Public Policy Blog
Updates on technology policy issues
A proud partner in the Workplace Charging Challenge
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Posted by Rolf Schreiber, Technical Program Manager, Electric Transportation
Cross-posted from the
Google Green Blog
At Google, we believe that plug-in vehicles are game-changers in the effort to reduce the carbon footprint of transportation, improve air quality, and increase the adoption of intermittent renewable energy sources. That’s why we’re excited to join the U.S. Department of Energy’s
Workplace Charging Challenge
, an initiative to increase the number of employers offering workplace charging by tenfold in five years.
Google has been dedicated to the
promise of electric vehicles
since 2007, when we outfitted a small fleet of Priuses and Escape Hybrids with homegrown dataloggers and installed an EV solar carport at our HQ in Mountain View. Our employees eagerly adopted the new technology, and we soon launched a corporate carshare program, called
GFleet
. GFleet provides Googlers with a low-carbon transportation option once they get to the office using alternative transportation (for instance, the Google shuttle, walking, biking, or carpooling). To date Googlers have driven GFleet vehicles over a quarter of a million miles.
To support GFleet and encourage Googlers to buy their own plug-ins, Google offers free on campus charging in Mountain View and eight additional office locations in the U.S. Now with more than 300 stations across the country, we’ve built the largest corporate charging infrastructure in the country.
We’re delighted to help drive progress in this space, and invite others to join the charge towards more EV infrastructure, cleaner air, and a sustainable future.
Mapping creates jobs and drives global economic growth
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Posted by Brian McClendon, VP Google Geo
(Cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
)
Twenty years ago, we used paper maps and printed guides to help us navigate the world. Today, the most advanced digital mapping technologies—satellite imagery, GPS devices, location data and of course
Google Maps
—are much more accessible. This sea change in mapping technology is improving our lives and helping businesses realize untold efficiencies.
The transformation of the maps we use everyday is driven by a growing industry that creates jobs and economic growth globally. To present a clearer picture of the importance of the geo services industry, we commissioned studies from
Boston Consulting Group
(BCG) and
Oxera
. What we found is that maps make a big economic splash around the world.
In summary, the global geo services industry is valued at up to $270 billion per year and pays out $90 billion in wages. In the U.S., it employs more than 500,000 people and is worth $73 billion. The infographic below illustrates some examples of the many benefits of maps, whether it’s improving agriculture irrigation systems or helping emergency response teams save lives.
Click the image for a larger version
1.1 billion hours of travel time saved each year? That’s a lot of time. Also, consider
UPS
, which uses map technology to optimize delivery routes—saving 5.3 million miles and more than 650,000 gallons of fuel in 2011. And every eight seconds, a user hails a taxi with
Hailo
, which used maps and GPS to deliver more than 1 million journeys in London alone last year. Finally,
Zipcar
uses maps to connect more than 760,000 customers to a growing fleet of cars in locations around the world.
Because maps are such an integral part of how we live and do business, the list of examples goes on and on. That’s why it’s important we all understand the need to invest in the geo services industry so it continues to grow and drive the global economy. Investments can come from the public and private sectors in many forms—product innovation, support of open data policies, more geography education programs in schools and more.
We’re proud of the contributions that
Google Maps
and
Earth
, the
Google Maps APIs
and our
Enterprise solutions
have made to the geo services industry and to making maps more widely available, but there’s a long way to go. To learn more about the impact of the maps industry, see the
full reports
.
Google supports high-skilled immigration reform
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Posted by Laszlo Bock,
Senior Vice President, People Operations
We have
spoken out
in the past about the valuable contributions highly skilled immigrants have made at Google. From developing products like
Google News
and
Google Maps
to managing our business and global marketing operations, talented foreign-born individuals have played and will continue to play a vital role at Google and throughout our economy.
Our experiences here at Google and in the tech sector show us that immigrants to the U.S. are a powerful force for entrepreneurship and innovation at every level, from startups to multinational corporations.
I
mmigrants have founded 40 percent of companies in the tech sector that were financed by venture capital and went on to become public in the U.S., among them Yahoo, eBay, Intel, and Google.
And according to a recent
Kauffman Foundation study
, nearly a quarter of the engineering and technology companies founded in the U.S. between 2006 and 2012 had at least one key founder who was foreign-born. In 2012, these companies employed roughly 560,000 workers and generated $63 billion in sales.
Still, at a time when the U.S. economy needs it most, our immigration policies are stifling innovation. The 2013 cap for the H-1B visas that allow foreign high skilled talent to work temporarily in the U.S. was exhausted by
June 2012
, preventing tech companies from recruiting some of the world’s brightest minds. Additionally, the severe backlog of green card applications has forced many foreign-born, U.S. educated entrepreneurs to look elsewhere to start their businesses. Other countries, like
Chile
and
Canada
, have responded with immigration policies and programs that welcome these innovators who have been turned away from the U.S.
