Google Public Policy Blog

Protecting Seniors from Identity Theft

2013-05-07T07:51:00.000-04:00

Posted by Jenny Backus, Public Policy Team

Every day in this country, someone’s mother, grandfather, or older neighbor is a victim of identity theft. Whether the identity thieves attack through a confusing telemarketing scam, a misleading piece of mail, or over the Internet, seniors and their families are increasingly at risk of long-term financial and emotional damage that can take years to undo.

In order to address this issue, the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of public and private partners like the National Consumer League’s Fraud.org are working together to protect seniors from identity theft. Google will also be recognizing Older Americans Month this May by offering tips for seniors to help them stay safe and secure online.

The FTC’s report of 2012 consumer complaint data recently showed that complaints about identity theft from older Americans are increasing at a faster rate than for any other age group. In fact, identity theft complaints from those over 70 increased by almost 70% since 2010, while complaints from 60 to 70 year olds increased by 53% in the same period.

Google’s Good to Know site is designed to help educate consumers of all ages about online threats and tools they can use to protect themselves, including information on how to protect themselves from identity theft.

Here are five tips from our security experts:

Don’t reply if you see a suspicious email, instant message or webpage asking for your personal or financial information. Identity thieves can steal your information and then use it to withdraw money from your bank account.

Never enter your password if you’ve arrived at a site by following a link in an email or chat that you don’t trust.

If you see a message from someone you know that doesn’t seem like them, their account might have been compromised by a cyber criminal who is trying to get money or information from you. Think before responding!

Don’t send your password via email, and don’t share your password with others. Legitimate sites won’t ask you to send them your passwords via email, so don’t respond if you get requests for your passwords to online sites.

Report any suspicious emails and scams. Many email providers, including Gmail, provide an easy way for you to report fishy emails and scams, and it can help our teams stop similar mail from being sent to you and others.

Seniors around the country can also learn more by attending or viewing by webcast the FTC’s workshop today on protecting seniors from identity theft. With speakers from some of the most trusted consumer groups, local, state and government leaders, and lead experts on fraud prevention, the FTC workshop will focus on forms of ID theft that are particularly significant for seniors, from the risks that seniors face in nursing homes to the identity theft concerns that arise when they file their taxes or seek government assistance, which is increasingly happening online.

Stopping bad actors who target seniors and preventing the rise of identity theft is a shared mission for all of us. Google is committed to making the Internet safer, and protecting our users of all ages.

Congress, now live on YouTube

2013-04-30T14:39:00.001-04:00

Posted by

Robert Kyncl, Vice President, Global Head of Content Partnerships for YouTube
& Susan Molinari, Vice President, Public Policy and Government Relations

Video plays a powerful role in bringing us closer together, especially when it connects people in real time. By transcending borders, empowering citizens, and increasing transparency, it’s one of the many ways technology allows democracy to thrive. Starting this week, all members of the U.S. Congress will have the opportunity to access enhanced features on their YouTube channels, including the ability to live stream video.

Live video is already allowing elected officials and their constituents to reach one another in innovative ways. Thousands tuned in to YouTube to watch the president’s State of the Union address and the corresponding Republican response this February. Engagement is growing across many types of platforms — Google+ Hangouts, for example, have sparked face-to-face conversations on topics ranging from gun control to the national economy and have allowed people on the other side of the world to share their stories at Congressional hearings.

If you’re a member of Congress and would like to know more, check out these Dear Colleague letters issued by the House and Senate. Whether it’s to share a look into your daily work, broadcast speeches and meetings, or showcase events in your state or district, we can’t wait to see how you connect with your constituents.

The Big Tent comes to Washington

2013-04-26T10:30:00.002-04:00

Posted by Susan Molinari, Vice President, Public Policy and Government Relations

When we started holding our Big Tent events in London two years ago, we wanted to stir up lively conversation about some of the hot topics relating to the Internet and society. After all, the political meaning of a “big tent” is to attract diverse viewpoints to come together in one place. Since then, we’ve held more than 20 Big Tents on three different continents to debate issues ranging from arts and culture online to the economic impact of the web.

Later today, the Big Tent is coming to Washington, D.C. for the first time. Along with our partner Bloomberg, we'll hear from some of the top names in media, government and the arts for discussions about one of the values we hold most dear: the right to free expression.

Can free speech survive in the digital age? At a time when too many governments deny their citizens the right to dissent, we’ll ask if the Internet is reaching its promise of empowering people around the world. We’ll have sessions on the limits to free speech online, national security in the Internet age, and creativity and freedom on the web.

Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt and senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond will be joined by a variety of speakers, including former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales, deputy secretary of homeland security Jane Holl Lute, Bloomberg chief content officer Norman Pearlstine, former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, and Saudi Arabian comedian and YouTube star Omar Hussein.

