Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Flu Trends Comes To Europe
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog
If you're like us, you're probably thinking a lot about how this year's flu season might affect you and your community. To help you out, we at
Google.org
are excited to announce the expansion of Google
Flu Trends
to 16 additional countries, including much of Europe. We've also made the site available in 37 languages. Flu is a global threat, affecting millions worldwide each year, so we're pleased to make this tool available in more regions and languages.
Last November
, we launched Google Flu Trends in the United States after finding a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. By tracking the popularity of certain Google search queries, we are able to estimate the level of flu, in near real-time. While some traditional flu surveillance systems may take days or weeks to collect and release data, Google search queries can be counted immediately. Google Flu Trends provides an additional surveillance tool that may help public health officials and the public make more informed decisions about preparing for the flu season.
In the past year, we've expanded our coverage to include Mexico, New Zealand and Australia and have continued to see a good correspondence between our estimates and official flu activity data. In fact, our analysis of last season shows that Google Flu Trends had a close 0.92 correlation with official U.S. flu data.
An important aspect of Google Flu Trends is that we filter out terms that may be popular because people hear about them in the news. What we do not use in the models is a term like [swine flu] since people are more likely to type that into Google because they want to know more information about it, given the news headlines, and not because they actually have H1N1 or swine flu. For more information about how we built this model, take a peek at this video:
If you visit Google Flu Trends for the U.S., you'll notice that the flu season is starting early this year. For tips on how to stay healthy this season, please visit our friends at the U.S.
CDC
and the
ECDC
.
Posted by Matt Mohebbi and Dan Vanderkam, Software Engineers
Navigating Europe's Streets
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
In June we wrote a
blog
about our ongoing Street View conversations with the Article 29 Working Party (the group which brings together representatives from all 27 European Data Protection Authorities).
Just to recap, they had asked that we continue to give advance notice to the public before collecting any images. In addition, they had requested that we set reasonable time limits for keeping copies of the un-blurred images used to create Street View.
As background, we use technology to blur faces and license plates before publishing them on Street View. While our technology is state-of-the-art, it's not perfect and we sometimes mistakenly blur things that are useful or interesting like sign posts, statues, street names, store fronts (
KFC's Colonel Saunders
is probably our most blurred image!) and road signs (like a 'no entry' or 'no right turn' sign, which our technology apparently thinks are faces).
We keep these un-blurred images in our databases so we can build better products, for example by constantly improving our blurring technology so that it obscures more of the things it should and less of the things it shouldn't. We also announced today
another way in which Street View data helps us make our maps better
.
For example, we might need to read a street sign in a Street View image to make sure that the street is properly named on Google Maps. Similarly, we need to know if a street has 'no entry' signs, so that we don't give you bad driving directions.
Starting today, we will permanently blur images on our internal database within one year of their publication on Street View. This means that long term the only copy we keep will be the blurred version. In countries where Street View is already launched the year long retention period will start today.
We think one year strikes a reasonable balance between protecting people's privacy and our ability to reduce mistakes in blurring, as well as use the data we have collected to build better maps products. It's important to remember that European privacy laws allow for the retention of data, so long as it is for reasonable periods of time and the information itself is actually being used.
In addition, where someone specifically requests that we remove an image (even where that particular face or license plate is already blurred in the published version), we'll move those images to the front of the queue, and permanently blur those pictures in our records as quickly as possible. We're also announcing today that over the next few months we'll launch revamped websites in countries where we're driving and/or where Street View is already available. These sites will have additional information about the product, including more detail about where Street View cars are driving--now all we need is good weather so we can show off all the attractions we're photographing in their best light!
Finally, we continue to work on improving our blurring technology. It's good but we think we can make it even better and as we make improvements we'll roll them out globally so that users everywhere get to benefit from them.
Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel
Rapping in Brussels
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
The invitation sounded cool. Instead of dull, bureaucratic Brussels, I received a link to a European Commission site entitled
IT for Girls
, which featured the arresting title "Cyberellas are IT!" accompanied by - get this - rap music.
