Microsoft's Latest “Scroogled” Ads Attack Sharing Of Information That Google Developers Need To Process Transactions

Today, Microsoft has leveled more accusations about Google’s practices by way of its “Scroogled” campaigns. This time, the complaints are about how Google handles users’ data when they purchase an application from Google Play.

Previous “Scroogled” campaigns have targeted both Gmail and search over ads and privacy.

In the two videos below, Microsoft uses animations and words to walk you through “what might happen” if your data were to end up in the wrong people’s hands. It’s a fear campaign, and it really doesn’t have any basis whatsoever.

Take a look at the videos and we’ll get into what actually happens when you buy an app from Google Play.

In the second video, a “real life” situation is played out on the front steps of an apartment building:

A Google spokesperson provided us with the following statement:

Google Wallet shares the information needed to process transactions and maintain accounts, and this is clearly stated in the Google Wallet Privacy Notice.

Why the mention of Google Wallet?

The main difference between Google Play and the Apple App Store is that Google uses its “Wallet” service to process transactions. While it’s not a third-party service in the sense that it’s a different company, it is a function of the process that is not embedded into the Google Play experience. It’s something that users are made aware of in the terms of service and privacy policies when they sign up.

More importantly, when merchants and developers sign up to sell things in Google Play, they must buy into not sharing any of the information that they get, which is name, email address and general location — the things that all companies selling things online need in order to process your transaction and provide support. Better start your attack against Amazon, Etsy and everyone else on the Internet, Microsoft.

The timing is interesting on this, because this is the way that Google Play has always worked. Its privacy policies haven’t changed since last July, in fact.

At the end of the video, if you got that far, you’ll notice that Microsoft ends things with a big “Windows Phone doesn’t do it this way.” Instead of doing an advertisement on how great Windows phones and apps are, Microsoft has decided to go after how “horrible” Google is. The “Scroogled” site even has a big old link to explore Windows Phones. Isn’t that convenient?

If Microsoft was purely trying to protect consumers from having their data “stolen” by nefarious app developers, don’t you think that it would focus on that, rather than trying to drum up business for itself?

You can’t put something on the Internet if it isn’t true, right? Wrong.

Wait, wasn’t that bearded “french” guy the same one that shows up at the end of the second Scroogled video? At least we know who is doing Microsoft’s ads now.

Put those marketing dollars into making great products that people love, Microsoft.

Google Play keeps all of your favorite music, movies, books, TV shows, magazines, and apps all in one place. Google Play allows the user to sample any content before they purchase. Google Play also makes recommendations to its users of music that they may enjoy in relation to what they’ve purchased already.

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Yandex, Russia's ‘Homegrown Google', Looks At Gesture-Based Interfaces To Power Apps

Russian search giant Yandex has collaborated on developing an experimental gesture-based interface to explore how similar technology could be incorporated into future social apps and mobile products. The company offers digital services beyond search already, launching and expanding mapping services and translation apps, for instance, in a bid to drive growth as its domestic search share (60.5% as of Q4 2012) has not grown significantly in recent quarters. Future business growth for Yandex looks likely to depend on its ability to produce a pipeline of innovative products and services — hence its dabbling with gestures.

Yandex Labs, the division that came up with its voice-powered social search app Wonder (an app that was quickly blocked by Facebook), has been working with Carnegie Mellon University on a research project to create a gesture-based social interface designed for an Internet-connected TV. The interface, demoed in the above video, pulls in data from Facebook, Instagram and Foursquare to display personalised content that is navigated by the TV viewer from the comfort of their armchair using a range of hand gestures.

Here’s how Yandex describes the app on its blog:

The application features videos, music, photos and news shared by the user’s friends on social networks in a silent ‘screen saver’ mode. As soon as the user notices something interesting on the TV screen, they can easily play, open or interact with the current media object using hand gestures. For example, they can swipe their hand horizontally to flip through featured content, push a “magnetic button” to play music or video, move hands apart to open a news story for reading and then swipe vertically to scroll through it.

The app, which was built on a Mac OS X platform using Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral for gesture recognition, remains a prototype/research project, with no plans to make it into a commercial product. But Yandex is clearly probing the potential of gestures to power future apps.