Things kick off at 1:30pm EDT today—you can watch the entire event on Bloomberg’s live stream and tune in to the Big Tent Google+ page for updates as the event unfolds. Later on, we’ll also upload video clips to the Big Tent YouTube channel. We hope you’ll join us for exciting conversations about how to best keep the Internet free and open.

Transparency Report: More government removal requests than ever before

2013-04-25T12:08:00.001-04:00

Posted by Susan Infantino, Legal Director

Three years ago when we launched the Transparency Report, we said we hoped it would shine some light on the scale and scope of government requests for censorship and data around the globe. Today, for the seventh time, we’re releasing new numbers showing requests from governments to remove content from our services. From July to December 2012, we received 2,285 government requests to remove 24,179 pieces of content—an increase from the 1,811 requests to remove 18,070 pieces of content that we received during the first half of 2012.

As we’ve gathered and released more data over time, it’s become increasingly clear that the scope of government attempts to censor content on Google services has grown. In more places than ever, we’ve been asked by governments to remove political content that people post on our services. In this particular time period, we received court orders in several countries to remove blog posts criticizing government officials or their associates. You can read more about these requests by looking at the annotations section of the Transparency Report. Of particular note were three occurrences that took place in the second half of 2012:

There was a sharp increase in requests from Brazil, where we received 697 requests to remove content from our platforms (of which 640 were court orders—meaning we received an average of 3.5 court orders per day during this time period), up from 191 during the first half of the year. The big reason for the spike was the municipal elections, which took place last fall. Nearly half of the total requests—316 to be exact—called for the removal of 756 pieces of content related to alleged violations of the Brazilian Electoral Code, which forbids defamation and commentary that offends candidates. We’re appealing many of these cases, on the basis that the content is protected by freedom of expression under the Brazilian Constitution.
Another place where we saw an increase was from Russia, where a new law took effect last fall. In the first half of 2012, we received six requests, the most we had ever received in any given six-month period from Russia. But in the second half of the year, we received 114 requests to remove content—107 of them citing this new law.
During this period, we received inquiries from 20 countries regarding YouTube videos containing clips of the movie “Innocence of Muslims.” While the videos were within our Community Guidelines, we restricted videos from view in several countries in accordance with local law after receiving formal legal complaints. We also temporarily restricted videos from view in Egypt and Libya due to the particularly difficult circumstances there.

We’ve also made a couple of improvements to the Transparency Report since our last update:

We’re now breaking down government requests about YouTube videos to clarify whether we removed videos in response to government requests for violating Community Guidelines, or whether we restricted videos from view due to local laws. You can see the details by scrolling to the bottom of each country-specific page.
We’ve also refreshed the look of the Traffic section, making it easier to see where and when disruptions have occurred to Google services. You can see a map where our services are currently disrupted; you can see a map of all known disruptions since 2009; and you can more easily navigate between time periods and regions.

The information we share on the Transparency Report is just a sliver of what happens on the Internet. But as we disclose more data and continue to expand it over time, we hope it helps draw attention to the laws around the world that govern the free flow of information online.

More momentum toward digital due process

2013-04-25T11:01:00.000-04:00

Posted by David Lieber, Privacy Policy Counsel

Three years ago, Google helped found a coalition of technology companies, privacy advocates and academics to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986. Today the Digital Due Process coalition includes more than 90 members, all devoted to bringing this federal law in line with how people use the web today.

ECPA no longer reflects the expectation of privacy that Google users and other users of the Internet reasonably have. For example, an email may receive more robust privacy protections under ECPA depending on how old it is or whether it has been opened. The privacy of electronic communications should not hinge on such arbitrary factors.

Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee took a significant step toward updating ECPA by passing legislation that would require the government to obtain a warrant in order to compel service providers to disclose the content of emails and other electronic content that they store on behalf of users. The bill replaces a confusing array of distinctions that ECPA makes with a bright line, warrant-for-content rule.

This is an important moment for all Internet users, and we’re deeply appreciative of Senators Leahy and Lee’s leadership in advancing this bill. We’ve also been working closely with the House Judiciary Committee on this issue and we look forward to continuing to work with Congress to update ECPA.

YouTube wins case against Viacom (again)

2013-04-18T18:00:00.001-04:00

Posted by Kent Walker, Senior Vice President & General Counsel, Google

Cross-posted from the Official YouTube Blog

Today is an important day for the Internet. For the second time, a federal court correctly rejected Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube. This is a win not just for YouTube, but for the billions of people worldwide who depend on the web to freely exchange ideas and information.

In enacting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Congress effectively balanced the public interest in free expression with the rights of copyright holders. The court today reaffirmed an established judicial consensus that the DMCA protects web platforms like YouTube that work with rightsholders and take appropriate steps to remove user-generated content that rightsholders notify them is infringing.

The growing YouTube community includes not only a billion individual users, but tens of thousands of partners who earn revenue from the platform -- from independent musicians and creators to some of the world’s biggest record labels, movie studios, and news organizations. Today’s decision recognizes YouTube as a thriving and vibrant forum for all these users, creators and consumers alike. Today is an important day for the Internet.

