Latest Criticism of Google Stories

REDMOND, Wash., Nov. 28, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Bing, Microsoft Corp.'s search engine, today is launching a national campaign to highlight Bing's commitment to honest search results and to help explain to consumers the risks of Google Shopping's newly announced "pay-to-rank" practice, in which the shopping search results customers see are not true search results such as they see elsewhere on Google; they are actually ads that are ranked, in part, by who pays the most. More information...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Requests by governments around the world to remove content from Google’s search results and other services grew 71 percent in the first half of 2012, while requests for user data grew 15 percent from the previous six months, according to Google’s sixth semi-annual Government Transparency Report released on Tuesday. "This is the sixth time we've released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on...

Rebecca Darrah for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Google’s services are currently blocked in China, according to web-monitoring group GreatFire.org. "It's the first time since we started tracking online censorship in China in February last year that this has happened," GreatFire wrote in a blog post on Friday. "The subdomains www.google.com, mail.google.com, google-analytics.com, docs.google.com, drive.google.com, maps.google.com, play.google.com and perhaps many more are...

Enid Burns for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The European Union is expected to tell Google on Tuesday that it must unravel its current privacy policy to conform to new standards set for EU countries. The French data protection commissioner issued the formal mandate at a press conference today. Google will have a limited amount of time to put through the changes or else face hefty fines. The EU Data Protection authorities have spent the past several months reviewing Google's...

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Oct. 16, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Consumer Watchdog today praised the European data commissioners for rebuking Google's unilateral merging of privacy policies and data across its various product lines and called on the Federal Trade Commission to act to protect U.S. consumers. "Google acted in complete disregard for legitimate privacy concerns," said John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project director. "I am glad that the European Union is...

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and WASHINGTON, Oct. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google today announced a settlement agreement that will provide access to publishers' in-copyright books and journals digitized by Google for its Google Library Project. The dismissal of the lawsuit will end seven years of litigation. The agreement settles a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Google on October 19, 2005 by five AAP member...

Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Late last month, Iran began making moves towards creating their own, filtered version of the Internet in order to protect themselves from outside attacks against their government, military and universities. This self-contained Internet not only allows Iran to tighten down security on their internal networks, it also prevents snooping from outside agencies. Iran’s first move towards this protected Internet was to block Google’s...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A federal appeals court sided with Google on Monday when it ruled to delay a court challenge to the company’s plans to build a vast digital library. Judge Raymond J. Lohier Jr. of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan granted Google’s request to stay a lower court ruling while an appeals panel considers whether authors of the books should receive class status. The ruling further extends a copyright dispute that...

Michael Harper for redOrbit.com We know Google operates internationally, allowing people from all over the world to have access to some form of a wealth of information. But how do these countries and governments feel about their citizens having this kind of access? For the past two years, Google has been issuing a “Transparency Report” detailing which governments have asked to have content removed. Some of these requests are granted, such as the removal of videos which contained...

Google will likely 'escape punishment' for gathering private emails, passwords, medical data, web browsing details and other private information from millions of Britons as it mapped out areas of the country in its fleet of Street View vehicles, experts say. The Internet search giant released sworn declarations from nine engineers involved in the controversial Street View project, who said they were unaware that Street View had been designed to collect such private data. The documents...