Asked what sort of applications it believes could be suitable for the tech, Grigory Bakunov, Director of Technologies at Yandex, said mobile apps are a key focus. “Almost any [Yandex services] that are available on mobiles now: search (to interact with search results, to switch between different search verticals, like search in pictures/video/music), probably maps apps and so forth [could incorporate a gesture-based interface],” he told TechCrunch when asked which of its applications might benefit from the research.

Bakunov stressed these suggestions are not concrete plans as yet — just “possible” developments as it figures out how gesture interfaces can be incorporated into its suite of services in future. ”We chose social newsfeeds to test the system [demoed in the video] as it can bring different types of content on TV screen like music listened by friends, photo they shared or just status updates. Good way to check all types in one app,” he added.

As well as researching the potential use-cases for gesture interfaces, Yandex also wanted to investigate alternatives to using Microsoft’s proprietary Kinect technology.

“Microsoft Kinect has its own gesture system and machine learning behind it. But the problem is that if you want to use it for other, non-Microsoft products you should license it (and it costs quite a lot), plus it has been controlling by Microsoft fully. So, one of the target was to find out more opened alternative with accessible APIs, better features and more cost-effective,” said Bakunov.

Yandex worked with Carnegie Mellon students and Professor Ian Lane to train gesture recognition and evaluate several machine learning techniques, including Neural Networks, Hidden Markov Models and Support Vector Machines — with the latter technique showing accuracy improvements of a fifth vs the other evaluated systems, according to Yandex.

The blog adds:

They [students] put a lot of effort in building a real training set – they collected 1,500 gesture recordings, each gesture sequenced into 90 frames, and manually labeled from 4,500 to 5,600 examples of each gesture. By limiting the number of gestures to be recognized at any given moment and taking into account the current type of content, the students were able to significantly improve the gesture recognition rate.

Launch Date: September 23, 1997

Yandex is an internet technologies company that operates in Russia, CIS and Turkey. It is the largest Russian and fourth-largest world internet search engine. Yandex is an acronym for the phrase Yet Another Indexer. As of March 2013, Yandex had about 61% of the Russian search market (source: LiveInternet.ru). Yandex’s mission is to give the answer to the user anytime and anywhere. Company provides its services for desktop and mobile users and develops embedded solutions as well. The company specializes on highly-targeted...

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Google Gives $3M Global Impact Award Grant To Three Organizations To Support “Global Human Trafficking Hotline”

Google’s non-profit arm announced its Global Impact Awards program last December and has announced three organizations that would be receiving $3 million in grants. All of these organizations are focused on setting up human trafficking helplines to help identify potential victims and provide them with support, no matter where they are in the world.

The three organizations — Polaris Project, Liberty Asia and La Strada International — are working together to form a “Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network.”

In Google’s announcement today, the company says that 21 million people are enslaved in one way or another globally and generating $32 billion in profit for those who are managing the illegal activity. The hope for these organizations is that they can collect data from all local helpline services to be able to view patterns and triangulate the hotspots in the world that are most egregious. Dating back to 2011, Google has invested $14.5 million into anti-trafficking efforts.

Two outside companies, Palantir Technologies and Salesforce.com, are providing analytics and data-integration tools, as well as a hotline center to help scale the anti-trafficking network.

Here’s what Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas and Jacquelline Fuller, Director of Google Giving, had to say about the announcement:

In the U.S., Polaris Project has collected data from over 72,000 hotline calls, helping local and national anti-trafficking communities better understand the dynamics of the crime. No such actionable hotline database has existed globally — but it doesn’t need to be that way. Clear international strategies, increased cooperation, and appropriate data sharing amongst anti-trafficking organizations will help victims, prevention efforts, and sound policymaking. Slavery can be stopped. Let’s get to it.

Here is the announcement of the awards:

You can read more about Google’s non-profit efforts in an interview that I conducted with Jacquelline Fuller for The Weekly Good.

