Google Data

• Telegram from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to President Kennedy, June 1963
• Request to meet with Kennedy on the day of the March on Washington, August 1963
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964, July 1964

• American Library Association 
• National Consumers League 
• National Hispanic Media Coalition 
• Open Technology Institute, New America Foundation
• Public Knowledge
• TechFreedom
• Center for Democracy and Technology
• Global Network Initiative 
• R Street 
• iKeepSafe 
• ConnectSafely 
• The Citizen Lab 
• Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic
• American Association of People with Disabilities
• Future of Privacy Forum
• Technology Policy Institute
• Future of Music
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce
• Internet Education Foundation
• Fundación Karisma 
• Asociación por los Derechos Civiles
• Derechos Digitales 
• Article 19 Mexico 

More fellowship opportunities in Asia, Africa, and Europe will be coming soon. You can learn about the program, application process and host organizations on the Google Public Policy Fellowship website.

The revelations about government surveillance practices—both in the U.S. and globally—over the past eight months have sparked a serious and overdue debate about the nature and scope of existing laws and programs. Today, many organizations and companies are participating in “The Day We Fight Back,” a series of events and awareness campaigns highlighting the urgent need for surveillance reform around the world.

Google recognizes the very real threats that the U.S. and other countries face, but we strongly believe that government surveillance programs should operate under a legal framework that is rule-bound, narrowly tailored, transparent, and subject to oversight.

In December, along with other technology companies, we unveiled a set of government surveillance reform principles that address many of the recent concerns around government surveillance. In Congress, Representative Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Senator Leahy (D-Vt.) have introduced legislation—the USA Freedom Act—that would codify many of these principles. As they both noted when introducing this bill, government surveillance programs “have come at a high cost to Americans’ privacy rights, business interests and standing in the international community.”

The USA Freedom Act reflects some of the key recommendations made by the President’s Review Group on Intelligence Communications and Technologies as well as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. We support this legislation and we urge Congress to enact it into law.

But there’s more that can be done as we consider appropriate reforms to government surveillance laws. Congress should update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to require governmental entities to obtain a warrant before they can compel online companies to disclose the content of users’ communications. Legislation introduced by Senators Leahy and Lee (R-Utah) in the Senate and Representatives Yoder (R-Kan.), Graves (R-Ga.), and Polis (D-Colo.) in the House would achieve that goal. More than 100 companies, trade associations, and consumer groups—and more than 100,000 Americans—have signed on to support this important update to ECPA, which no longer reflects users’ reasonable expectations of privacy.

We will continue to press Congress to adopt these important measures, which would represent significant progress in the broader effort to reform government surveillance laws. If you want to receive updates from us, please visit google.com/takeaction and sign up.

Once upon a time, Tax Day meant pens and pencils, paper forms, and long waits at the post office. Now, the Internet makes tax day much simpler — online software and e-Filing now allows everyone a much smoother Tax Day experience. Unfortunately, the Internet also makes something else easier: tax identity theft that allows scammers to do things like file for fraudulent tax refunds or apply for jobs.

As the FTC noted earlier this month, “identity theft has been the top consumer complaint to the FTC for 13 consecutive years, and tax identity theft has been an increasing share of the Commission’s identity theft complaints.” In fact, tax ID theft accounted for more than 43 percent of the FTC’s ID theft complaints, “making it the largest category of identity theft complaints by a substantial margin.”

With this in mind, the FTC hosted events around the country last week as part of its Tax Identity Theft Awareness Week, to educate consumers about the risks of tax identity theft and how to avoid becoming a victim. The IRS also released a video this month to educate taxpayers on what to do if they are victimized by tax ID theft.

At Google’s Good To Know site, consumers can learn about the many ways that they can protect all of their data, including their SSN, tax forms, and other information that tax identity thieves are after. For example:

• Don’t reply if you see a suspicious email, instant message or webpage asking for your personal or financial information. Identity thieves try to use these phishing techniques to steal your information such as your social security number or other tax info. 
• If you see a message from someone you know that doesn’t seem like them, their account might have been compromised by a cyber criminal who is trying to con you into providing your SSN or other sensitive information. 
• Don’t send your password via email, and don’t share your password with others — thieves that gain access to your accounts can then steal your tax identity. Legitimate sites won’t ask you to send them your passwords via email, so don’t respond if you get requests for your passwords to online sites.

The ease and convenience of the Internet has helped simplify tax filing. And following these tips will help keep your tax information safe in the process.

(Cross-posted from the Google AdWords Blog)

Advertising helps fund great web services and enables companies of all sizes to grow their businesses online. However, this economy can also attract bad actors that want to abuse online advertising tools for harmful or deceptive purposes.

We’ve allocated substantial technical, financial, and human resources to stopping bad advertising practices and protecting users on the web. Hundreds of our engineers, policy experts and others have dedicated their careers to this work.

Following up on our 2012 report, below is an overview of how we fought bad ads and bad ad-funded content in 2013.

Stopping more bad ads from fewer bad sources

We removed more than 350 million bad ads from our systems in 2013. To put that in perspective, if someone looked at each of these for one second, it would take them more than ten years to see them all. This was a significant increase from approximately 220 million ads removed in 2012. This trend has been consistent in the last several years and we attribute it to several factors, including: the growth of online advertising overall and constant improvement of our detection systems.

The number of advertisers we disabled, however, dropped from over 850,000 in 2012 to more than 270,000 in 2013. In part, we attribute this decline to scammers — counterfeiters, for example — being thwarted by our safety screens and searching for less-secure targets.

