Google@Thought: The Alhambra, symmetries and the beauty of mathematics

As everyone involved in lobbying will know, public policy discussions can often be very technical, quickly getting down to nuts and bolts. In this environment, one of the biggest challenges lobbyists face is to make sure that the ideals and activities of the companies we represent are also fully reflected in the conversations we have.

At Google Brussels, we have developed a complementary approach: our Google@Thought seminar series. In these talks, we do not focus on upcoming legislation or the debates of the day, but instead go back to Google’s roots as a company that finds inspiration in the exploration of ideas and concepts.  

Our first Google@Thought speaker was Professor Marcus du Sautoy, who told the story of how he discovered the language of symmetry at the age of twelve and fell in love with mathematics as a result. Today, Marcus is the University of Oxford’s Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.

“Symmetry is present everywhere in nature,” Marcus explains. “It is used by all organisms, from viruses upwards. Take bees: they have very bad vision and can’t see colours. But they excel at detecting the symmetry of a flower. Symmetry means sustenance to them. For flowers, it means reproductive success. Symmetry is the tool that bonds bees and flowers, the language they use to communicate.”

Marcus illustrates his exploration of the language of symmetry with reference to Japanese aesthetics, Bach’s Goldberg variations and to the beauty and perfection of the Moorish decorations at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. Today, we know that the Alhambra’s designs represent all seventeen mathematically possible kinds of symmetry that can be drawn on a plane - an incredible achievement given the Alhambra was completed in 1391!

You can watch the highlights of Professor Du Sautoy’s Google@Thought seminar on YouTube.





Posted by Simon Hampton, Director of European Public Policy, and a former mathematician ;-)

WiFi data collection: An update

Update June 9, 2010:

When we announced three weeks ago that we had mistakenly included code in our software that collected samples of payload data from WiFi networks, we said we would ask a third party to review the software at issue, how it worked, and what data it gathered. That report, by the security consulting firm Stroz Friedberg, is now complete and was sent to the interested data protection authorities today. In short, it confirms that Google did indeed collect and store payload data from unencrypted WiFi networks, but not from networks that were encrypted. You can read the report here. We are continuing to work with the relevant authorities to respond to their questions and concerns.

Update May 17, 2010:

On Friday May 14 the Irish Data Protection Authority asked us to delete the payload data we collected in error in Ireland. We can confirm that all data identified as being from Ireland was deleted over the weekend in the presence of an independent third party. We are reaching out to Data Protection Authorities in the other relevant countries about how to dispose of the remaining data as quickly as possible.

You can read the letter from the independent third party, confirming deletion, here.

Nine days ago the data protection authority (DPA) in Hamburg, Germany asked to audit the WiFi data that our Street View cars collect for use in location-based products like Google Maps for mobile, which enables people to find local restaurants or get directions. His request prompted us to re-examine everything we have been collecting, and during our review we discovered that a statement made in a blog post on April 27 was incorrect.

In that blog post, and in a technical note sent to data protection authorities the same day, we said that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.

However, we will typically have collected only fragments of payload data because: our cars are on the move; someone would need to be using the network as a car passed by; and our in-car WiFi equipment automatically changes channels roughly five times a second. In addition, we did not collect information traveling over secure, password-protected WiFi networks.

So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.

As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it.

Maintaining people’s trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short. So we will be:

• Asking a third party to review the software at issue, how it worked and what data it gathered, as well as to confirm that we deleted the data appropriately; and
• Internally reviewing our procedures to ensure that our controls are sufficiently robust to address these kinds of problems in the future.

In addition, given the concerns raised, we have decided that it’s best to stop our Street View cars collecting WiFi network data entirely.

This incident highlights just how publicly accessible open, non-password-protected WiFi networks are today. Earlier this year, we encrypted Gmail for all our users, and next week we will start offering an encrypted version of Google Search. For other services users can check that pages are encrypted by looking to see whether the URL begins with “https”, rather than just “http”; browsers will generally show a lock icon when the connection is secure. For more information about how to password-protect your network, read this.