Intrigued, I investigated and learned that the European Commission was asking Google to sign up to a
Code of Conduct
in order to improve prospects for women to build careers in information technology. This goal resonates with us. Too few women study engineering and computer science and this gap continues to widen in all but a very few European countries. The IT industry as a whole is finding it hard to fill positions and any serious effort to solve the problem means encouraging women to overcome the "geek stereotype." So I agreed to come to Brussels on October 8 and participate in a seminar with European Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding.
At Google, we aspire to make information access better for everyone. Our users are simply everyone on the planet - so, we need to have an engineering organisation that represents that to the best of its abilities - making products that mean something for people. Having women developing products is key to us developing relevant and meaningful products. It's obvious to me that working in a team ofGooglers from diverse backgrounds and life experiences makes problem solving and creativity a lot more likely - and a lot more fun.
We've already undertaken many of the measures the Commission encourages to improve gender balance, working with universities and sponsoring scholarships for female computer scientists. Four years ago, we posted this inside
look
at our pioneering female engineers at Google. We also sponsor the
Anita Borg Scholarship
for women undergraduate and graduate students in technology. Named after the late and great female computer scientist Anita Borg, scholarship recipients will each receive a EUR 7,000 award for the 2010-2011 academic year and be invited to attend the Annual Google Scholars' Retreat in our European Engineering Headquarters in Zurich. The British Computer Society recognized Google as a great place to work in 2008 and we are shortlisted again this year, so fingers crossed.
We're proud to have a strong lineup of top female executives. Megan Smith, our vice president of new business development, oversees our new-ventures partnerships, explorations, and licensing, FrancoiseBrougher , vice president of business operations, has led us into Sub-Saharan Africa. Marissa Mayer, our vice president of search products, is spearheading efforts in Web search, images, news, maps, Google Earth, and more.Shona Brown joined Google in 2003 to oversee critical operational issues across the company as senior vice president of business operations.
We try to make Google a welcoming place to work for all of its staff, including women. Google offers its staff free lunches and massages, as well as games rooms and 20% time (engineers can choose for themselves what they wish to work on for, on average, one day per week). These are not frivolous perks, but a crafted, thought-out our human resource strategy that we believe pays off in happy, productive employees.Generous maternity leave allows women to pursue careers - and Google's progressive paternity policy gives them a strong support structure at home (actually, we recently made two very high profile promotions of women who were on maternity leave at the time!). For those first few weeks of baby's new life, Google Mums or Dads can also claim the new parent food allowance to, at least, remove one of the household headaches. Both male and femaleGooglers tell us how they appreciate flexibility in working hours - and our company policy of doing all work collaboratively on the Internet improves overall work-life balance.
We have just started this journey to help women get online - and there's lots more we can do. I look forward to explaining our Google culture this week in Brussels - and to enjoying a little more of that surprising rap music.
Posted by Rachel Mooney, Head of Diversity & People Policy for Europe
Brussels buzzes with ideas for the future
Friday, September 25, 2009
Brussels is buzzing with ideas for a new technology agenda. The European Commission recently distributed a questionnaire on the
post-i2010 Initiative
and the EU's Swedish Presidency is seeking views on a
Green Knowledge Society
. Not to be outdone, the European Parliament's
European Internet Foundation
(EIF) has just published a
paper
on the Europe of 2025, including room to comment on their site. The Foundation is a
Parliamentarian led
organisation funded by businesses (full disclosure: Google is a
member
) and industry trade associations.
The Foundation's secretariat penned the paper, building upon three workshops held earlier in the year. Google provided a speaker on
cloud computing
at the
technology workshop
. Debates also took place on
economic
and
socio-political
issues.
The resulting paper does not pretend to be a common position of the Foundation's members, it contains few dramatic policy recommendations, and is clearly meant to stimulate new debate.
But it does shine a spotlight on some key issues, starting with the crucial concept of "mass collaboration", which has for example led to a globally accessible repository of information called
Wikipedia
. It's not so much the technology in itself is not so exciting; what's cool is how humans adapt it to accelerate our natural inclinations to communicate and share ideas. This concept of "mass collaboration" is fueling debate about intellectual property rules (our recent submission can be found
here
) and whether Europe needs to join with the
FCC
to promote a strong set of net freedoms.
Secondly, we cannot rely on the next generation alone to fuel innovation. As the paper points out, "70% of Europe’s workforce of 2025 is already part of our work-force today." I can't think of a more powerful statistic about the need to embrace change.
