Google Europe Blog: May 2010

Google@Thought: The Alhambra, symmetries and the beauty of mathematics

Monday, May 31, 2010

As everyone involved in lobbying will know, public policy discussions can often be very technical, quickly getting down to nuts and bolts. In this environment, one of the biggest challenges lobbyists face is to make sure that the ideals and activities of the companies we represent are also fully reflected in the conversations we have.

At Google Brussels, we have developed a complementary approach: our Google@Thought seminar series. In these talks, we do not focus on upcoming legislation or the debates of the day, but instead go back to Google’s roots as a company that finds inspiration in the exploration of ideas and concepts.

Our first Google@Thought speaker was Professor Marcus du Sautoy, who told the story of how he discovered the language of symmetry at the age of twelve and fell in love with mathematics as a result. Today, Marcus is the University of Oxford’s Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.

“Symmetry is present everywhere in nature,” Marcus explains. “It is used by all organisms, from viruses upwards. Take bees: they have very bad vision and can’t see colours. But they excel at detecting the symmetry of a flower. Symmetry means sustenance to them. For flowers, it means reproductive success. Symmetry is the tool that bonds bees and flowers, the language they use to communicate.”

Marcus illustrates his exploration of the language of symmetry with reference to Japanese aesthetics, Bach’s Goldberg variations and to the beauty and perfection of the Moorish decorations at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. Today, we know that the Alhambra’s designs represent all seventeen mathematically possible kinds of symmetry that can be drawn on a plane - an incredible achievement given the Alhambra was completed in 1391!

You can watch the highlights of Professor Du Sautoy’s Google@Thought seminar on YouTube.

Posted by Simon Hampton, Director of European Public Policy, and a former mathematician ;-)

WiFi data collection: An update

Friday, May 14, 2010

Update June 9, 2010:

When we announced three weeks ago that we had mistakenly included code in our software that collected samples of payload data from WiFi networks, we said we would ask a third party to review the software at issue, how it worked, and what data it gathered. That report, by the security consulting firm Stroz Friedberg, is now complete and was sent to the interested data protection authorities today. In short, it confirms that Google did indeed collect and store payload data from unencrypted WiFi networks, but not from networks that were encrypted. You can read the report here. We are continuing to work with the relevant authorities to respond to their questions and concerns.

Update May 17, 2010:

On Friday May 14 the Irish Data Protection Authority asked us to delete the payload data we collected in error in Ireland. We can confirm that all data identified as being from Ireland was deleted over the weekend in the presence of an independent third party. We are reaching out to Data Protection Authorities in the other relevant countries about how to dispose of the remaining data as quickly as possible.

You can read the letter from the independent third party, confirming deletion, here.
Nine days ago the data protection authority (DPA) in Hamburg, Germany asked to audit the WiFi data that our Street View cars collect for use in location-based products like Google Maps for mobile, which enables people to find local restaurants or get directions. His request prompted us to re-examine everything we have been collecting, and during our review we discovered that a statement made in a blog post on April 27 was incorrect.

In that blog post, and in a technical note sent to data protection authorities the same day, we said that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.

However, we will typically have collected only fragments of payload data because: our cars are on the move; someone would need to be using the network as a car passed by; and our in-car WiFi equipment automatically changes channels roughly five times a second. In addition, we did not collect information traveling over secure, password-protected WiFi networks.

So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.

As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it.

Maintaining people’s trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short. So we will be:

Asking a third party to review the software at issue, how it worked and what data it gathered, as well as to confirm that we deleted the data appropriately; and
Internally reviewing our procedures to ensure that our controls are sufficiently robust to address these kinds of problems in the future.

In addition, given the concerns raised, we have decided that it’s best to stop our Street View cars collecting WiFi network data entirely.

This incident highlights just how publicly accessible open, non-password-protected WiFi networks are today. Earlier this year, we encrypted Gmail for all our users, and next week we will start offering an encrypted version of Google Search. For other services users can check that pages are encrypted by looking to see whether the URL begins with “https”, rather than just “http”; browsers will generally show a lock icon when the connection is secure. For more information about how to password-protect your network, read this.