This is why we strongly support the bipartisan efforts being made to reform our high skilled immigration laws. We look forward to working with Congress and the Obama Administration to ensure that talented individuals will continue to innovate in the U.S. - a critical part of getting the economy back on track and making it stronger for the long-run.
Show off Your Security Skills: Pwn2Own and Pwnium 3
Monday, January 28, 2013
Posted by Chris Evans, Google Chrome Security Team
(Cross-posted from the
Google Chromium Blog
)
Security is one of the core tenets of Chrome, but no software is perfect, and security bugs slip through even the best development and review processes. That’s why we’ve continued to engage with the security research community to help us find and fix vulnerabilities. Recently, HP’s
Zero Day Initiative
(ZDI) announced details for the annual
Pwn2Own competition
, to be held at the
CanSecWest
security conference taking place March 6-8 in Vancouver, BC. This year we’ve teamed up with ZDI by working together on the Pwn2Own rules and by underwriting a portion of the winnings for all targets. The new rules are designed to enable a contest that significantly improves Internet security for everyone. At the same time, the best researchers in the industry get to showcase their skills and take home some generous rewards.
Today we’re announcing our third Pwnium competition—Pwnium 3. Google Chrome is already featured in the Pwn2Own competition this year, so Pwnium 3 will have a new focus: Chrome OS.
We’ll issue Pwnium 3 rewards for Chrome OS at the following levels, up to a total of $3.14159 million USD:
$110,000: browser or system level compromise in guest mode or as a logged-in user, delivered via a web page.
$150,000: compromise with device persistence -- guest to guest with interim reboot, delivered via a web page.
We believe these larger rewards reflect the additional challenge involved with tackling the security defenses of Chrome OS, compared to traditional operating systems.
The attack must be demonstrated against a base (WiFi) model of the Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook, running the latest stable version of Chrome OS. Any installed software (including the kernel and drivers, etc.) may be used to attempt the attack. For those without access to a physical device, note that the
Chromium OS developer’s guide
offers assistance on getting up and running inside a virtual machine.
Standard Pwnium rules apply: the deliverable is the full exploit plus accompanying explanation and breakdown of individual bugs used. Exploits should be served from a password-authenticated and HTTPS-supported Google property, such as Google App Engine. The bugs used must not be known to us or fixed on trunk. We reserve the right to issue partial rewards for partial, incomplete or unreliable exploits.
Pwnium 3 will take place on-site at the CanSecWest conference on March 7.
Google’s approach to government requests for user data
Monday, January 28, 2013
Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer
(Cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
)
Today, January 28, is Data Privacy Day, when the world recognizes the importance of preserving your online privacy and security.
If it’s like most other days, Google—like many companies that provide online services to users—will receive dozens of letters, faxes and emails from government agencies and courts around the world requesting access to our users’ private account information. Typically this happens in connection with government investigations.
It’s important for law enforcement agencies to pursue illegal activity and keep the public safe. We’re a law-abiding company, and we don’t want our services to be used in harmful ways. But it’s just as important that laws protect you against overly broad requests for your personal information.
To strike this balance, we’re focused on three initiatives that I’d like to share, so you know what Google is doing to protect your privacy and security.
First, for several years we have advocated for updating laws like the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, so the same protections that apply to your personal documents that you keep in your home also apply to your email and online documents. We’ll continue this effort strongly in 2013 through our membership in the
Digital Due Process
coalition and other initiatives.
Second, we’ll continue our long-standing strict process for handling these kinds of requests. When government agencies ask for our users’ personal information—like what you provide when you sign up for a Google Account, or the contents of an email—our team does several things:
We scrutinize the request carefully to make sure it satisfies the law and our policies. For us to consider complying, it generally must be made in writing, signed by an authorized official of the requesting agency and issued under an appropriate law.
We evaluate the scope of the request. If it’s overly broad, we may refuse to provide the information or
seek to narrow the request
. We do this frequently.
We notify users about legal demands when appropriate so that they can contact the entity requesting it or consult a lawyer. Sometimes we can’t, either because we’re legally prohibited (in which case we sometimes seek to lift gag orders or unseal search warrants) or we don’t have their verified contact information.
We require that government agencies conducting criminal investigations use a search warrant to compel us to provide a user’s search query information and private content stored in a Google Account—such as Gmail messages, documents, photos and YouTube videos. We believe a warrant is required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure and overrides conflicting provisions in ECPA.
And third, we work hard to provide you with information about government requests. Today, for example, we’ve added a new
section
to our Transparency Report that answers many questions you might have. And last week we released
data
showing that government requests continue to rise, along with additional details on the U.S. legal processes—such as subpoenas, court orders and warrants—that government use to compel us to provide this information.
We’re proud of our approach, and we believe it’s the right way to make sure governments can pursue legitimate investigations while we do our best to protect your privacy and security.