The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust—and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.


Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering & Research


Cross posted from the Official Google Blog

A Polish Internet Revolution

Poland is one of the few countries that is emerging from Europe’s financial crisis relatively unscathed. While many European Union members struggle to raise funds, Poland’s zloty remains stable and interest rates low.

During my recent visit, my former Dow Jones colleague, now Bloomberg bureau chief Dennis McQuaid, told me how the government just had sold off a large state-owned insurance company – and the offering was seven times oversubscribed, making it the country’s biggest ever IPO. Poland’s economy has kept growing and the streets of Warsaw bustle with well-dressed shoppers and the clatter of construction.

Personally, this success is gratifying. As a journalist, I covered Poland during the 1980s when it laboured under communism. Stores were empty then. But the Polish spirit amazed me – how a courageous people could undertake a successful non-violent, spiritually-based, worker- and intellectual-led revolution. In 1989, I watched some Solidarity supporters set up the country’s first free newspaper in a day care centre. It was called Gazeta Wyborcza.

Today, Gazeta Wyborcza is Poland’s top paper, part of the giant Agora group. It operates out of an airy, sparkling, shiny steel headquarters building. Grzegorz Piechota, the paper’s special projects editor, presented an upbeat outlook for the future. While Gazeta hasn’t escaped the pain of the transition online, it has embraced the web, starting dozens of sites targeted to different audiences, from teenage girls to senior citizens. “We know we have no choice except to move online,” Piechota said.

For Google, Poland represents a successful laboratory for bringing business online. Nimble, small, family owned companies dominate the economy. Yet most have little or no online presence. While four in every five consumers are searching for information online about products and services, a Google-sponsored study last year showed that fewer than half of small Polish businesses have any online presence.

In order to get Poland online, we launched an Internet Revolution campaign at the end of last year, supported by the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The program offers advice on how Polish companies could get online using both Google and non-Google tools, including a free package to help them establish a web domain, create a website and launch their first domestic or international online advertising campaign.

The success of this initiative has exceeded our expectations. Last week, we announced at a press conference that over 10,000 small entrepreneurs had signed up. The Polish economy may ‘only’ rank 21st globally, but it’s clear that the country has a healthy appetite for making the internet an integral part of doing business and driving growth for the future.

Posted by Bill Echikson, Head of Communications, South, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa

TechTalk: Search Quality

Google’s Search Quality team is responsible for the ranking of Google search results.Their job is clear: A few hundreds of millions of times a day people will ask Google questions, and within a fraction of a second Google needs to decide which among the billions of pages on the web to show them -- and in what order.

There’s a lot of work that goes into building a ranking system like ours - by some estimates, more than one thousand years of programming work have gone directly into the development of our algorithms. The pace of development and innovation is not slowing down either: because the web changes all the time, so our signals and our algorithms are constantly changing and improving too.

On Friday 28th of May, Matt Cutts, one of Google’s most distinguished engineers, will be giving a TechTalk for webmasters on what you can do to optimise your website and also increase the likelihood that web users looking for your particular product or service can find you in search engines.

As usual, the TechTalk will take place over lunchtime (there will be food available of course!), at the Google Brussels office.

We hope you can make it along. If you’d like to attend, please register here.

When: Friday, May 28, 12:15 - 13:45 hours CET (sandwich lunch provided).
Where: Google Brussels - Chaussée D'Etterbeek 180 - Steenweg op Etterbeek 180, 2nd floor, 1040 Brussels

Matt Cutts is a principal software engineer and joined Google in 2000. Within the Search Quality group he heads up the Web Spam team. He knows the ins and outs of Google Search and how to optimize your website for your users. Get a flavour of what Matt has to say on YouTube, or check out our site for webmasters, google.com/webmasters.

Posted by Alain Van Gaever, Policy Manager, Google

German Supreme Court rules that Image Search does not infringe copyright

Google's aim is to help users discover information as quickly and efficiently as possible. Sometimes the information they seek is in written or audio form, and sometimes the information they seek is visual - which may take the form of photographs, designs, artworks or other types of imagery - and we try to present the information in a way that best answers the user’s query.