A third point to note is the notion of a "data-driven world" where "our ability to capture, measure and analyse our collective, collaborative behaviour will itself have become a defining feature, driving force and economic engine in the digital world". This is unquestionably true, and Google is a pioneer in this space. As the ability to collect data grows, the paper recognises the need to debate the privacy issues that emerge. A
consultation
on Europe's data protection directive is underway and it will have the challenge of balancing data-driven growth & jobs while protecting fundamental rights.
Google is going to be involved in all of these debates. We published
some policy proposals
back in June. You may want also to take a look this
recent speech
by our CEO Eric Schmidt, which provides a real vision of the opportunity.
But you don't have to be based inside the Brussels 'Ring' to join in - the debate is open, and stakes for Europe's society and economy are high.
Posted by Simon Hampton, Director of Public Policy
What's up with Measurement Lab
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Cross posted from Google Public Policy Blog
Eight months ago
, we joined a group of researchers to launch
Measurement Lab (M-Lab)
, an open platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools.
We created M-Lab in order to help measure the
actual
performance of broadband Internet connections. Is your connection as fast as advertised? Where are the bottlenecks that impact VoIP or video performance? Answers to these sorts of questions will help users to make informed decisions in the market, and help governments around the globe to craft sound broadband policy.
So, how's it doing?
To date, more than 150,000 Internet users from around the world have used M-Lab to test the performance of their broadband connection and share information with researchers.
Now M-Lab is hitting the Mediterranean. We're thrilled to announce that the
EETT
-- Greece's telecommunications regulator -- and the
Greek Research and Technology Network (GRnet)
have contributed servers and connectivity for a new M-Lab node in Athens, Greece, and will collaborate with M-Lab to help improve the usability of the platform's tools.
EETT has already been working to provide useful information about broadband networks to consumers, through their
central Web portal
. EETT plans to incorporate data collected through M-Lab into this map, so that users will be able to compare broadband providers' and their Internet connection's performance across several dimensions.
In addition to EETT and GRnet,
Voxel
also has joined as an M-Lab partner, providing server nodes and connectivity in New York City and Amsterdam. Since launch, we've added many new servers, for a total of 38 between the U.S. and Europe.
We've also added two new tools,
PathLoad2
and
ShaperProbe
. PathLoad2 allows users to test their available bandwidth (the maximum bit rate you can send to a network link before it gets congested), and ShaperProbe detects whether the ISP reduces the speed of a download or an upload after it begins.
We're happy about M-Lab's successful beginning, but it's only the beginning. The platform and its tools are still very much in beta, and we continue efforts to improve them.
In the coming months we're aiming to make the collected data publicly available and accessible, improve the user experience and stability of our tools, and expand the availability of the site globally. Stay tuned, and in the meantime we hope you'll
run an M-Lab test on your own broadband connection
.
Posted by Sascha Meinrath and Robb Topolski, Open Technology Initiative (OTI), and Derek Slater, Policy Analyst, Google
(Editor's note: We're pleased to welcome Sascha Meinrath and Robb Topolski of the
Open Technology Initiative
(OTI) as
guest
bloggers. As a part of The New America Foundation, OTI works to support policy and regulatory measures that further open technologies and communications networks.)
Introducing DataLiberation.org: Liberate your data!
Monday, September 14, 2009
Cross-posted from
Google Policy Blog
Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you - not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you're like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it's also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all.
Although this may seem like a strange analogy, this pretty accurately describes the situation my team, Google's Data Liberation Front, is working hard to combat from an engineering perspective. We're a small team of Google Chicago engineers (named after a Monty Python skit about the
Judean People's Front
) that aims to make it easy for our users to transfer their personal data in and out of Google's services by building simple import and export functions. Our goal is to "liberate" data so that consumers and businesses using Google products always have a choice when it comes to the technology they use.
What does product liberation look like? Said simply, a liberated product is one which has built-in features that make it easy (and free) to remove your data from the product in the event that you'd like to take it elsewhere.
At the heart of this lies our
strong commitment
to an open web run on open standards. We think open is better than closed -- not because closed is inherently bad, but because when it's easy for users to leave your product, there's a sense of urgency to improve and innovate in order to keep your users. When your users are locked in, there's a strong temptation to be complacent and focus less on making your product better.
