Google Data

Posted by Susan Molinari, Vice President, Public Policy and Government Affairs

Any student in the country could be the creator of the next big website or the next cool app. That’s why we’re excited that yesterday the House of Representatives passed H. Res. 77, a near-unanimous resolution highlighting the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) — especially computer science — and establishing an annual, nationwide academic competition in these fields.

STEM disciplines are a source of jobs and innovation, and they are necessary for our workforce to match the fast pace of technological change. For example, an estimated 1.4 million new jobs will require computing skills by 2020. Yet the US still lags in this area; only a small percentage of middle schoolers show proficiency in math and science, and only one third of bachelor’s degrees earned in this country are in a STEM field. For this reason, energizing students at an early age is crucial.

The competition established by the House resolution could engage students in various ways. To start, it calls for a challenge to create new apps for a range of platforms. Developing an app is a great way for students to gain hands-on experience in computer science, the next wave of opportunity in today’s economy. As technology advances, the competition may evolve to focus on different fields.

We believe it’s crucial to help kids and teens around the country move from being great consumers of technology to being great creators of technology — and competitions like this one can help drive that evolution. By reaching out to budding technologists in their districts, Members of Congress can foster a deeper enthusiasm for computer science. We hope this opportunity for students to showcase their creativity will spark interest in the STEM fields for years to come.

Posted by Nicklas Lundblad, Director, Public Policy

The Internet policy world is ripe with fascinating issues. From cybercrime to government surveillance and security, to public procurement, trade and open access to information, there has never been a more exciting time to get involved. We’re excited to launch the 6th summer of the Google Policy Fellowship, with new opportunities to work with organizations from Africa, Europe and Latin America in addition to ones in U.S. and Canada. Applications are open today, and students of all levels and disciplines are welcome to apply before March 15, 2013.

Fellows will spend ten weeks this summer working on a broad portfolio of topics at a diverse set of organizations, including: 

Africa 

• ILab Africa

• Kofi Annan Centre for Excellence in IT

Europe

• Bruegel 

• ECIPE (European Centre for International Political Economy)

• OpenForum Europe (OFE)

• The Lisbon Council

Latin America

• Asociascón por los Derechos Civiles
• Derechos Digitales

North America

• American Library Association

• Center for Democracy and Technology
• Competitive Enterprise Institute 
• Creative Commons
• EFF
• Future of Music Coalition 
• Institute for Public Representation 
• Internet Education Foundation
• Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
• Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
• National Consumer League
• National Hispanic Media Coalition 
• New America Foundation 
• Public Knowledge 
• Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic
• TechFreedom
• Technology Policy Institute 
• The Citizen Lab
• US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce 

You can learn about the program, application process and host organizations on the Google Public Policy Fellowship website.

Posted by Mike Hearn, Google Security Engineer 

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Have you ever gotten a plea to wire money to a friend stranded at an international airport? An oddly written message from someone you haven’t heard from in ages? Compared to five years ago, more scams, illegal, fraudulent or spammy messages today come from someone you know. Although spam filters have become very powerful—in Gmail, less than 1 percent of spam emails make it into an inbox—these unwanted messages are much more likely to make it through if they come from someone you’ve been in contact with before. As a result, in 2010 spammers started changing their tactics—and we saw a large increase in fraudulent mail sent from Google Accounts. In turn, our security team has developed new ways to keep you safe, and dramatically reduced the amount of these messages.

Spammers’ new trick—hijacking accounts 
To improve their chances of beating a spam filter by sending you spam from your contact’s account, the spammer first has to break into that account. This means many spammers are turning into account thieves. Every day, cyber criminals break into websites to steal databases of usernames and passwords—the online “keys” to accounts. They put the databases up for sale on the black market, or use them for their own nefarious purposes. Because many people re-use the same password across different accounts, stolen passwords from one site are often valid on others.

With stolen passwords in hand, attackers attempt to break into accounts across the web and across many different services. We’ve seen a single attacker using stolen passwords to attempt to break into a million different Google accounts every single day, for weeks at a time. A different gang attempted sign-ins at a rate of more than 100 accounts per second. Other services are often more vulnerable to this type of attack, but when someone tries to log into your Google Account, our security system does more than just check that a password is correct.

