Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Responding to Article 29 Working Party’s Questions
Thursday, July 31, 2014
The group of European data protection agencies in the
Article 29 Working Party
last week invited three US-based search engines - Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!- to discuss
“the practical implementation”
of the Right to be Forgotten. Before the meeting, the working party sent us a
questionnaire
.
Today, in a move to support the working party’s goal of transparency, we are publishing our
answers
.
The European Court of Justice ruling has sparked a debate about privacy and access to information. We are actively complying with it. Our answers also make clear that many questions raised by the ruling remain unresolved - and will be the subject of a welcome public discussion over coming months.
Posted by William Echikson, Senior Manager Communications and Public Affairs, Brussels
Seeking advice on the Right to be Forgotten
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Earlier this summer we announced the formation of an
Advisory Council
on the Right to be Forgotten. As the Council begins its work, it is seeking
comment
from experts on the issues raised by the CJEU ruling. Experts will be considered for selection to present to the Council in-person during public consultations held this fall, in the following cities:
September 9 in Madrid, Spain
September 10 in Rome, Italy
September 25 in Paris, France
September 30 in Warsaw, Poland
October 14 in Berlin, Germany
October 16 in London, UK
November 4 in Brussels, Belgium
The Council welcomes position papers, research, and surveys in addition to other comments. We accept submissions in any official EU language. Though the Council will review comments on a rolling basis throughout the fall, it may not be possible to invite authors who submit after August 11 to present evidence at the public consultations.
Stay tuned for details on the Council’s activity.
Posted by Betsy Masiello, Google Secretariat to the Council
Launching new features for bicyclists
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
While the Tour de France may just have completed its final lap around the Champs Elysees, our Maps team continues to pedal ahead at top speed. Want to avoid that brutal Mountain Stage while you’re cycling to work? The latest version of Google Maps for Android update puts elevations in bike directions, so you can arrive with leg muscles intact.
We first added biking directions three years ago to our maps for a
number of countries in Europe
, from Austria to the United Kingdom. It proved to be a popular feature among cycling amateurs and enthusiasts and we’ve expanded the product to cover almost the entire continent. Enthusiastic users have added hundreds of kilometers of biking paths through Google Mapmaker.
We’re also innovating before you hop onto the bicycle. Do you sometimes get a sudden urge for a pizza or a banana split? The improved GoogleMaps for desktop lets you click and drag to measure your next road trip, bike ride or run—even if you’re taking a few sharp turns.
Oh, and what about the Tour de France? With the race over, you might want to relive its high moments, visiting the routes the riders took up the same mountains with
StreetView
, starting in Saint-Étienne and
climbing into the Alps to finish at Chamrousse
. And if you want to say au revoir to Le Tour de France, look below, or click on an
EarthView on the Champs Élysées
.
Posted by Gareth Evans, Communications Manager, London
Bletchley Park’s rebirth and why it matters
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Twenty five years ago, the historic World War II codebreaking center
Bletchley Park
faced demolition. We have supported its restoration, culminating in
last month’s opening
of Block C by the Duchess of Cambridge. Her grandmother Valerie Glassborow worked as a duty officer and managed the interception of enemy signals for decryption at Bletchley.
Photos copyright
Shaun Armstrong
Now reborn as one of England’s most evocative museums, Bletchley Park is a fitting place of pilgrimage for both history and technology fans alike. The extraordinary code-breaking feats that took place in its spartan wooden huts were crucial to the Allied victory, and helped lay the foundations for the computer age. We were honoured to have been invited to create this new film for the visitors centre:
Bletchley Park is where Alan Turing’s theories were first put into practice, in the Bombe machines used to break Enigma, operated by women like 93 year old veteran and grandmother of one of our colleagues in Google London,
Jean Valentine
. It was also home to
Colossus
, the world’s first electronic programmable computer.
As important as what was achieved at Bletchley Park are the lessons we can learn from the way it was done.
Bletchley Park was a melting pot of brilliant minds set free by an atmosphere of tolerance. Societal norms were swept aside because of extreme need and circumstances. What mattered was what a person could do — not their gender, sexual orientation, religion, national origin or any supposed eccentricity. By removing these artificial constraints, Bletchley Park brought out the best in the fullest range of talent.
In this sense, Bletchley’s codebreaking success came not in spite of people’s differences, but because of them. It’s a compelling role model for the power of diversity that resonates still today.
Overall, at Bletchley Park thousands of talented people, more than half women, made heroic contributions that were kept secret until the 1970s. To borrow Keira Knightley’s line playing code breaker
Joan Clarke
in
upcoming movie “The Imitation Game”
:
“Sometimes it’s the people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things no one can imagine.”
Google has long championed saving Bletchley Park together with Dr. Sue Black, Stephen Fry, Sir John Scarlett and many others. We’ve donated money, hosted events, created videos to help preserve and promote its story, including this . But nothing beats the experience of visiting this hallowed place in person — it’s just 45 minutes
by train from London Euston
— do go if you can. We promise you will be inspired by these technical heroes and early founders of our industry.
Posted by Lynette Webb and Megan Smith, Google
Celebrating Czech culture online
Monday, July 21, 2014
Václav Havel
was a playwright, essayist, poet, philosopher - and also a politician, first a leading anti-communist dissident and then president of Czechoslovakia. A new exhibit on this remarkable man just has been launched on our Cultural Institute. It shows the interior of his
quirky, personalised office
, full of brightly colored furniture and modern art, and recounts the trajectory of his
remarkable life
.
