Google releases Dashboard privacy tool
Nov/09BC
Source: CNN
(CNN) — Ever wonder what information Google knows about you? With a click or two, now you can find out.
Google released a feature Thursday that lets users see and control data that the Web giant has collected about them. Called Google Dashboard, the service provides an online summary of a user’s Google files — Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa photos and so on — by collecting pre-existing privacy controls in one place.
Dashboard users can review and delete recent Google searches, see recently opened and shared documents and survey their interactions with other Google-powered sites such as YouTube.
Google, which has come under fire from politicians and privacy advocates for its data-collection practices, announced the service with a blog post headlined, “Transparency, Choice and Control — now complete with a Dashboard!”
“Over the past 11 years, Google has focused on building innovative products for our users,” the company said in its official blog on Thursday. “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.”
The advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, which has been critical of the amount of personal data Google stores, called the dashboard a small step in the right direction.
Read more of the article at cnn.com.
What Happens To Your Facebook After You Die?
Oct/09BC
In an Oct. 26 blog post, Max Kelly, Facebook’s head of security, announced the company’s policy of “memorializing” profiles of users who have died, taking them out of the public search results, sealing them from any future log-in attempts and leaving the wall open for family and friends to pay their respects. Though most media reports claimed this was a new Facebook feature, a spokeswoman for the company told TIME that it’s an option the site has had since its early days.
Read more of the article at: CNN.com.
GeoCities closes down today
Oct/09BC
The day has finally happened, GeoCities was shut down by Yahoo. Play that one last midi horn file for them.
Sadly it went down slightly unnoticed, many young web designers have once used this site to share with world what ever their hearts desired, it was the most significant virtual museum on the internet.
GeoCities allowed anyone to build a custom web page for free and reserved a small amount of virtual storage to keep pictures and documents.
It was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet.
Practically every facet of our culture was documented and thanks to search engines, easily accessible, now today all of those documents are disappeared. GeoCites stopped accepting new accounts at the beginning of this year. Existing users could continue to update their pages and save sites to a personal hard drive in advance of the impending closure. Yahoo is encouraging the relatively few remaining users to transition their accounts to the company’s $5-per-month Web hosting service.
Read more of the story at Latimes.com.