Improving software patent quality to support innovation

2013-04-16T14:31:00.000-04:00

Posted by Suzanne Michel, Senior Patent Counsel

We filed comments yesterday with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) on software patent quality, where we argue that better application of established legal principles can help reduce the number of vague, overbroad software patents issued. We think this will protect real innovation while helping to solve some growing problems in the patent system.

Many software patents are so broad as to claim every way of doing something on a computer. And the boundaries of these patents are often unclear. The Patent Office would never permit a patent that covered “any combination of molecules to treat a headache with a pill,” but it regularly does this by allowing software patent claims covering only a goal—not an inventive solution.

By more consistently applying legal rules that require specificity around functional software claims, the PTO can ensure that software patents reward and protect the creative work of building great software products—not just coming up with vague or abstract ideas.

We filed our comments in response to the PTO’s new partnership with the software community and its recent call for public comment on improving patent quality. We commend the PTO’s efforts in this area and look forward to working constructively with the agency in the future.

In our comments, we also suggest that the PTO consider how improved technical training for patent examiners, expanded prior art databases, and standardized terminology used across all software patent applications can help improve quality.

Improving software patent quality is critically important to innovation, which is under attack by patent assertion entities (also known as patent trolls). Trolls don’t make anything; they simply use patents to extract money—almost $30 billion a year—from productive companies through litigation. Trolls often target startups and small businesses that lack the resources or expertise to effectively deal with such lawsuits.

The trolls’ weapons of choice are low-quality software patents: today, most patent litigation is brought by trolls, and about 82% of those suits involve software. There is no single fix to the troll problem, but improving software patent quality will help stem the tide while also supporting real innovation.

Beyond the Password: Protecting Your Online Identity

2013-04-12T14:47:00.001-04:00

Posted by David Lieber, Public Policy Team

Just like burglars and thieves, cyber criminals have many different ways to steal personal information and money. Consumers and technical experts alike are awakening to the reality that passwords - even those that are developed in ways that reduce the likelihood of a breach - are not the cure-all for online security.

Last year, Wired senior writer Mat Honan drew attention worldwide for his first-person account of having his online identity hijacked -- a story that spurred a conversation about passwords and online privacy and security. On Wednesday, April 17th, Google DC is hosting a talk with FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen on data security, followed by a fireside chat with Mat Honan and security experts to discuss security challenges and the solutions that companies are working on to protect consumers against existing and emerging threats.

Beyond the Password: Protecting Your Online Identity

Wednesday, April 17th

5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Google DC

If you are in the DC area, please join us for an engaging discussion about protecting your online identity. RSVP by clicking here.

Plan your digital afterlife with Inactive Account Manager

2013-04-11T12:05:00.000-04:00

Posted by Andreas Tuerk, Product Manager

Not many of us like thinking about death — especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account.

The feature is called Inactive Account Manager — not a great name, we know — and you’ll find it on your Google Account settings page. You can tell us what to do with your Gmail messages and data from several other Google services if your account becomes inactive for any reason.

For example, you can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube. Before our systems take any action, we’ll first warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to the secondary address you’ve provided.

We hope that this new feature will enable you to plan your digital afterlife — in a way that protects your privacy and security — and make life easier for your loved ones after you’re gone.

Strong, United Voices for Internet Freedom

2013-04-10T12:05:00.004-04:00

Posted by Susan Molinari, Vice President, Public Policy and Government Relations

Remember the ITU? It might seem like a long time ago, but it was only last December at a closed-door meeting of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Dubai when some governments proposed measures to censor and regulate the web. We joined millions of individuals and thousands of organizations from all over the world in speaking up against this.

The fight to keep the Internet free and open isn’t over.

Eighty-nine countries signed onto the treaty that came out of the ITU conference. We continue to stand with the countries that refuse to sign. For all of us who believe in pushing back the tide of censorship online, it’s very important to remain vigilant and reaffirm our commitment to an open web.

Among the many voices who spoke up against the closed negotiations at the ITU were those of virtually every Member of the United States Congress. Indeed, in a resolution adopted last year by both the Senate and the House of Representatives without a single dissenting vote, Congress called for the web to remain free from government control and emphasized its support for the multistakeholder model that has allowed the Internet to flourish.

This week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee is once more considering a call for the Internet to remain free and open. We’re glad Congress remains focused on the ways the ITU proposals threaten the web we have today.

Speaking with one voice in Dubai enabled the United States to lead in defense of Internet freedom. We look forward to supporting policy makers’ efforts to ensure the web keeps fueling economic growth, innovation, and the vibrant exchange of information.

