WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Google will lobby Washington in 2013 to make it harder for law enforcement authorities to gain access to emails and other digital messages. In a blog post on Monday, linked to Data Privacy Day, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said the tech giant, in coalition with many other powerful tech companies, will try to convince Congress to update a 1986 privacy protection law. He cited data showing that government requests for Google’s user data increased more than 70 percent since 2009. In 2012, Google said, it received 16,407 requests for user data affecting 31,072 users or accounts, more than half of them accompanied by a subpoena. “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,” Drummond said in the post. The U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in the early days of the Internet, does not require government investigators to have a search warrant when requesting access to old emails and messages that are stored online, providing less protection for them than, say, letters stored in a desk drawer or even messages saved on a computer’s hard drive. The current system also makes complex distinctions, many disputed in courts, between emails saved as drafts online, in transit, unopened or opened. Some of them are to be released with subpoenas, which have a lower threshold than search warrants as they often do not involve a judge. A warrant is generally approved by a judge if investigators have “probable cause” to believe that their search is likely to turn up information related to a crime. Google, Microsoft Corp, Yahoo and popular social media site Twitter – among others – have resisted turning over customer data. They have put in place policies, based on the constitutional protection from unreasonable searches, that require search warrants for access to content of private communications. Privacy activists say the outdated law should be reformed to extend the constitutional right to privacy online, but legislation limiting government requests will not face an easy road. Last year, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill that would have updated the current law. It triggered a wave of concerns from the police and FBI that new restrictions would impede crime investigations and possibly endanger victims. “After three decades, it is essential that Congress update ECPA to ensure that this critical law keeps pace with new technologies and the way Americans use and store email today,” Leahy said in a statement on Monday. His privacy legislation died in Congress last year after his counterpart in the House of Representatives, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Republican, drafted another version of that bill, which also tackled other issues but stripped out privacy reform language. Last year, Goodlatte said he was willing to consider the privacy law reform, but that the timeline then was too short for a “thorough examination.” Leahy has now included the change of privacy laws as one of his top priorities this year. http://news.yahoo.com/google-pledges-fight-over-government-access-users-email-234520748–sector.html
Google+ moves up to second place in social networks
Last year, many people dismissed Google’s Google+ social network as a “virtual ghost town.” That was then. This is now. According to GlobalWebIndex, Google+, with 343-million active users, has become the second largest social network globally. As Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior VP of engineering, observed, “That is a lot of ghosts”
Facebook is still the top social network, but Google+ has moved into second place. (Credit: GlobalWebIndex)
Facebook is still the biggest of the social networks by a large margin. By GlobalWebIndex’s count Facebook has almost 700-million active users. The research group defines active users as those who used or contributed to a site in the past monthAll three of the major global social networks, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter are growing by leaps and bounds. “Data collected in GWI.8 (Q4 2012) demonstrates the continued shift in usage from localized social platforms to global ones with huge growth for Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. The fastest growing network in 2013 in terms of “Active Usage” was Twitter which grew 40% to 288m across our 31 markets (approximately 90% of global Internet population). 21% of the global Internet population now use Twitter actively on a monthly basis. This compares to 21% actively using YouTube, 25% actively using Google+ and a staggering 51% using Facebook on a monthly basis.”
Say hello to the new look of Google Plus (screenshots)
Even with Twitter’s growth, however, “Google+, who despite being branded a failure or ghost town by large portions of the media, grew in terms of active usage by 27% to 343m users to become the number 2 social platform. Interestingly for Google, YouTube (not previously tracked by us as a social platform) comes in at number 3, demonstrating the immense opportunity of linking Google’s services through the G+ social layer. This is also a key indication of why Google+ integrated with the Google product set is so key to the future of search and the Internet.”Indeed so, I’ve long thought that Google’s integration of Google Plus into many of its services would lead to massive growth. But, just because people using Google services such as Gmail or YouTube got a Google+ membership didn’t mean they’d actually use the service. So, what I find more interesting is that GlobalWebIndex’s data indicates that Google+s’ members are actively using the social network rather than just their attached Google services.
Mind you, I don’t find this much of a surprise. I’m a member of most of the popular social networks and Google+ is easily my favorite of them.
Where is Google+’s growth coming from? It’s not at the expense of Facebook or Twitter. Instead, like them, Google+ is cannibalizing smaller, local social networks. “The growth in the large, global social platforms is coming broadly at the expense of local services like MeinVz, Hyves, Copains d’Avant. Even more interestingly, we are seeing a large decline across the board in local Chinese services with Tencent Weibo, Kaixin, Sina Weibo and QZone all declining substantially, up to 57% in the case of Tencent Weibo.”
Looking ahead, it appears that the global networks, led by Facebook, Google+, Twitter and YouTube, will all continue to grow at the expense of the local social networks. Will Google+ eventually catch-up and pass Facebook? Possibly, but it won’t be soon. Even with privacy concerns and annoying notifications, Facebook is continuing to maintain its dominant position.
via Google+ moves up to second place in social networks | ZDNet.
