The Federal Trade Commission in the USA has delivered the highest fine that it has ever given, us$22,5m, to Google for infringing on privacy. Google ‘misrepresented’, a term used in criminal fraud trials frequently, the extent to which consumers can exercise control over the collection of their information.
In other news, many of you have seen the Google logo appearing in your favourite series episode? Google is also now selling content. Google has made a first announcement about pirate content: ‘Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily whether it’s a song previewed on NPRs music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed’
The search side of Google will discriminate against returnign search results including copyright infringing websites as Google will in an increasing fashion, start discriminating against websites against which anyone has filed a copyright complaint.