How Google Security helps protects your account
Every time you sign in to Google, whether via your web browser once a month or an email program that checks for new mail every five minutes, our system performs a complex risk analysis to determine how likely it is that the sign-in really comes from you. In fact, there are more than 120 variables that can factor into how a decision is made.

If a sign-in is deemed suspicious or risky for some reason—maybe it’s coming from a country oceans away from your last sign-in—we ask some simple questions about your account. For example, we may ask for the phone number associated with your account, or for the answer to your security question. These questions are normally hard for a hijacker to solve, but are easy for the real owner. Using security measures like these, we’ve dramatically reduced the number of compromised accounts by 99.7 percent since the peak of these hijacking attempts in 2011.

Help protect your account
While we do our best to keep spammers at bay, you can help protect your account by making sure you’re using a strong, unique password for your Google Account, upgrading your account to use 2-step verification, and updating the recovery options on your account such as your secondary email address and your phone number. Following these three steps can help prevent your account from being hijacked—this means less spam for your friends and contacts, and improved security and privacy for you.

Posted by Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering

Technology can sometimes be complicated, but you shouldn’t have to be a computer scientist or security expert to stay safe online. Protecting our users is one of our top priorities at Google. Whether it’s creating easy-to-use tools to help you manage your information online or fighting the bad guys behind the scenes, we’re constantly investing to make Google the best service you can rely on, with security and privacy features that are on 24-7 and working for you.

Last year, we launched Good to Know, our biggest-ever consumer education campaign focused on making the web a safer, more comfortable place. Today, on Safer Internet Day, we’re updating Good to Know to include more tips and advice to help you protect yourself and your family from identity theft, scams and online fraud. You can also learn how to make your computer or mobile device more secure, and get more out of the web—from searching more effectively to making calls from your computer. And you can find out more about how Google works to make you, your device and the whole web safer. 

For example, we encrypt the Gmail and Google Search traffic between your computer and Google—this protects your Google activity from being snooped on by others. We also make this protection, known as session-wide SSL encryption, the default when you’re signed into Google Drive. Because outdated software makes your computer more vulnerable to security problems, we built the Chrome browser to auto-update to the latest version every time you start it. It gives you up-to-date security protection without making you do any extra work.

Even if you don’t use Google, we work hard to make the web safer for you. Every day we identify more than 10,000 unsafe websites—and we inform users and other web companies what we’ve found. We show warnings on up to 14 million Google Search results and 300,000 downloads, telling our users that there might be something suspicious going on behind a particular website or link. We share that data with other online companies so they can warn their users.

We know staying safe online is important to you—and it is important to us too. To emphasize the importance of American’s online safety, Google will join the US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), the National Cyber Security Alliance, The Project to Get Older Adults onLine (GOAL), and the National PTA at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. to discuss the importance of Safer Internet Day, how people’s commitment to keeping themselves and the Internet safer doesn’t stop after 24 hours, and resources that can help families stay safe on February 5th and every day. Watch live at 11am EST.

Please take some time today to make your passwords stronger and turn on 2-step verification to protect your Google Account. Talk with friends and family about Internet safety. And visit our new Good to Know site to find more tips and resources to help you stay safe online.

Posted by Rolf Schreiber, Technical Program Manager, Electric Transportation 

Cross-posted from the Google Green Blog 

At Google, we believe that plug-in vehicles are game-changers in the effort to reduce the carbon footprint of transportation, improve air quality, and increase the adoption of intermittent renewable energy sources. That’s why we’re excited to join the U.S. Department of Energy’s Workplace Charging Challenge, an initiative to increase the number of employers offering workplace charging by tenfold in five years.

