Advertisers spend heaps of cash on branding, bannering, and product-placing. But does anyone really look at those ads? Google could be betting that advertisers will pay to know whether consumers are actually looking at their billboards, magazine spreads, and online ads. The company was just granted a patent for "pay-per-gaze" advertising, which would employ a Google Glass-like eye sensor in order to identify when consumers are looking at advertisements in the real world and online.
Google Eye Tracker: Watching You Watch Them
And you thought tracking your browser and search history was intrusive! From The Verge:
Google Goes Offline, Internet Traffic Drops 40%
What did you do during the blackout? From The Register:
The event began at approximately 4:37pm Pacific Time and lasted between one and five minutes, according to the Google Apps Dashboard. All of the Google Apps services reported being back online by 4:48pm.
The incident apparently blacked out every service Mountain View has to offer simultaneously, from Google Search to Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and beyond.
Big deal, right? Everyone has technical difficulties every once in a while. It goes with the territory.
But then, not everyone is Google. According to web analytics firm GoSquared, worldwide internet traffic dipped by a stunning 40 per cent during the brief minutes that the Chocolate Factory's services were offline.
Depressed? Get Off Facebook
Concerned about your privacy? You should probably logout of Facebook. Concerned about your mental health and well being? You should probably logout of Facebook. From the BBC:
Using Facebook can reduce young adults' sense of well-being and satisfaction with life, a study has found. Checking Facebook made people feel worse about both issues, and the more they browsed, the worse they felt, the University of Michigan research said. The study, which tracked participants for two weeks, adds to a growing body of research saying Facebook can have negative psychological consequences.
Facebook has more than a billion members and half log in daily. "On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it," said the researchers.
Microsoft Sends DMCA Takedown Notices for Links to Open Source Competitors
From Torrent Freak:
Every week copyright holders send millions of DMCA takedown notices to Google in the hope of making pirated content harder to find. Microsoft has been one of the most active senders and over the past month alone has asked Google to remove more than a million infringing URLs from its indexes. In addition the software giant also strips infringing links from its own search engine Bing.
While most of the submitted URLs do indeed link to infringing content, not all requests sent by Microsoft and other copyright holders are correct. Their often automated anti-piracy systems regularly trigger notices that include links to perfectly legitimate content, sometimes from direct competitors.
The latter happened with several recent DMCA takedown requests sent to Google on behalf of Microsoft. The notices, which contain references to unauthorized copies of Microsoft Office, also list many links to Apache’s open source office suite, OpenOffice . . .
Google: No Expectation of Privacy in Gmail Emails
From Slate:
If you happen to be one of the 400 million people who use Google's Gmail service for sending and receiving emails, you shouldn't have any expectation of privacy, according to a court briefing obtained by the Consumer Watchdog website. In a motion filed last month by Google to have a class action complaint dismissed, Google's lawyers reference a 1979 ruling, holding that people who turn over information to third parties shouldn't expect that information to remain private.
Users Scramble to Download Pirate Bay's Anti-Censorship Browser
From Torrent Freak:
Within three days of its launch The Pirate Bay’s PirateBrowser, which allows people to bypass ISP filtering and access blocked websites, has already been downloaded more than 100,000 times. The Pirate Bay team say they never expected the browser to catch on this quickly, while noting that they are determined to provide more anti-censorship tools.
On the occasion of its 10th anniversary last Saturday, The Pirate Bay sent out a gift to its users – the PirateBrowser. Blocked by court orders all over the world, Pirate Bay is arguably the most censored website on the Internet. The PirateBrowser software allows people to bypass these restrictions.
It appears that the browser idea is right on the money. New statistics revealed today show that blocked users have been downloading the tool en masse . . .
Mega Encrypted Email Service in Progress
From ZDNet:
Kim Dotcom's "privacy company" Mega is developing secure email services to run on its entirely non-US-based server network as intense pressure from US authorities forces other providers to close.
Last week, Lavabit, which counted NSA leaker Edward Snowdon as a user, and Silent Circle both closed. Lavabit's owner, Ladar Levison, said he was shutting it down to avoid becoming "complicit in crimes against the American people".
Last week, Mega chief executive Vikram Kumar told ZDNet that the company was being asked to deliver secure email and voice services. In the wake of the closures, he expanded on his plans.
Kumar said work is in progress, building off the end-to-end encryption and contacts functionality already working for documents in Mega.
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