Vaclav Havel's quirky office
The new Havel exhibit is only one of a slew of new exhibitions celebrating Czech culture. Until now, the Culture Institute featured only two Czech galleries, the Kampa Museum and the National Gallery. Nine new Czech museums and organizations from all around the country have joined, bringing together up to 500 art works. Two new high definition gigapixel pictures are featured, including Jiri Sopko’s spectacular
Dance
. In addition to Havel, the life of the first Czechoslovak President
Tomas Garrigue Masaryk
is featured.
Tomas Garrigue Masaryk
Enjoy the exhibitions from the other Czech partner museums:
Museum of Decorative Arts
Jewish Museum in Prague
Egon Schiele Art Centrum
Museum of Eastern Bohemia in Hradec Králové
Moravian Gallery in Brno
Olomouc Museum of Art
Along with the new Czech museum exhibits, we also launched new Street View imagery, including interiors of museums. Our launch event took place in the Decorative Arts Museum’s library.
The entrance to the Decorative Arts Museum Library
Launching the new exhibits
The venue will be closed soon due to reconstruction of its historical building - but it will remain visible and visitable online.
Posted by Martina Ondrusova, Communications Manager, Prague
Showcasing tolerance From Berlin to Budapest
Thursday, July 17, 2014
At a time when racism is on the
rise in Europe
, reportedly reaching its worst level since the 1980s, it is more more important than ever to stand up against scapegoating of migrants and minorities. Two initiatives highlight our commitment to tolerance.
In Germany, we kicked off a new edition this month of the
YouTube 361 Grad Respekt
combating social exclusion and (cyber-)bullying. This YouTube youth competition runs five video camps across the country, helping students script and shoot videos. You can also participate from home using a webcam or make a video with your smartphone or tablet. Tell us all what makes you strong, talk about your experiences, give others courage, and inspire and motivate them to submit their own statement about showing more respect. Share the video and upload
here
.
Submissions from the five video camps will be presented one by one on
www.youtube.de/361grad
until September. Keep checking the channel. After only two days live, the site had received more than 500,000 views!
In Hungary, we’re well into our second year of an exciting program called
WeAreOpen
. It’s rallying cry is: "Being open is not only the right thing to do, but it's also worth it." To date, more than
750 companies, communities and organisations
, big and small, have signed up in support. This year’s version launched in March with a social media campaign to counter hate speech. Musicians, actors, celebrities, and Internet users (including students, doctors and teachers) shared their own experiences, taking a stand against prejudice, showing support for Roma, lesbians, gays, Jews and handicapped. Their videos have received more than 200,000 views on YouTube.
At July’s
Budapest Pride
march, WeAreOpen supplied an
army of colorful balloons
and invited everyone to join. The march was live streamed the on YouTube and more than 20,000 watched it live.
This year's WeAreOpen 2014 features
research
from the
Gemius consulting firm
about diversity and tolerance at the workplace. It found that more than half of Hungarian employees have already encountered negative discrimination.
The virus of hatred, unfortunately, will not vanish. 361 Grad Respekt, WeAreOpen and many more initiatives promoting tolerance are urgently needed.
Posted by Richard Schuster and Mounira Latrache, Communications managers
Germany's World Cup victory comes alive through search
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
On Sunday, Germany won their fourth world championship, and, over the course of the last month, the world watched them do it—in Brazil, in bars and living rooms around the world, on their phones and laptops and tablets. This World Cup was the most digital, most connected, and most searched global event we've seen to date. There were more than 2.1 billion tournament-related searches on Google, many of which we shared on our
trends hub
.
Looking at the trends from each match, you’ll see some topics that you’d expect to catch the world’s attention, such as top players and highly-anticipated matches. But who would have guessed that there were
10x more searches
in the U.S. for the World Cup than for the NBA Playoffs? Or that
Clint Dempsey
, American soccer star who also has a rap single, had 2x more search interest than Jay-Z? Or that after
Ángel di María's
divine goal against Switzerland, he netted 4x more global searches than his fellow countryman, Pope Francis?
Mexico’s Guillermo Ochoa was the most searched goalie in the tournament, but
Tim Howard’s heroics
could hardly be forgotten. German goalkeeper Manuel Neuer not only snagged third place in search, but took home the 2014 Golden Glove award and a World Cup championship to boot.
The
Germany vs. Brazil
semifinal was the most searched match throughout the tournament, leaving many people around the world asking, “What is the biggest win in World Cup history?” Meanwhile, some countries were ready to move on to the next opportunity: after the third place game, Brazilians
searched more
for “World Cup 2018” than for the final game between Argentina and Germany.
No World Cup would be complete without a few surprises—and the creative people of the web were ready to weigh in. Uruguay's Luis Suarez was the most searched player meme, and at the time of the Uruguay-Italy game, there were 20x more searches globally for “Suarez Bite” than for snake, spider, tick, fly, dog and mosquito bites combined.
And if a search Dream Team was created, you’d see these 11 players strutting their stuff on the field. While German star
Mario Götze
didn’t make this list, he was a favorite on search. Even before his goal won it all in the final, he attracted 4x more search attention than Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen, who presented Germany with the championship trophy.
Beyond the impressive stats on the field, we’ve got some numbers of our own to share:
Our team watched 107+ hours of football (we didn’t even need a water break!) and spent 250+ hours bringing you regular insights from our first ever World Cup trends hub. We hope you enjoyed the excitement of the tournament as much as we did, and for more trends, visit
google.com/worldcup
or check out our
Google+ album
.
Posted by
Roya Soleimani
, Communications Manager, who searched for [
iran vs. argentina
], [
brazil’s 12th player
], and of course [
world cup schedule
] throughout the tournament<
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