Fighting human trafficking

2013-04-09T14:52:00.002-04:00

Posted by Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas and Jacquelline Fuller, Director of Google Giving

Human trafficking, the narcotics trade and weapons smuggling all have one major thing in common: Their ill-gotten proceeds feed conflict, instability and repression worldwide. Out of all of these, human trafficking is perhaps the most devastating, enslaving nearly 21 million people and generating at least $32 billion of illicit profits every year. At last summer's Google Ideas summit on mapping, disrupting and exposing illicit networks, it became clear that connecting anti-trafficking helplines in a global data sharing collaboration could help identify illicit patterns and provide victims anywhere in the world with more effective support. Today, Polaris Project, Liberty Asia, and La Strada International are receiving a $3 million Global Impact Award from Google to do just that. Building on our 2011 grants, this brings our total commitment to anti-trafficking efforts to $14.5 million.

Global Impact Awards support nonprofits that use technology to launch disruptive solutions in their sector. We launched the Global Impact Awards program last December to fund new ideas with a potential for huge scale. And at the Google Ideas INFO summit over the summer, we brought together technologists, leaders, and those with unique personal experiences — including former weapons brokers and survivors of domestic and international human trafficking — to look at illicit networks and their defining obstacles. By connecting technologists and experts with those who understand and have lived through trafficking situations, our discussion centered around a fundamental question: What if local, national, and regional anti-trafficking helplines across the globe were all connected in a data-driven network that helped disrupt the web of human trafficking?

Since the summit, we’ve worked with Polaris Project, Liberty Asia and La Strada International to make this concept a reality. These organizations exist to provide vital help to victims in need across the United States, the Mekong Delta region and Europe. Now, working across borders, this new Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network will collect data from local hotline efforts, share promising practices and create anti-trafficking strategies that build on common patterns and focus on eradication, prevention and victim protection. To enhance the participating organizations' ability to better share, analyze and act upon their data in real time, Palantir Technologies will expand on its existing relationship with Polaris Project by donating its data integration and analytics platform for this project. In addition, Salesforce.com supports Polaris Project's hotline center and is helping scale their call tracking infrastructure internationally.

Together, these partners will not only be able to help more trafficking survivors, but will also move the global conversation forward by dramatically increasing the amount of useful data being shared. Appropriate data can tell the anti-trafficking community which campaigns are most effective at reducing slavery, what sectors are undergoing global spikes in slavery, or if the reduction of slavery in one country coincides with an increase right across the border.

In the U.S., Polaris Project has collected data from over 72,000 hotline calls, helping local and national anti-trafficking communities better understand the dynamics of the crime. No such actionable hotline database has existed globally — but it doesn’t need to be that way. Clear international strategies, increased cooperation, and appropriate data sharing amongst anti-trafficking organizations will help victims, prevention efforts, and sound policymaking. Slavery can be stopped. Let's get to it.

It’s time to take action against patent trolls and patent privateering

2013-04-05T11:00:00.000-04:00

Posted by Matthew Bye, Senior Competition Counsel

Today, we submitted comments together with BlackBerry, EarthLink and Red Hat to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice on the growing harm caused by patent assertion entities (more widely known as patent trolls).

We’ve been encouraged by recent attention on the problem of trolls, which cost the U.S. economy nearly $30 billion a year. Trolls are hurting consumers and are increasingly going after small businesses, hampering innovation and reducing competition.

Our comments today also focus on a worrisome trend: some companies are increasingly transferring patents to trolls—and providing incentives to assert those patents against their competitors. These transfers can raise rivals’ costs and undermine patent peace.

This trend has been referred to as “patent privateering”: a company sells patents to trolls with the goal of waging asymmetric warfare against its competitors.

Trolls use the patents they receive to sue with impunity—since they don’t make anything, they can’t be countersued. The transferring company hides behind the troll to shield itself from litigation, and sometimes even arranges to get a cut of the money extracted by troll lawsuits and licenses.

Privateering lets a company split its patent portfolio into smaller sub-portfolios “stacked” on each other, increasing the number of entities a firm must negotiate with and multiplying licensing costs. This behavior unfairly raises competitors’ costs, ultimately driving up prices for consumers.

It also undermines incentives for companies to work together towards “patent peace” through good-faith negotiation and cross-licensing. If cross-licensing is nuclear deterrence for patents, then privateering has the opposite effect, facilitating patent proliferation and aggression.

We’re asking other companies to work with us to develop cooperative licensing agreements that can help curb privateering. We’re also encouraged that the FTC and DOJ are paying attention to this critical issue, and we hope they will continue to study how abusive troll litigation and patent privateering are harming innovative industries.

Inspiring Innovation to Protect Consumers from Robocalls

2013-04-02T17:31:00.001-04:00

Posted by Rob Mahini, Policy Counsel

Every month, the Federal Trade Commission receives over 200,000 consumer complaints about robocalls. These phone calls can not only be annoying, they also can be a vehicle for cheating consumers and stealing their identities. While law enforcement agencies work to crack down on these fraudsters, unscrupulous robocallers continue to find ways to swindle consumers.