With this in mind, we launched our Image Search service in 2003, which presents users with a selection of reduced-resolution thumbnail images relating to their search query. Users can then click through to the site that hosts the image to see it in full-size or to see the content around it. Millions of users find this service helpful - they can quickly find exactly what they want, and many site owners do too - it’s another means through which Internet users can discover their sites. Website owners have complete control over what Google will crawl on their site: with a simple set of tools called robots.txt they can notably tell Google (and other search engines) not to crawl the images on their site.

We are heartened by the German Supreme Court´s ruling today that Google Image Search does not infringe copyright. The case was brought to court by an artist who had uploaded photos of her work (large paintings) to her own website. She then claimed for copyright infringement against Google as the images were displayed in our image search results.

Today´s ruling makes it clear not just for Google, its users in Germany and all owners of websites containing images, but also for all providers of image search services operating in the country: showing thumbnail images within search results is legitimate and millions of users in Germany benefit from being able to discover visual information at the click of a mouse.

We still have to wait for the full reasoning behind the decision. What we know today: thousands of websites and companies in Germany will be able to benefit from Google Image Search in the future as well. News websites on the Internet, online providers of pictures and posters, artists, photographers, designers and many more who depend on the web for their livelihoods can go on using the service as a significant distribution platform.

Posted by Dr. Arnd Haller, Managing Counsel, Google Germany GmbH

Disrupting knowledge workers - e.g. lawyers

The author of a book called “The End of Lawyers?” was likely to be provocative, but when Professor Richard Susskind, OBE started his presentation at today’s Oxford Internet Institute’s Seminar on the The Internet and Legal Services by noting that ‘lawyers are knowledge workers’, my ears really pricked up.

As we’ve discussed on this blog before, the knowledge economy is genuinely different from that which we knew in the 20th century. Lawyers are indeed knowledge workers, so the suggestion that this is a sector set for transformation as a result of the Internet should not have been a surprise. Nonetheless, it was, and that was because of the extent the predicted transformation.

On the simpler side, Richard talked of the the automation of certain functions: standardising and systemetising certain client offerings, and recognising that some activities will simply become commoditised (perhaps as loss leaders for other work).

But then there is the potential to create new value, including through harnessing ‘mass collaboration’. There is real scope for open source models to enter the market, with reputation systems helping to keep the end result trustworthy - just as we see in the tech community. This could be complemented by collaborative projects within “closed client communities” where participants explicitly know who the other parties are.

I am not a lawyer, and my thoughts turned to two issues:

• Does per 6-minute billing applied by lawyers really reflect the drivers of value creation; and
• Are there barriers to those wishing to exploit the economics of the knowledge economy to disrupt the market?

Richard suggested that metered billing did remain a reasonable proxy for ‘bespoke’ lawyering but was fairly certain it would evolve for other services.

The emergence of a maverick in the legal industry would be exciting. And there certainly would be demand for it, as Tony Wales, who shared the platform, discussed the fascinating evolution of the in-house General Counsel role. Innovation is occurring rapidly there, with lawyers partnering with business developers to help tailor commercial solutions that meet their company’s needs and reflect their appetite for risk.

I wonder what the many Commission officials that attended made of it all? It will fall to some of them to ensure that companies, consumers and citizens enjoy the benefits of innovation and disruption across the EU legal profession!

Posted by Simon Hampton, Director of European Public Policy

Data collected by Google cars

[Editor's note, 5/14/10: This post contains incorrect information about our WiFi data collection (see * below). We have posted a clarification and update about our process on the Official Google Blog.]

Over the weekend, there was a lot of talk about exactly what information Google Street View cars collect as they drive our streets. While we have talked about the collection of WiFi data a number of times before--and there have been stories published in the press--we thought a refresher FAQ pulling everything together in one place would be useful. This blog also addresses concerns raised by data protection authorities in Germany.

