Author Archives: David Graff
Announcing the new Transparency Center
Source: The Official Google Blog
Helping high-risk users stay safe online
Helping people stay safe online is our top priority. That’s why we design our products with built-in protections and invest in global teams and operations to prevent abuse on our platforms.
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in cybersecurity threats, especially for individuals and groups that tend to be at higher risk for online attacks, such as activists, journalists, election and campaign officials, and people working in public life. To help anyone at risk, we’re making our strongest security protections easily accessible and sharing more details about the best tools, tips, and resources people can use to protect themselves online.
- Enrolling in our Advanced Protection Program: We have dedicated teams of security professionals responsible for detecting and disrupting cyber threats to protect people all over the world. We have invested in advanced security solutions like our Advanced Protection Program (APP), which helps safeguard users from digital attacks, including sophisticated phishing attacks (through the use of security keys), malware and other malicious downloads on Chrome and Android, and unauthorized access to personal account data (such as Gmail, Drive, and Photos). APP is available to all users, but is specifically designed for individuals and organizations such as elected officials, political campaigns, human rights activists, and journalists, who are at higher risk of targeted online attacks.
- Keeping Google accounts secure and private: Our Security Checkup gives people personalized security recommendations and flags actions they should take to immediately secure their Google account. Additionally, Privacy Checkup provides helpful reminders of what activity is being saved, which third-party apps have permission to access user data, and the option to adjust user settings with simple controls. Both checkups take people through a step-by-step process to customize their security and privacy controls based on their individual preferences.
- Helping you control your online presence: On Google Search, we offer a set of policies and tools to help people take more control over how their sensitive, personally-identifiable information can be found. With the new Results about you tool, users can quickly and easily request the removal of personal contact information—like their home address, email address, or phone number—from search results. We also have a set of policies to allow people to request the removal of other types of highly personal content from Search that can cause direct harm, such as in cases of doxxing or information like bank account or credit card numbers that could be used for financial fraud. (It’s important to remember that removing content from Google Search won’t remove it from the internet entirely, so people may wish to contact the hosting site directly, if they’re comfortable doing so.)
- Making sign-ins more secure: We make signing into Google and user apps and services secure by default. We offer tools like Google Password Manager to help people create unique passwords, warn them if they’re compromised, and stop them from being entered into a malicious site. We also continue to encourage the adoption of 2-Step Verification (2SV), which provides an extra layer of sign-in security across a user’s account. And we’re always innovating new ways to make sign-ins safer and less painful.
- Exploring the online world safely: To help people stay safe and secure when browsing the web, especially on public or free WiFi, we recommend using Chrome and ensuring there is a gray locked icon in the URL field indicating a secure connection. Users should make sure the sites they visit utilize HTTPS, which indicates the browser or app is securely connected to the website they’re visiting. We also encourage people to use Chrome or Google Drive before downloading documents or opening suspicious email attachments. Both will automatically scan for viruses and make sure users are not being targeted by a phishing campaign.
We will continue to bring our strongest security protections to those who need them most, and build new tools that keep everyone, everywhere, safer. Visit our Safety Center to learn more.
Source: The Official Google Blog
Our Content Removal Transparency Report for January to June 2021
Courts and government agencies around the world regularly require that we remove content and information from various Google services like Google Search and YouTube.
We review these demands carefully to determine if the content that is the subject of the request violates a specific local legal requirement. Because we value access to information, we work to minimize over-reaching removals whenever possible by seeking to narrow the scope of government demands and ensure that they are authorized by relevant laws.
For over a decade, we’ve also published a transparency report on Government Requests for Content Removal. This report includes only demands made by governments and courts. We report separately on requests by private actors under content-removal systems established by various governments such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States or the Right to be Forgotten included in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU.
Over the years, as use of our services has grown, our transparency report shows a rise in the number of government demands for content removal – as to both the volume of requests that we receive and the number of individual items of content we are asked to remove. Today’s transparency report, covering January to June 2021, represents the highest volumes we’ve seen on both measures to date.
January - June 2021 Data
Top countries by volume of requests:
- Russia
- India
- South Korea
- Turkey
- Pakistan
- Brazil
- United States
- Australia
- Vietnam
- Indonesia
Top countries by volume of items:
- Indonesia
- Russia
- Kazakhstan
- Pakistan
- South Korea
- India
- Vietnam
- United States
- Turkey
- Brazil
See the full report here.
As research by organizations like Freedom House makes clear, all online platforms are seeing a similar trend.
We’re also seeing a significant increase in the number of laws that require information to be removed from online services. These laws vary by country and region, and require the removal of content on a very wide range of issues – from hate speech to adult content and obscenity, to medical misinformation, to privacy and intellectual property violations.
Many of these laws seek to protect people online and align with Google's own platform policies and community guidelines that help ensure people have a good experience while they are using our services. But laws in some countries can also go significantly beyond those policies, affecting access to information on a range of topics.
Coupled with this, we’ve also seen new laws that impose individual liability on local employees for actions taken by a company offering online services. These types of laws have drawn concern from organizations like the Global Network Initiative because individuals can be pressured, prosecuted, and held personally liable, even when they are not responsible for the content decisions of the company they work for.
While content removal and local representative laws are often associated with repressive regimes, they are increasingly not limited to such nations. Findings from entities like the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), our own transparency report data, and any survey of international laws introduced over the past few years all point to the fact that we are likely to continue to see a rise in these types of laws across more countries around the world.
Source: The Official Google Blog
An update to our AdWords policy on lending products
Source: Google Public Policy Blog
An update to our AdWords policy on lending products
When ads are good, they connect people to interesting, useful brands, businesses and products. Unfortunately, not all ads are — some are for fake or harmful products, or seek to mislead users about the businesses they represent. We have an extensive set of policies to keep bad ads out of our systems — in fact in 2015 alone, we disabled more than 780 million ads for reasons ranging from counterfeiting to phishing. Ads for financial services are a particular area of vigilance given how core they are to people’s livelihood and well being.
In that vein, today we’re sharing an update that will go into effect on July 13, 2016: we’re banning ads for payday loans and some related products from our ads systems. We will no longer allow ads for loans where repayment is due within 60 days of the date of issue. In the U.S., we are also banning ads for loans with an APR of 36% or higher. When reviewing our policies, research has shown that these loans can result in unaffordable payment and high default rates for users so we will be updating our policies globally to reflect that.This change is designed to protect our users from deceptive or harmful financial products and will not affect companies offering loans such as Mortgages, Car Loans, Student Loans, Commercial loans, Revolving Lines of Credit (e.g. Credit Cards).
According to Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, "This new policy addresses many of the longstanding concerns shared by the entire civil rights community about predatory payday lending. These companies have long used slick advertising and aggressive marketing to trap consumers into outrageously high interest loans — often those least able to afford it."
We’ll continue to review the effectiveness of this policy, but our hope is that fewer people will be exposed to misleading or harmful products.