Counter-attacking counterfeiters

We continue to see positive results in our work to combat counterfeiters. Attempts to market counterfeit goods on AdWords decreased by 47% in 2012 and 82% in 2013. In parallel, the volume of complaints about these ads dropped by 85% in 2012 and by another 78% in 2013.

As these numbers have declined, we’re pleased to report that we’ve also banned fewer bad advertisers for counterfeit violations. Last year, we banned approximately 14,000 advertisers for trying to sell counterfeit goods — a decline of more than 80% compared to 2012.

Preventing good ads from funding bad content

Maintaining a healthy ads ecosystem isn’t just about stopping bad ads and advertisers; we closely monitor the sites and mobile apps that show our ads as well. Early last year, we outlined some of this work, with a particular focus on our efforts to stop scammy ad-funded software, like toolbars, that provides a poor user-experience.

By the end of 2013, we had blacklisted more than 200,000 total publisher pages, an encouraging decline from last year, and disapproved more than 3,000,000 attempts to join our AdSense network. We also removed more than 250,000 publisher accounts for various policy violations. This includes more than 5,000 account removals for violating our copyright policies, an increase of more than 25% compared to 2012.

Here’s a more complete overview of our work to bust bad advertising practices in 2013:

This is an ever-evolving and ongoing fight. Bad actors are relentless, often very sophisticated and will not rest on their laurels. But neither will we. Nothing is more important than the security of our users and we’ll continue to work tirelessly to keep them safe online.

Five years ago, when we became founding members of the Global Network Initiative (GNI), we agreed that outside assessors would review how we’re doing against GNI’s Principles on Freedom of Expression and Privacy. GNI brings together diverse stakeholders to address the risks to a free and open Internet, and conducting these assessments is an important part of the organization’s mandate.

This morning, GNI released its first ever Company Assessment Report. The organization used independent assessors to look into whether the GNI’s three founding companies — Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft — are upholding GNI’s principles in practice. After reviewing specific cases on how Google is implementing the principles, the board found that we are compliant and working to protect freedom of expression and privacy online.

Even though it can be uncomfortable to open up to outside scrutiny, we believe the assessment is a useful model for companies, NGOs, academics, and others working together to assess how companies respond to government requests related to human rights.

Today’s report also supports the organization’s other primary task, advocacy — ensuring that governments everywhere protect privacy and free expression online. If you’re interested in learning more about how Google responds to government demands for user information and content removal, check out our Transparency Report.

Tomorrow the House of Representatives will consider H.R. 3309, the Innovation Act. This bipartisan bill, introduced by Chairman Bob Goodlatte, approved by the House Judiciary Committee with a 33-5 vote, and supported by the White House, would go a long way to solve the patent troll problem.

The Innovation Act would address the explosion of abusive patent litigation, helping the patent system work as intended — promoting innovation.

Patent protection is meant to provide an incentive to innovate, spurring real progress that benefits consumers. Unfortunately, patent trolls are abusing a flood of questionable patents — like those on basic e-commerce tools such as online shopping carts and shipment notification emails — to attack supermarkets, hotels, restaurants, retailers, and many other businesses, large and small. Trolls use the threat of time-consuming and expensive litigation to extort settlements, even where their claims wouldn’t hold up in court.

This kind of patent troll litigation has grown like a particularly noxious weed, increasing four-fold since 2005. By some estimates it cost the U.S. economy nearly $500 billion over the past two decades. And the problem is growing.

It’s time to step up and take action. A broad coalition of companies and organizations support the Innovation Act, which would level the playing field by controlling discovery costs, raising pleading standards, and making fee-shifting a more meaningful deterrent to frivolous allegations. We agree with Chairman Goodlatte on the need to stop the exponential increase in the use of dubious patents to attack American businesses. And we believe that legislation can go further to address the significant burden that invalid business method patents impose on innovative companies.

We strongly support Chairman Goodlatte’s bill and encourage all Members of Congress to vote for this important piece of legislation. The Innovation Act would stop patent trolls from abusing the system, letting America’s productive companies focus on creating new products and jobs, not fighting frivolous patent suits.

posted by Richard Salgado, Legal Director, Law Enforcement and Information Security

In a year in which government surveillance has dominated the headlines, today we’re updating our Transparency Report for the eighth time. Since we began sharing these figures with you in 2010, requests from governments for user information have increased by more than 100 percent. This comes as usage of our services continues to grow, but also as more governments have made requests than ever before. And these numbers only include the requests we’re allowed to publish.

Over the past three years, we’ve continued to add more details to the report, and we’re doing so again today. We’re including additional information about legal process for U.S. criminal requests: breaking out emergency disclosures, wiretap orders, pen register orders and other court orders.

We want to go even further. We believe it’s your right to know what kinds of requests and how many each government is making of us and other companies. However, the U.S. Department of Justice contends that U.S. law does not allow us to share information about some national security requests that we might receive. Specifically, the U.S. government argues that we cannot share information about the requests we receive (if any) under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But you deserve to know.

Earlier this year, we brought a federal case to assert that we do indeed have the right to shine more light on the FISA process. In addition, we recently wrote a letter of support for two pieces of legislation currently proposed in the U.S. Congress. And we’re asking governments around the world to uphold international legal agreements that respect the laws of different countries and guarantee standards for due process are met.

Our promise to you is to continue to make this report robust, to defend your information from overly broad government requests, and to push for greater transparency around the world.

We strongly believe that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) must be updated in this Congress, and we urge Congress to expeditiously enact a bright-line, warrant-for-content rule. Governmental entities should be required to obtain a warrant—issued based on a showing of probable cause—before requiring companies like Google to disclose the content of users’ electronic communications.