Google has been dedicated to the promise of electric vehicles since 2007, when we outfitted a small fleet of Priuses and Escape Hybrids with homegrown dataloggers and installed an EV solar carport at our HQ in Mountain View. Our employees eagerly adopted the new technology, and we soon launched a corporate carshare program, called GFleet. GFleet provides Googlers with a low-carbon transportation option once they get to the office using alternative transportation (for instance, the Google shuttle, walking, biking, or carpooling). To date Googlers have driven GFleet vehicles over a quarter of a million miles.

To support GFleet and encourage Googlers to buy their own plug-ins, Google offers free on campus charging in Mountain View and eight additional office locations in the U.S. Now with more than 300 stations across the country, we’ve built the largest corporate charging infrastructure in the country. 

We’re delighted to help drive progress in this space, and invite others to join the charge towards more EV infrastructure, cleaner air, and a sustainable future.

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP Google Geo 

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Twenty years ago, we used paper maps and printed guides to help us navigate the world. Today, the most advanced digital mapping technologies—satellite imagery, GPS devices, location data and of course Google Maps—are much more accessible. This sea change in mapping technology is improving our lives and helping businesses realize untold efficiencies.

The transformation of the maps we use everyday is driven by a growing industry that creates jobs and economic growth globally. To present a clearer picture of the importance of the geo services industry, we commissioned studies from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Oxera. What we found is that maps make a big economic splash around the world.

In summary, the global geo services industry is valued at up to $270 billion per year and pays out $90 billion in wages. In the U.S., it employs more than 500,000 people and is worth $73 billion. The infographic below illustrates some examples of the many benefits of maps, whether it’s improving agriculture irrigation systems or helping emergency response teams save lives.

1.1 billion hours of travel time saved each year? That’s a lot of time. Also, consider UPS, which uses map technology to optimize delivery routes—saving 5.3 million miles and more than 650,000 gallons of fuel in 2011. And every eight seconds, a user hails a taxi with Hailo, which used maps and GPS to deliver more than 1 million journeys in London alone last year. Finally, Zipcar uses maps to connect more than 760,000 customers to a growing fleet of cars in locations around the world.

Because maps are such an integral part of how we live and do business, the list of examples goes on and on. That’s why it’s important we all understand the need to invest in the geo services industry so it continues to grow and drive the global economy. Investments can come from the public and private sectors in many forms—product innovation, support of open data policies, more geography education programs in schools and more.

We’re proud of the contributions that Google Maps and Earth, the Google Maps APIs and our Enterprise solutions have made to the geo services industry and to making maps more widely available, but there’s a long way to go. To learn more about the impact of the maps industry, see the full reports.

Posted by Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President, People OperationsWe have spoken out in the past about the valuable contributions highly skilled immigrants have made at Google. From developing products like Google News and Google Maps to managing our busi…

Posted by Chris Evans, Google Chrome Security Team(Cross-posted from the Google Chromium Blog) Security is one of the core tenets of Chrome, but no software is perfect, and security bugs slip through even the best development and review processes….

Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog) Today, January 28, is Data Privacy Day, when the world recognizes the importance of preserving your online privacy and security.If …

Posted by Matthew Stepka, VP, Google.orgCross-posted from the Google.org blogThe Internet is redefining citizenship in the 21st century. Technology is helping people to connect, engage, and contribute to society and each other like never before.We’v…

Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal OfficerThe U.S. Federal Trade Commission today announced it has closed its investigation into Google after an exhaustive 19-month review that covered millions of pages of documents and inv…

Posted by Vint Cerf, VP and Chief Internet Evangelist(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog) Starting in 1973, when my colleagues and I proposed the technology behind the Internet, we advocated for an open standard to connect computer networks to…

Posted by Andy Berndt, Creative Lab  Cross-posted from the Official Google BlogFor several years now, we’ve been working to help the veteran community through outreach programs and by connecting veterans and their families to useful Google prod…

Posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy AnalystCross-posted from the Official Google Blog We think it’s important to shine a light on how government actions could affect our users. When we first launched the Transparency Report in early 2010, ther…

Posted by Mary Grove, Head of Global Entrepreneurship OutreachCross-posted from the Official Google Blog  Startups and entrepreneurs have the power to build technologies and creative solutions that transform the world and move us forward. Innovat…