Many web services make it difficult to leave their services - you have to pay them for exporting your data, or jump through all sorts of technical hoops -- for example, exporting your photos one by one, versus all at once. We believe that users - not products - own their data, and should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product without a hassle. We'd rather have loyal users who use Google products because they're innovative - not because they lock users in. You can think of this as a long-term strategy to retain loyal users, rather than the short-term strategy of making it hard for people to leave.
We've already liberated over half of all Google products, from our popular blogging platform Blogger, to our email service Gmail, and Google developer tools including App Engine. In the upcoming months, we also plan to liberate Google Sites and Google Docs (batch-export).
Feel free to take a deeper look into product liberation at
dataliberation.org
, a website we're launching today which is dedicated to explaining the Data Liberation Front and the products we've liberated.
If you'd like to contribute suggestions for services that you think need to be liberated, please do so on our Data Liberation
Moderator page
. We're also on Twitter
@dataliberation
.
Posted by Brian Fitzpatrick, Data Liberation engineering manager
Bringing the world's lost books back to life
Monday, September 7, 2009
Today I am attending the European Commission's information hearing in Brussels on Google Books's agreement with American authors and publishers. This offers us a wonderful opportunity to clear up misunderstandings and further explain the opportunities offered by the US Agreement. All of us, on both sides of the Atlantic share the same crucial goal - to bring millions of lost books back to life.
If an American court approves, readers in the U.S. will be able for the first time to search, preview and buy online access to a great number of out-of-print books that were scanned as part of Google Book Search. A new non-profit registry will be set up to locate these in copyright but difficult to find books' rights holders and collect and distribute revenues to authors and publishers.
This hearing shows that European libraries, authors, publishers and users are grappling with the same issue of how to open up access to the world of knowledge contained in books. In recent weeks, we noted several important measures of support. We are already working successfully with libraries around the world, including in France, Belgium, the UK, Switzerland, Germany and Spain, insuring that our digital library includes works over 100 languages. I was particularly pleased to hear our Ghent Library Partner Sylvia van Peteghem talking about how together we have worked to allow viewers from all over the world access to her institution's priceless public domain collection. Last week, Mario Resca, General Director of the Italian Ministry of Culture, expressed a desire to partner with us to find ways on best valuing the Italian public domain books collection. Support from the Italian authorities represents an important step forward to demonstrating how our Books project can further benefit Europe.
While anybody is allowed to digitise and distribute out of copyright, so called public domain works, pose no legal problem free of charge or for a fee, what's really at stake are the fate of the vast majority of books -- by some estimate up to 80 percent of the total - which are in copyright out of print and hard to locate. These works are not sold through bookstores or held on most library shelves, and yet represent an important repository of the world's knowledge and culture. Often it is difficult to identify or locate the copyright holder. If the author has died, who holds his rights, his wife, children or another relative?
The agreement announced in October 2008 between Google and a broad class of copyright holders in the United States will dramatically expand access to out-of-print books, creating new revenue opportunities for authors and publishers. The new registry should help reduce the number of in-copyright works whose owners cannot be identified or found because authors will have a concrete economic incentive to come forward, claim their works and then earn money. For books that are in-print, the agreement would offer new distribution opportunities to copyright holders in the United States.
European authors and publishers whose books have been scanned from an American library may benefit from the new revenue that will come as American readers discover and purchase their books. They can register with the new registry to control and profit from online access to their books, or, just like American authors, they can choose to opt out. The registry will also benefit rightsholders by helping potential licensors for Europe reach out to rightsholders and negotiate agreements to license works in the EU. But no readers outside of the United States will reap the benefits American readers will see-- because the agreement is under U.S. law, it can by nature only govern what happens within the U.S.
In this context, we are delighted to see that the EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding recently added her voice to the debate welcoming calling for Europe to act. "Google Books is a commercial project developed by an important player," she said. "It is good to see that new business models are evolving which could allow bringing more content to an increasing number of consumers." We agree. The bottom line conclusion from today's hearing is clear and straightforward: Europeans, not just Americans, should be empowered to rediscover long lost books
.
Posted by Daniel Clancy, Engineering Director
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