Back in October, the FTC issued its first-ever technology challenge to innovators to conceptualize solutions to this problem. The FTC Robocall Challenge called for “solutions and proofs of concept” for reducing robocalls on mobile and landline phones. Recognizing that innovative solutions often rely on data analysis, the FTC also made over four years worth of consumer complaint data about robocalls available to challenge participants.

Inspired by this desire to tap into the innovative spirit, Google engineers submitted their idea for a crowd-sourced solution for consumers to avoid robocalls. By harnessing the knowledge of the crowd, the Internet can often tackle and solve otherwise difficult problems consumers face. Our engineers were honored today to accept the FTC’s Technology Achievement Award for their submission, which recommended tapping into the power of the Internet to target persistent robocalls that disrupt consumers.

The fact that the FTC received nearly 800 submissions shows that there is a real thirst from innovators to work with the agency to help consumers. Collaboration with tech experts is a critical component of the FTC’s consumer protection mission, and the robocall challenge was itself an innovative approach for inspiring a broad group of tech enthusiasts to think up possible ways to stop these real consumer harms. We are proud that Google engineers stepped up to help spark solutions to take on troublesome robocalls.

Taking a stand on open source and patents

2013-03-28T11:56:00.003-04:00

Posted by Duane Valz, Senior Patent Counsel

Cross-posted from the Google Open Source Blog

At Google we believe that open systems win. Open-source software has been at the root of many innovations in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet generally. And while open platforms have faced growing patent attacks, requiring companies to defensively acquire ever more patents, we remain committed to an open Internet—one that protects real innovation and continues to deliver great products and services.

Today, we’re taking another step towards that goal by announcing the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge: we pledge not to sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked.

We’ve begun by identifying 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google—open-source versions of which are now widely used. Over time, we intend to expand the set of Google’s patents covered by the pledge to other technologies.

We hope the OPN Pledge will serve as a model for the industry, and we’re encouraging other patent holders to adopt the pledge or a similar initiative. We believe it has a number of advantages:

Transparency. Patent holders determine exactly which patents and related technologies they wish to pledge, offering developers and the public transparency around patent rights.

Breadth. Protections under the OPN Pledge are not confined to a specific project or open-source copyright license. (Google contributes a lot of code under such licenses, like the Apache or GNU GPL licenses, but their patent protections are limited.) The OPN Pledge, by contrast, applies to any open-source software—past, present or future—that might rely on the pledged patents.

Defensive protection. The Pledge may be terminated, but only if a party brings a patent suit against Google products or services, or is directly profiting from such litigation.

Durability. The Pledge remains in force for the life of the patents, even if we transfer them.

Our pledge builds on past efforts by companies like IBM and Red Hat and the work of the Open Invention Network (of which Google is a member). It also complements our efforts on cooperative licensing, where we’re working with like-minded companies to develop patent agreements that would cut down on lawsuits.

And, in addition to these industry-driven initiatives, we continue to support patent reforms that would improve patent quality and reduce excessive litigation.

We hope the OPN Pledge will provide a model for companies looking to put their own patents into the service of open-source software, which continues to enable amazing innovation.

Testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives on privacy legislation

2013-03-19T08:54:00.005-04:00

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Director of Public Policy

This morning Richard Salgado, Legal Director of Law Enforcement and Information Security, will testify before a House Judiciary Subcommittee about the need to bring a key privacy law into line with how people use the web today.

The Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations will explore whether to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The 1986 law, known as ECPA, regulates how government agencies can compel companies to disclose information about users.

Richard’s testimony explains that ECPA was a well-intentioned law when passed nearly three decades ago, but it no longer provides the privacy protections that users of these services reasonably expect.

You can read his written testimony and this recent blog post outlining Google’s approach to government requests for user data.

Google Policy Fellowship applications due March 15th

2013-03-13T09:13:00.000-04:00

Posted by Kate Sheerin, Policy Analyst

This Friday is the last day to apply for the 2013 Google Policy Fellowship -- all applications must be submitted by March 15, 2013 at midnight PST. Please visit the website for application and program details.

The Google Policy Fellowship supports students and organizations working on the critical technology policy issues of our time. Fellows will have the opportunity to work at public interest organizations at the forefront of debates on broadband and access policy, content regulation, copyright and trademark reform, consumer privacy, open government, and more. The Google Policy Fellowship is open to students of all levels and disciplines.

Good luck on your application!

Launching a dialogue on free expression with telecoms

2013-03-12T13:08:00.000-04:00

Posted by Bob Boorstin, Director, Public Policy, and Lewis Segall, Senior Counsel, Ethics and Compliance

(Cross-posted from the Google Europe Blog)

We wake up every day at Google asking ourselves: how can we get more information to more people around the world? Unfortunately, officials in too many governments wake up every day asking themselves: how can we stop our people from getting more information?