The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust—and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering & Research

Cross posted from the Official Google Blog

A Polish Internet Revolution

Monday, May 10, 2010

Poland is one of the few countries that is emerging from Europe’s financial crisis relatively unscathed. While many European Union members struggle to raise funds, Poland’s zloty remains stable and interest rates low.

During my recent visit, my former Dow Jones colleague, now Bloomberg bureau chief Dennis McQuaid, told me how the government just had sold off a large state-owned insurance company – and the offering was seven times oversubscribed, making it the country’s biggest ever IPO. Poland’s economy has kept growing and the streets of Warsaw bustle with well-dressed shoppers and the clatter of construction.

Personally, this success is gratifying. As a journalist, I covered Poland during the 1980s when it laboured under communism. Stores were empty then. But the Polish spirit amazed me – how a courageous people could undertake a successful non-violent, spiritually-based, worker- and intellectual-led revolution. In 1989, I watched some Solidarity supporters set up the country’s first free newspaper in a day care centre. It was called Gazeta Wyborcza.

Today, Gazeta Wyborcza is Poland’s top paper, part of the giant Agora group. It operates out of an airy, sparkling, shiny steel headquarters building. Grzegorz Piechota, the paper’s special projects editor, presented an upbeat outlook for the future. While Gazeta hasn’t escaped the pain of the transition online, it has embraced the web, starting dozens of sites targeted to different audiences, from teenage girls to senior citizens. “We know we have no choice except to move online,” Piechota said.

For Google, Poland represents a successful laboratory for bringing business online. Nimble, small, family owned companies dominate the economy. Yet most have little or no online presence. While four in every five consumers are searching for information online about products and services, a Google-sponsored study last year showed that fewer than half of small Polish businesses have any online presence.

In order to get Poland online, we launched an Internet Revolution campaign at the end of last year, supported by the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The program offers advice on how Polish companies could get online using both Google and non-Google tools, including a free package to help them establish a web domain, create a website and launch their first domestic or international online advertising campaign.

The success of this initiative has exceeded our expectations. Last week, we announced at a press conference that over 10,000 small entrepreneurs had signed up. The Polish economy may ‘only’ rank 21st globally, but it’s clear that the country has a healthy appetite for making the internet an integral part of doing business and driving growth for the future.

Posted by Bill Echikson, Head of Communications, South, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa

TechTalk: Search Quality

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Google’s Search Quality team is responsible for the ranking of Google search results.Their job is clear: A few hundreds of millions of times a day people will ask Google questions, and within a fraction of a second Google needs to decide which among the billions of pages on the web to show them -- and in what order.

There’s a lot of work that goes into building a ranking system like ours - by some estimates, more than one thousand years of programming work have gone directly into the development of our algorithms. The pace of development and innovation is not slowing down either: because the web changes all the time, so our signals and our algorithms are constantly changing and improving too.

On Friday 28th of May, Matt Cutts, one of Google’s most distinguished engineers, will be giving a TechTalk for webmasters on what you can do to optimise your website and also increase the likelihood that web users looking for your particular product or service can find you in search engines.

As usual, the TechTalk will take place over lunchtime (there will be food available of course!), at the Google Brussels office.

We hope you can make it along. If you’d like to attend, please register here.

When: Friday, May 28, 12:15 - 13:45 hours CET (sandwich lunch provided).
Where: Google Brussels - Chaussée D'Etterbeek 180 - Steenweg op Etterbeek 180, 2nd floor, 1040 Brussels

Matt Cutts is a principal software engineer and joined Google in 2000. Within the Search Quality group he heads up the Web Spam team. He knows the ins and outs of Google Search and how to optimize your website for your users. Get a flavour of what Matt has to say on YouTube, or check out our site for webmasters, google.com/webmasters.

Posted by Alain Van Gaever, Policy Manager, Google

Europe Blog

Google@Thought: The Alhambra, symmetries and the beauty of mathematics

WiFi data collection: An update

A Polish Internet Revolution

TechTalk: Search Quality

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