Transparency Report: What it takes for governments to access personal information
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Posted by Richard Salgado, Legal Director, Law Enforcement and Information Security
Today we’re releasing new data for the
Transparency Report
, showing that the steady increase in government requests for our users’ data continued in the second half of 2012, as usage of our services continued to grow. We’ve shared figures like this
since 2010
because it’s important for people to understand how government actions affect them.
We’re always looking for ways to make the report even more informative. So for the first time we’re now
including
a breakdown of the kinds of legal process that government entities in the U.S. use when compelling communications and technology companies to hand over user data. From July through December 2012:
68 percent of the requests Google received from government entities in the U.S. were through subpoenas. These are requests for user-identifying information, issued under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA”), and are the easiest to get because they typically don’t involve judges.
22 percent were through ECPA search warrants. These are, generally speaking, orders issued by judges under ECPA, based on a demonstration of “probable cause” to believe that certain information related to a crime is presently in the place to be searched.
The remaining 10 percent were mostly court orders issued under ECPA by judges or other processes that are difficult to categorize.
User data requests of all kinds have increased by more than 70 percent since 2009, as you can see in our new visualizations of overall trends. In total, we received 21,389 requests for information about 33,634 users from July through December 2012.
We’ll keep looking for more ways to inform you about government requests and how we handle them. We hope more companies and governments themselves join us in this effort by releasing similar kinds of data.
One last thing: You may have noticed that the latest Transparency Report doesn’t include new data on
content removals
. That’s because we’ve decided to release those numbers separately going forward. Stay tuned for that data.
Promoting civic innovation through technology
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Posted by Matthew Stepka, VP, Google.org
Cross-posted from the
Google.org blog
The Internet is redefining citizenship in the 21st century. Technology is helping people to connect, engage, and contribute to society and each other like never before.
We’ve seen developers use our
Civic Information API
to bring election data to citizens in new and exciting ways. Our live election results maps have been viewed by billions around the world, bringing real-time transparency to elections in Egypt, Mexico, Ghana, and more. Last week, we launched the
Kenya Elections Hub
for citizens to access the latest news and resources for the country’s presidential election.
Beyond elections, technology can improve everyday civic life: the way we connect, engage, access and act on critical government information. Worldwide, organizations are developing new ways to encourage more open and innovative societies. Google.org is supporting two of these leaders--the
Sunlight Foundation
and
mySociety
--and their work on tech solutions for civic innovation.
We are providing $2.1 million to the Sunlight Foundation to grow their programs for open government data, with a focus on making civic information for U.S. cities transparent, available, and useable. By opening up information at the city level for developers as well as citizens, Sunlight is creating opportunity for new ideas that can have an impact in local markets.
We are also supporting mySociety, providing $1.6 million to build a global platform to equip developers with tools and resources--such as open source code--to more easily and quickly launch new civic apps and services. This initiative can promote collaboration between civic-minded technologists, regardless of geography. For example, a civic app created in Finland might be easily replicated 9,000 miles away by a developer in Chile.
Both organizations are working to bring together a larger community--governments, developers, companies, nonprofits, and citizens--with an interest in improving societies. By creating these open platforms today, we can open doors to ambitious new solutions in the future.
The Federal Trade Commission closes its antitrust review
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission today announced it has closed its investigation into Google after an exhaustive 19-month review that covered millions of pages of documents and involved many hours of testimony. The conclusion is clear: Google’s services are good for users and good for competition.
Larry and Sergey founded Google because they believed that building a great search experience would improve people’s lives. And in the decade-plus that’s followed, Google has worked hard to make it quicker and easier for users to find what they need. In the early days you would type in a query, we’d return 10 blue links and you’d have to click on them individually to find what you wanted. Today we can save you the hassle by providing direct answers to your questions, as well as links to other sites. So if you type in [weather san francisco], or [tom hanks movies], we now give you the answer right from the results page—because truly great search is all about turning your needs into actions in the blink of an eye.
As we made clear when the FTC started its investigation, we’ve always been open to improvements that would create a better experience. And today we’ve
written
(PDF) to the FTC making two voluntary product changes:
More choice for websites
: Websites can already
opt out of
Google Search, and they can now remove content (for example reviews) from specialized search results pages, such as local, travel and shopping;
More ad campaign control
: Advertisers can already
export their ad campaigns
from Google AdWords. They will now be able to mix and copy ad campaign data within third-party services that use our AdWords API.
In addition, we’ve
agreed with the FTC
(PDF) that we will seek to resolve standard-essential patent disputes through a neutral third party before seeking injunctions. This agreement establishes clear rules of the road for standards essential patents going forward.
We’ve always accepted that with success comes regulatory scrutiny. But we’re pleased that the FTC and the other authorities that have looked at Google's business practices—including the U.S. Department of Justice (in its
ITA Software
review), the U.S. courts (in the
SearchKing
and
Kinderstart
cases), and the Brazilian courts (in a
case last year
)—have concluded that we should be free to combine direct answers with web results. So we head into 2013 excited about our ability to innovate for the benefit of users everywhere.
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