Those opposing questions lay at the heart of our decision back in 2008 to be a founding member company of the Global Network Initiative (GNI). The GNI is a group of companies, human rights groups and NGOs, socially responsible investors and academics that works to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in the ICT sector.

From the beginning, we hoped that the GNI would find common ground with other companies and groups around the world. And today we’re happy to report that the GNI is entering into a two-year collaboration with a group of eight European telecommunications firms to “find a shared and practical approach to promoting freedom of expression and privacy rights around the world.”

The eight firms — Alcatel-Lucent, France Telecom-Orange, Millicom, Nokia Siemens Networks, Telefonica, Telenor, TeliaSonera, and Vodafone — provide services and equipment in scores of countries.

The firms, known collectively as the Telecommunications Industry Dialogue, have been meeting among themselves since 2011 to discuss freedom of expression and privacy rights in their sector, and have developed a set of guiding principles. Under the new partnership, they are not joining GNI — but the GNI will house the Industry Dialogue’s work and provide a place where members of both groups can learn from each other, develop new ideas, and collaborate in protecting and advancing user privacy and freedom of expression.

For the Industry Dialogue, we hope the arrangement will give the eight companies the chance to see the advantages we’ve found in an alliance that goes beyond industry and includes NGOs and others. For the GNI — a group born of the conviction that there is strength in numbers and a diverse membership — the arrangement marks a concrete step to building a broader and more global platform to help protect user rights.

Working together to reduce patent litigation

2013-03-12T09:29:00.001-04:00

Posted by Eric Schulman, Legal Director

We’ve been encouraged by recent proposals for legislation and other reforms aimed at addressing the growing harm that patent trolls are inflicting on U.S. consumers and small businesses. We also think that companies can work together to help curb excessive patent litigation, so we’ve launched a new cooperative licensing website laying out some of our ideas and soliciting feedback from interested companies.

The problem of lawsuits brought by patent trolls—companies that don't make any products—is huge and getting worse. Additionally, in a growing trend, companies are selling patents to trolls that then use those patents to attack other companies. In some cases, those companies arrange to get a cut of revenue generated from the trolls’ suits.

We think companies should cooperate to reduce patent litigation—what’s been compared to nuclear arms control for the patent world. On our site, we outline several networked, standardized, royalty-free patent licensing agreements that increase companies’ freedom to operate while reducing patent assertions, especially by trolls.

For example, in a License on Transfer (LOT) Agreement, participating companies agree that when a patent is transferred (other than as part of a legitimate spin-out), the transferred patent automatically becomes licensed to other participating companies. Participants are thus protected from any future attacks if the patent was sold to a troll.

The more companies that unite in these kinds of agreements, the more beneficial the agreement becomes to its members, especially companies that don’t regularly sell patents or don’t want to spend money or time defending against trolls.

Take a look at the description of the LOT Agreement and the other approaches on our website and, if you’re interested or have feedback, let us know.

Transparency Report: Shedding more light on National Security Letters

2013-03-05T14:14:00.000-05:00

Posted by Richard Salgado, Legal Director, Law Enforcement and Information Security

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Our users trust Google with a lot of very important data, whether it’s emails, photos, documents, posts or videos. We work exceptionally hard to keep that information safe—hiring some of the best security experts in the world, investing millions of dollars in technology and baking security protections such as 2-step verification into our products.

Of course, people don’t always use our services for good, and it’s important that law enforcement be able to investigate illegal activity. This may involve requests for personal information. When we receive these requests, we:

scrutinize them carefully to ensure they satisfy the law and our policies;
seek to narrow requests that are overly broad;
notify users when appropriate so they can contact the entity requesting the information or consult a lawyer;
and require that government agencies use a search warrant if they’re seeking search query information or private content, like Gmail and documents, stored in a Google Account.

When conducting national security investigations, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation can issue a National Security Letter (NSL) to obtain identifying information about a subscriber from telephone and Internet companies. The FBI has the authority to prohibit companies from talking about these requests. But we’ve been trying to find a way to provide more information about the NSLs we get—particularly as people have voiced concerns about the increase in their use since 9/11.

Starting today, we’re now including data about NSLs in our Transparency Report. We’re thankful to U.S. government officials for working with us to provide greater insight into the use of NSLs. Visit our page on user data requests in the U.S. and you’ll see, in broad strokes, how many NSLs for user data Google receives, as well as the number of accounts in question. In addition, you can now find answers to some common questions we get asked about NSLs on our Transparency Report FAQ.

You'll notice that we're reporting numerical ranges rather than exact numbers. This is to address concerns raised by the FBI, Justice Department and other agencies that releasing exact numbers might reveal information about investigations. We plan to update these figures annually.

Identifying available spectrum

2013-03-04T10:17:00.001-05:00

Posted by Alan Norman, Principal, Access

Cross-posted from the Official Google.org blog

Today, there are billions of phones, tablets, laptops and other mobile devices connecting to the Web wirelessly. Meanwhile, people living in parts of the world without wired infrastructure rely on wireless broadband for their last mile connection. As more people go online and the number of wireless devices grows, so does the need for spectrum.

