25 access points per square mile, so that users would generally be no farther than 500 feet from the nearest one, said Logan Kleier, the city's manager for the Unwired Portland project.
Cutting that distance in half, to 250 feet, would require about four times as many access points, because they need to be installed in all four directions.
"The network cost gets completely out of whack," he said. "The business model breaks in its entirety."
Network operators, meanwhile, are recommending signal boosters for as much as $150 to get indoor coverage. Many people in Portland and elsewhere plan to stick with their existing DSL or cable provider instead.
An emerging technology called WiMax -- promising much longer ranges -- might be able to blanket a larger area more easily than Wi-Fi can. Sprint Nextel Corp. already has announced plans to offer WiMax service in several cities by next year, with initial deployments this year in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore.
But Wi-Fi still has its advantages. It's been around longer so the technology is stable and equipment relatively cheap.
And although Wi-Fi continues to evolve -- an industry group will soon start certifying products under its emerging, faster "n" flavor -- devices made tomorrow will likely work with networks built today. On the network side, some equipment can be upgraded by pushing new software remotely, said Esme Vos, an expert on municipal Wi-Fi systems.
Regardless of the specific wireless technology, though, wired services remain a better choice over wireless for many basic needs. Wired networks are generally faster and have fewer security risks. Prices for DSL, in particular, have dropped.
Wireless networks are good as backups during emergencies and away from home, but "it's very hard to have a wireless network compete as a primary connection," said Dave Burstein, editor of the industry newsletter DSL Prime.
"Where you have a choice, DSL or cable compared to wireless, you are going to go for DSL or cable unless it's ridiculously overpriced."
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

MySpace will turn over names of sex offenders

RALEIGH, North Carolina (AP) -- MySpace.com will provide a number of state attorneys general with data on registered sex offenders who use the popular social networking Web site, the company said Monday.
Attorneys general from eight states demanded last week that the company provide data on how many registered sex offenders are using the site and where they live. MySpace initially refused, citing federal privacy laws.
MySpace obtained the data from Sentinel Tech Holding Corp., which the company partnered with in December to build a database with information on sex offenders.
"We developed 'Sentinel Safe' from scratch because there was no means to weed them out and get them off of our site," said Mike Angus, MySpace's executive vice president and general counsel.
Angus said the company, owned by media conglomerate News Corp. had always planned to share information on sex offenders it identified and has already removed about 7,000 profiles out of a total of about 180 million.
"This is no different than an offline community," he said. "We're trying to keep it safe."
Angus said the company had also made arrangements to allow law enforcement to use the Sentinel software directly.
MySpace is owned by media conglomerate News Corp.
Attorneys general in North Carolina, Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania asked for the Sentinel data last week.
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper's office said in a statement the information could potentially be used to look for parole violations or help in investigations.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Inventor: Camera phone evolution has only just begun