What information are your cars collecting?
We collect the following information--photos, local WiFi network data and 3-D building imagery. This information enables us to build new services, and improve existing ones. Many other companies have been collecting data just like this for as long as, if not longer, than Google.

• Photos: so that we can build Street View, our 360 degree street level maps. Photos like these are also being taken by TeleAtlas and NavTeq for Bing maps. In addition, we use this imagery to improve the quality of our maps, for example by using shop, street and traffic signs to refine our local business listings and travel directions;
• WiFi network information: which we use to improve location-based services like search and maps. Organizations like the German Fraunhofer Institute and Skyhook already collect this information globally;
• and 3-D building imagery: we collect 3D geometry data with low power lasers (similar to those used in retail scanners) which help us improve our maps. NavTeq also collects this information in partnership with Bing. As does TeleAtlas.

What do you mean when you talk about WiFi network information?

WiFi networks broadcast information that identifies the network and how that network operates. That includes SSID data (i.e. the network name) and MAC address (a unique number given to a device like a WiFi router).

Networks also send information to other computers that are using the network, called payload data, but Google does not collect or store payload data.*

But doesn’t this information identify people?
MAC addresses are a simple hardware ID assigned by the manufacturer. And SSIDs are often just the name of the router manufacturer or ISP with numbers and letters added, though some people do also personalize them.

However, we do not collect any information about householders, we cannot identify an individual from the location data Google collects via its Street View cars.

Is it, as the German DPA states, illegal to collect WiFi network information?
We do not believe it is illegal--this is all publicly broadcast information which is accessible to anyone with a WiFi-enabled device. Companies like Skyhook have been collecting this data cross Europe for longer than Google, as well as organizations like the German Fraunhofer Institute.

Why did you not tell the DPAs that you were collecting WiFi network information?
Given it was unrelated to Street View, that it is accessible to any WiFi-enabled device and that other companies already collect it, we did not think it was necessary. However, it’s clear with hindsight that greater transparency would have been better.

Why is Google collecting this data?
The data which we collect is used to improve Google’s location based services, as well as services provided by the Google Geo Location API. For example, users of Google Maps for Mobile can turn on “My Location” to identify their approximate location based on cell towers and WiFi access points which are visible to their device. Similarly, users of sites like Twitter can use location based services to add a geo location to give greater context to their messages.

Can this data be used by third parties?
Yes--but the only data which Google discloses to third parties through our Geo Location API is a triangulated geo code, which is an approximate location of the user’s device derived from all location data known about that point. At no point does Google publicly disclose MAC addresses from its database (in contrast with some other providers in Germany and elsewhere).

Do you publish this information?
No.

But wouldn’t GPS enable you to do to all this without collecting the additional data?
Yes--but it can be much slower or not available (e.g. when there is no view of the sky; when blocked by tall buildings). Plus many devices don’t have GPS enabled. GPS is also expensive in terms of battery consumption, so another reason to use WiFi location versus GPS is to conserve energy.

How does this location database work?
Google location based services using WiFi access point data work as follows:

• The user’s device sends a request to the Google location server with a list of MAC addresses which are currently visible to the device;
• The location server compares the MAC addresses seen by the user’s device with its list of known MAC addresses, and identifies associated geocoded locations (i.e. latitude / longitude);
• The location server then uses the geocoded locations associated with visible MAC address to triangulate the approximate location of the user;
• and this approximate location is geocoded and sent back to the user’s device.

How do your cars collect this WiFi data?

Visibly attached to the top of the car is a commercially available radio antenna. This antennae receives publicly broadcast WiFi radio signals within range of the vehicle. The equipment within the car operates passively, receiving signals broadcast to it but not actively seeking or initiating a communication with the access point.

Why didn’t you let the German DPA see the car?
We offered to let them examine it last year --it is totally untrue to say we would not let them see the car. They are still welcome to do so.

How do you collect 3-D building imagery?
We collect 3D geometry data with low power lasers (similar to those used in retail scanners).

Is this safe?
Yes.

You can also read the WiFi submission we made today to several national data protection authorities.

Posted by Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel

** Added additional sentence to first bullet point.