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Posted by Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy
Counsel, and Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel

Because we're strongly committed to protecting your privacy, we
want to present our privacy practices in the clearest way possible.
Over the past year, we've been experimenting with video to
clarify and illustrate the privacy practices set forth in our
Google Privacy Policy. We've used videos to communicate with
you about things like cookies, IP addresses, and logs. (Check out
the Google
Privacy Channel on YouTube.) And you've told us that the
screen shots, whiteboard drawings, and pointers from the engineers
and product managers we've captured on video are helping you
better understand the fine points of our Privacy Policy.

With that in mind, today we're announcing a revamp of our href="http://www.google.com/privacy" id="hhl2" >Privacy Center.
The new Center is a one-stop shop for privacy resources, with
various multi-media formats aimed to help you further understand
how we store and use data, how to control who you share your data
with, and how we protect your privacy. We hope this new Center will
help you make more informed privacy choices whenever you use Google
products and services.

Tags: , Counsel, Horvath, Jane, Peter, Posted, Privacy, Senior

Posted by Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy
Counsel

In order to give you the best possible information about the
privacy settings for our products, we asked the engineers and
product managers who actually designed them to explain how they
work in href="http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FCEE46AA997A23D9" >a
series of new videos we released today on our href="http://www.youtube.com/googleprivacy" id="n-48"
>YouTube Privacy Channel.
These videos feature Googlers sharing privacy tips, like how to use
Google Chat’s “Off the Record” feature, how to limit the number of
people who can view your Picasa photos, how to unlist your phone
number from Google search results, and how to make the details of
your Google Calendar entries private.

Just as we’re dedicated to innovation when it comes to making
better, more useful products, we’re also committed to finding new
ways to educate you about how to control what information you share
when using our products, and with whom. This series, along with the
other videos on our YouTube Privacy Channel, are part of this
awareness-raising effort. So watch the videos (including our very
own blooper reel) and href="http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?form_type=user&stage=fm&user_type=user&contact_type=privacy&hl=en"
id="dc3s" >tell us what you think. And
we'll be adding new videos to the Privacy Channel now and
again, so be sure to check back.

Tags: , CounselIn, Horvath, Jane, order, Posted, Privacy, Senior

Posted by Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy
Counsel;
Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel; and Shuman Ghosemajumder,
Business Product Manager for Trust and Safety

Last year, the Council of Europe had a great idea. Based on polling
that showed that 70% of Europeans did not understand how their
personal data was being protected, the Council decided to hold the
first annual Data Protection Day on January 28, 2007. Privacy
experts visited schools and universities, launched information
campaigns, and held press conferences in locations throughout
Europe, informing and educating consumers about their personal data
rights and protections.

Lack of understanding about data protection on the Internet is not
only a European issue, it's a global one. As more and more
personal information comes online every day, it's increasingly
important that users all over the world understand both the
benefits and potential risks of online data sharing, and the tools
at their disposal to control and manage the data they share online.
In recognition of the global importance of data protection, the
U.S. and Canada have joined 27 European countries to celebrate href="https://www.privacyassociation.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1329&Itemid=138" >
Data Privacy Day 2008 this Monday, January 28th.

As part of the day's events, we'll join legal scholars,
privacy professionals, and government officials from Europe and the
U.S. at an international data privacy href="http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/ces/" id="tn3n" >conference being
held at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. We'll also
contribute to efforts to raise awareness and promote understanding
of data privacy issues by releasing the third href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=XfZLztx8cKI" id="q5nq" >video
in our privacy series ("Google Privacy: A Look at
Cookies") on our

href="http://www.youtube.com/user/googleprivacy" id="fsfg" >YouTube
Privacy Channel. This video offers a closer look at how
cookies work and how web sites and advertisers use them to
personalize our online experiences. We've also developed a
href="https://services.google.com/blog_resources/google_privacy_booklet.pdf"
id="q9sg" >privacy booklet (pdf-web version
coming soon!) that you can download to get an in-depth look at our
privacy practices and approach, and have co-sponsored the creation
of href="https://www.privacyassociation.org/images/stories/pdfs/DPD08_TeenPrivacyOnline_slides.pdf"
id="k:u1" >educational materials on teen online privacy for
parents and educators. The goal of all these efforts is to help
educate you about online data privacy so that you can make more
informed choices about how you use online products and
services.

We hope that you'll take a few minutes on Monday to learn
something new, and that Data Privacy Day reinforces existing global
efforts to educate consumers about online data collection, use, and
protection. height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , Counsel, Horvath, Jane, Peter, Posted, Privacy, Senior

Posted by Jane Horvath, Senior Privacy
Counsel

Online privacy isn’t always an easy thing to understand—or to
explain. When I recently joined the company, I was happy to learn
that Google was continuing with the effort to make our privacy
practices (and your choices) even clearer and more accessible. We
are using YouTube to post videos that explain how, when, and why we
collect information about searches, and how you can protect your
privacy while using our search engine.

If you watched the href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLgJYBRzUXY" >first privacy
video, you href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/google-search-privacy-plain-and-simple.html" >
learned about some of the information we collect (IP addresses,
cookies, and search queries) and how we use this information to
improve your search experience as well as prevent against fraud and
other abuses. We appreciated all of the feedback we got in response
to the first video.

In response to your requests for more detailed information, in our
second video we're offering a closer look at personalization
and the privacy tools available when you choose to personalize your
search. Personalization has been an area that raises concerns about
privacy, and we want you to understand how we personalize search
results while protecting your privacy.

As the video explains, search algorithms that are designed to take
your personal preferences into account, including the things you
search for and the sites you visit, have better odds of delivering
useful results for you. So if you’ve been checking out sites about
the Louvre and you search for [Paris], you’re more likely to get
results about the French capital than the celebrity heiress. The
privacy tools we’ve designed — such as “pause” and “remove” buttons
— help put you in control of personalization.

So sit back, take a look, and then href="http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?form_type=user&stage=fm&user_type=user&contact_type=privacy&hl=en" >
tell us what you think about this video (and the earlier one
too). We look forward to hearing from you.

height="1" width="1" />

Tags: , CounselOnline, Horvath, Jane, Posted, Privacy, Senior