There is available spectrum out there -- but it can be hard to find if you don't know where to look. One way we're trying to help researchers and other stakeholders identify available spectrum is through dynamic spectrum sharing. Spectrum sharing allows devices to use spectrum when it is not in use by someone else simply by checking a data base. We're in the process (with several others) of becoming a certified database administrator for a band of spectrum called the TV white spaces.

Today, we’ve reached a milestone in the certification process: our database is beginning a public trial with the FCC. Our trial site allows industry stakeholders (broadcasters, cable, wireless microphone users, licensed spectrum holders) to test and provide feedback on the database. The trial site also allows anyone to find out how much TV white spaces spectrum is available at any location, such as your home or office.

Google Earth visualization of available TV whitespace spectrum.

The completion of the trial will bring us all one step closer to freeing up more spectrum, which in turn will help the industry bring new wireless technologies to market and enable people to get wireless Internet access when and where they need it.

How you, and Google, can help prevent identity theft

2013-02-27T17:11:00.001-05:00

Posted by Pablo Chavez, Director, Public Policy

Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission released its annual list of the top categories of consumer complaints received by the agency. In 2012, for the thirteenth year in a row, complaints about identity theft topped the list.

Identity theft has real consequences for consumers. It enables fraudsters to open lines of credit, drain banking, savings, and retirement accounts, file false tax returns, and falsify medical records. Victims often incur significant out-of-pocket expenses, spend considerable time trying to fix the problems created by the theft, and experience emotional stress as they attempt to repair the damage to their lives.

Keeping our users’ information safe and secure is among our highest priorities at Google, and we are continuously adjusting our security practices as threats from identity thieves and account hijackers evolve.

In 2010, we turned SSL encryption on by default for Gmail users to protect their messages from being snooped on by others, and have since extended this security measure to services like Google Search and Google Drive as well. In 2011, we made our 2-step verification service available for all Google Accounts so users could add an extra layer of security and protection to their account.

And as we noted last week when we saw spammers start to focus their attention on breaking into legitimate Google accounts in 2010, our security team further strengthened the Google Account sign-in process. This allowed us to reduce the number of accounts compromised by those specific kinds of attacks by 99.7 percent.

You can read more about how Google helps protect you from identity theft, and steps that you can take to help protect yourself and keep your family safe online on our Good to Know site. We encourage anyone concerned about online safety or identity theft to take five minutes today and do the following:

Make sure you are using strong, unique passwords for each of your important online accounts;
Make sure your account recovery options are up-to-date to help services contact you if there is a problem with your account; and
Turn on 2-step verification for your Google Account.

We’ll continue to work hard to protect our users and help make the Internet a safer place for everyone from threats like identity theft and online fraud. And to keep identity theft from making the consumer complaint list for a fourteenth year in a row, we look forward to working with other companies, NGOs, and the public sector on identifying emerging security threats and improving consumer education efforts.

Let’s defend innovators against patent trolls

2013-02-27T15:37:00.004-05:00

Posted by Suzanne Michel, Senior Patent Counsel

Patent trolls are hurting consumers and small businesses. Patent trolls don’t make anything of value to consumers, but rather extract profits from lawsuits against productive companies. Suits brought by trolls have quadrupled since 2005. They now account for 60% of all patent litigation and are disproportionately targeted at small businesses. In 2011 alone, companies spent $29 billion fighting trolls. That’s money that should have gone towards building great products, or creating hundreds of thousands of jobs.

There is no silver bullet when it comes to solving the troll problem, but Congress and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) are taking steps in the right direction.

The trolls’ weapons of choice—used in 85% of their suits—are software patents, many of which are vague, overbroad and invalid. The PTO should improve patent quality by requiring better descriptions and clearer claims. Today at a PTO-sponsored event in New York, I spoke on how better application of established legal principles can help to curb the issuance of overbroad software patents.

We’ve also been encouraged by the PTO’s new partnership with the software community and its recent call for public comment on improving patent quality. The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice are also looking at the serious threat posed by trolls to both innovation and competition. As President Obama explained in his recent Fireside Hangout, trolls “don't actually produce anything themselves, they're just trying to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else's idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.”

Congress should also make it easier for companies to recover money spent defending against frivolous troll suits. Legislation, such as the bipartisan SHIELD Act re-introduced this week in the House, can do much to reduce troll litigation. And expanding the covered business method program of the America Invents Act to include more patents would create a robust alternative to litigation.

We look forward to continuing to work with the PTO, Congress and the software industry to find ways to improve patent quality, end the growing troll problem, and protect innovation and job growth.