SANTA CRUZ, California (AP) -- The chilling sounds of gunfire on the Virginia Tech campus; the hateful taunts from Saddam Hussein's execution; the racist tirade of comedian Michael Richards.
Those videos, all shot with cell phone cameras and seen by millions, are just a few recent examples of the power now at the fingertips of the masses. Even the man widely credited with inventing the camera phone in 1997 is awed by the cultural revolution he helped launch.
"It's had a massive impact because it's just so convenient," said Philippe Kahn, a tech industry maverick whose other pioneering efforts include the founding of software maker Borland, an early Microsoft Corp. antagonist.
"There's always a way to capture memories and share it," he said. "You go to a restaurant, and there's a birthday and suddenly everyone is getting their camera phones out. It's amazing."
If Kahn feels a bit like a proud father when he sees people holding up their cell phones to snap pictures, there's good reason: He jury-rigged the first camera phone while his wife was in labor with their daughter.
"We were going to have a baby and I wanted to share the pictures with family and friends," Kahn said, "and there was no easy way to do it."
So as he sat in a maternity ward, he wrote a crude program on his laptop and sent an assistant to a RadioShack store to get a soldering iron, capacitors and other supplies to wire his digital camera to his cell phone. When Sophie was born, he sent her photo over a cellular connection to acquaintances around the globe.
A decade later, 41 percent of American households own a camera phone "and you can hardly find a phone without a camera anymore," said Michael Cai, an industry analyst at Parks Associates.
Market researcher Gartner Inc. predicts that about 589 million cell phones will be sold with cameras in 2007, increasing to more than 1 billion worldwide by 2010.
Mix in the Internet's vast reach and the growth of the YouTube generation, and the ubiquitous gadget's influence only deepens and gets more complicated. So much so that the watchful eyes on all of us may no longer just be those of Big Brother.
"For the past decade, we've been under surveillance under these big black and white cameras on buildings and at 7-Eleven stores. But the candid camera is wielded by individuals now," said Fred Turner, an assistant professor of communications at Stanford University who specializes in digital media and culture.
The contraption Kahn assembled in a Santa Cruz labor-and-delivery room in 1997 has evolved into a pocket-friendly phenomenon that has empowered both citizen journalists and personal paparazzi.
It has prompted lawsuits -- a student sued campus police at UCLA for alleged excessive force after officers were caught on cell-phone video using a stun gun during his arrest; and been a catalyst for change -- a government inquiry into police practices ensued in Malaysia after a cell-phone video revealed a woman detainee being forced to do squats while naked.
On another scale, parents use cell-phone slideshows -- not wallet photos -- to show off pictures of their children, while adolescents document their rites of passage with cell phone cameras and instantly share the images.
One of the recipients of Kahn's seminal photo e-mail was veteran technology consultant Andy Seybold, who recalled being "blown away" by the picture.
"The fact that it got sent wirelessly on the networks those days -- that was an amazing feat," Seybold said.
Kahn's makeshift photo-communications system formed the basis for a new company, LightSurf Technologies, which he later sold to VeriSign Inc. LightSurf built "PictureMail" software and worked with cell phone makers to integrate the wireless photo technology.
Sharp Corp. was the first to sell a commercial cell phone with a camera in Japan in 2000. Camera phones didn't debut in the U.S. until 2002, Kahn said.
Though Kahn's work revolved around transmitting only digital still photographs -- video-related developments were created by others in the imaging and chip industries -- his groundbreaking implementation of the instant-sharing via a cell phone planted a seed.
"He facilitated people putting cameras in a phone, and he proved that you can take a photo and send it to someone with a cell phone," Seybold said.
Kahn, 55, is well aware of how the camera phone has since been put to negative uses: sneaky shots up women's skirts, or the violent trend of "happy slapping" in Europe where youths provoke a fight or assault, capture the incident on camera and then spread the images on the Web or between mobile phones.
But he likes to focus on the technology's benefits. It's been a handy tool that has led to vindication for victims or validation for vigilantes.
As Kahn heard the smattering of stories in recent years about assailants scared off by a camera phone or criminals who were nabbed later because their faces or their license plates were captured on the gadget, he said, "I started feeling it was better than carrying a gun."
And though he found the camera-phone video of the former Iraqi dictator's execution disturbing, Kahn said the gadget helped "get the truth out." The unofficial footage surreptitiously taken by a guard was vastly different from the government-issued version and revealed a chaotic scene with angry exchanges depicting the ongoing problems between the nation's factions.
Kahn also thinks the evolution of the camera phone has only just begun.
He wouldn't discuss details of his newest startup, Fullpower Technologies Inc., which is in stealth mode working on the "convergence of life sciences and wireless," according to its Web site.
But, Kahn said, it will, among other things, "help make camera phones better."
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Google unifies search results

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (Reuters) -- Google Inc. said on Wednesday it is combining its different Web search services into one "Universal Search" service that will present Web sites, news, video and other results on one page.
The move, a significant overhaul of Google's most-used function, will take effect on Wednesday and be improved over time, executives told reporters at the company's "Googleplex" headquarters.
"I think of it as a pretty natural evolution, with the one interesting thing being the video side of it," said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst with Global Crown Capital.
"The thing everyone is wondering right now is what will an advertiser be willing to pay for a video link," Pyykkonen said. "From the advertiser standpoint, I think they will be interested in how to hook their customer better."
Universal Search means that standard Google searches will draw results from separate properties covering books, local information, images, news, and video, said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search and user experience.
"It's breaking down the silos of information that have been built up. It's a broad, long-term vision that will unfold over the next few years," Mayer said. "We are really excited about what Universal Search could evolve to in the future."
The combined search includes any site indexed by Google's services. On the video side, for example, it will include YouTube, Google Video and independent sites like Metacafe.com.
Mayer did not directly discuss advertising plans, but she indicated the new service could open the door to more relevant ads on search result pages, which accounted for roughly half of the $10.6 billion in revenue Google did last year.
"For us, ads are (search) answers as well. I would hope that we can bring some of these same advances, in terms of richness of media, to ads," Mayer said.
In addition, the company is introducing new navigation features at the top of every Google page that let users to quickly hop between its different properties.
For example, users of Google's e-mail service, Gmail, can jump instantly to search, calendar, documents, and other services, according to a demonstration at the briefing.
The company also is preparing a translation service that converts queries into other languages, allowing a user to comb a broader swath of the Web, Google's Vice President of Engineering, Udi Manber, said at the event.
The technique will translate queries in any of a dozen languages into English, find additional search results, then automatically translate those back into the language of the original query. This will give users in any supported language a broader view of information on the Web.
"That by itself will open the whole Web to different languages," Manber said.
Copyright 2007 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.