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Google Updates Search iOS App With Minor Bug Fixes, Still No Sign Of Google Now

Google has quietly rolled out an update to its Google Search app for iOS, and before you get your hopes up, I’ll go ahead and tell you that there’s no “Google Now” anywhere to be seen.

The update does, however, bring with it some minor bug fixes. Other than that, the update isn’t all that exciting. In fact, it’s downright disappointing.

Rumors had been swirling for a while that Google has plans to bring Google Now over to iOS. A video even leaked in mid-March showing an alleged promotion for Google Now on iOS, saying it was built right into Google Search for iOS.

There was some back and forth after that, with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt saying the ball is in Apple’s court with regard to when we might actually see Google Now on Apple’s platform. He played a similar game with Google Maps months ago, when we were all ready and waiting for Google to swoop in after Apple’s Maps product on iOS 6 was a flop.

Apple then responded saying that Google had not submitted any Google Now application to the App Store. Of course, that didn’t exclude the possibility that Google would push out Google Now through an update to Google Search.

Alas, Google Search has been updated and there’s no Google Now to show for it.

Of course, Google could still push out Google Now through the Search app, and probably will if this video (which looks pretty legit) is to be believed. Unfortunately, today just isn’t the day.

Search is Google’s core product and is what got them an official transitive verb addition to the Merriam Webster for “google”. The product is known for its Internet-crawling Googlebots and its PageRank algorithm influenced heavily by linking. When users type keywords into the home page search box they are returned with relevant results that they can further refine. Google also has more specific search for blogs, images, news and video. Google will also return search results from your own...

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Microsoft's Latest “Scroogled” Ads Attack Sharing Of Information That Google Developers Need To Process Transactions

Today, Microsoft has leveled more accusations about Google’s practices by way of its “Scroogled” campaigns. This time, the complaints are about how Google handles users’ data when they purchase an application from Google Play.

Previous “Scroogled” campaigns have targeted both Gmail and search over ads and privacy.

In the two videos below, Microsoft uses animations and words to walk you through “what might happen” if your data were to end up in the wrong people’s hands. It’s a fear campaign, and it really doesn’t have any basis whatsoever.

Take a look at the videos and we’ll get into what actually happens when you buy an app from Google Play.

In the second video, a “real life” situation is played out on the front steps of an apartment building:

A Google spokesperson provided us with the following statement:

Google Wallet shares the information needed to process transactions and maintain accounts, and this is clearly stated in the Google Wallet Privacy Notice.

Why the mention of Google Wallet?

The main difference between Google Play and the Apple App Store is that Google uses its “Wallet” service to process transactions. While it’s not a third-party service in the sense that it’s a different company, it is a function of the process that is not embedded into the Google Play experience. It’s something that users are made aware of in the terms of service and privacy policies when they sign up.

More importantly, when merchants and developers sign up to sell things in Google Play, they must buy into not sharing any of the information that they get, which is name, email address and general location — the things that all companies selling things online need in order to process your transaction and provide support. Better start your attack against Amazon, Etsy and everyone else on the Internet, Microsoft.

The timing is interesting on this, because this is the way that Google Play has always worked. Its privacy policies haven’t changed since last July, in fact.

At the end of the video, if you got that far, you’ll notice that Microsoft ends things with a big “Windows Phone doesn’t do it this way.” Instead of doing an advertisement on how great Windows phones and apps are, Microsoft has decided to go after how “horrible” Google is. The “Scroogled” site even has a big old link to explore Windows Phones. Isn’t that convenient?

If Microsoft was purely trying to protect consumers from having their data “stolen” by nefarious app developers, don’t you think that it would focus on that, rather than trying to drum up business for itself?

You can’t put something on the Internet if it isn’t true, right? Wrong.

Wait, wasn’t that bearded “french” guy the same one that shows up at the end of the second Scroogled video? At least we know who is doing Microsoft’s ads now.

Put those marketing dollars into making great products that people love, Microsoft.

Google Play keeps all of your favorite music, movies, books, TV shows, magazines, and apps all in one place. Google Play allows the user to sample any content before they purchase. Google Play also makes recommendations to its users of music that they may enjoy in relation to what they’ve purchased already.

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View the original article here