Congress encourages the next generation of computer scientists

2013-02-27T09:24:00.002-05:00

Posted by Susan Molinari, Vice President, Public Policy and Government Affairs

Any student in the country could be the creator of the next big website or the next cool app. That’s why we’re excited that yesterday the House of Representatives passed H. Res. 77, a near-unanimous resolution highlighting the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) — especially computer science — and establishing an annual, nationwide academic competition in these fields.

STEM disciplines are a source of jobs and innovation, and they are necessary for our workforce to match the fast pace of technological change. For example, an estimated 1.4 million new jobs will require computing skills by 2020. Yet the US still lags in this area; only a small percentage of middle schoolers show proficiency in math and science, and only one third of bachelor’s degrees earned in this country are in a STEM field. For this reason, energizing students at an early age is crucial.

The competition established by the House resolution could engage students in various ways. To start, it calls for a challenge to create new apps for a range of platforms. Developing an app is a great way for students to gain hands-on experience in computer science, the next wave of opportunity in today’s economy. As technology advances, the competition may evolve to focus on different fields.

We believe it’s crucial to help kids and teens around the country move from being great consumers of technology to being great creators of technology — and competitions like this one can help drive that evolution. By reaching out to budding technologists in their districts, Members of Congress can foster a deeper enthusiasm for computer science. We hope this opportunity for students to showcase their creativity will spark interest in the STEM fields for years to come.

Apply for a 2013 Google Policy Fellowship

2013-02-20T11:34:00.000-05:00

Posted by Nicklas Lundblad, Director, Public Policy

The Internet policy world is ripe with fascinating issues. From cybercrime to government surveillance and security, to public procurement, trade and open access to information, there has never been a more exciting time to get involved. We’re excited to launch the 6th summer of the Google Policy Fellowship, with new opportunities to work with organizations from Africa, Europe and Latin America in addition to ones in U.S. and Canada. Applications are open today, and students of all levels and disciplines are welcome to apply before March 15, 2013.

Fellows will spend ten weeks this summer working on a broad portfolio of topics at a diverse set of organizations, including:

Africa

ILab Africa

Kofi Annan Centre for Excellence in IT

Europe

Bruegel

ECIPE (European Centre for International Political Economy)

OpenForum Europe (OFE)

The Lisbon Council

Latin America

North America

American Library Association

You can learn about the program, application process and host organizations on the Google Public Policy Fellowship website.

An update on our war against account hijackers

2013-02-19T12:04:00.002-05:00

Posted by Mike Hearn, Google Security Engineer

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Have you ever gotten a plea to wire money to a friend stranded at an international airport? An oddly written message from someone you haven’t heard from in ages? Compared to five years ago, more scams, illegal, fraudulent or spammy messages today come from someone you know. Although spam filters have become very powerful—in Gmail, less than 1 percent of spam emails make it into an inbox—these unwanted messages are much more likely to make it through if they come from someone you’ve been in contact with before. As a result, in 2010 spammers started changing their tactics—and we saw a large increase in fraudulent mail sent from Google Accounts. In turn, our security team has developed new ways to keep you safe, and dramatically reduced the amount of these messages.

Spammers’ new trick—hijacking accounts
To improve their chances of beating a spam filter by sending you spam from your contact’s account, the spammer first has to break into that account. This means many spammers are turning into account thieves. Every day, cyber criminals break into websites to steal databases of usernames and passwords—the online “keys” to accounts. They put the databases up for sale on the black market, or use them for their own nefarious purposes. Because many people re-use the same password across different accounts, stolen passwords from one site are often valid on others.

With stolen passwords in hand, attackers attempt to break into accounts across the web and across many different services. We’ve seen a single attacker using stolen passwords to attempt to break into a million different Google accounts every single day, for weeks at a time. A different gang attempted sign-ins at a rate of more than 100 accounts per second. Other services are often more vulnerable to this type of attack, but when someone tries to log into your Google Account, our security system does more than just check that a password is correct.

Legitimate accounts blocked for sending spam: Our security systems have dramatically reduced the number of Google Accounts used to send spam over the past few years

How Google Security helps protects your account
Every time you sign in to Google, whether via your web browser once a month or an email program that checks for new mail every five minutes, our system performs a complex risk analysis to determine how likely it is that the sign-in really comes from you. In fact, there are more than 120 variables that can factor into how a decision is made.

If a sign-in is deemed suspicious or risky for some reason—maybe it’s coming from a country oceans away from your last sign-in—we ask some simple questions about your account. For example, we may ask for the phone number associated with your account, or for the answer to your security question. These questions are normally hard for a hijacker to solve, but are easy for the real owner. Using security measures like these, we've dramatically reduced the number of compromised accounts by 99.7 percent since the peak of these hijacking attempts in 2011.

Help protect your account
While we do our best to keep spammers at bay, you can help protect your account by making sure you’re using a strong, unique password for your Google Account, upgrading your account to use 2-step verification, and updating the recovery options on your account such as your secondary email address and your phone number. Following these three steps can help prevent your account from being hijacked—this means less spam for your friends and contacts, and improved security and privacy for you.