Later on this year, Google plans to roll out their Street View system across Germany (see below for the cities they are targeting), but it’s been hit with a number of privacy concerns. At an event I was at a few weeks ago, Wieland Holfelder, Google’s Engineering Director in Munich, said that Google sees that Germany is their privacy capital of the world. And because of this, one of their teams in Munich is focused on this topic of privacy. He said if they can make the Germans happy, their policies should be okay almost everywhere else.
Street View Privacy
Besides the issue with the WIFI networks, people have been requesting that their should have a way to “opt-out” of this service. Currently Google blurs out faces & number plates of cars, but in Germany people have the right to request that the image of their house can be removed. Right now this is a storm in a tea cup for the German regional Information Commissioner, Dr Johannes Caspar. Some{DE} newspapers {DE} are reporting that there are over 10,000 requests already to remove information, and it’s expected that this number will continue to grow.
I must admit, I think that these people are forgetting how the internet works. This type of information is not just available from Google. Here are a series of videos from a Düsseldorf letting agency, which show houses and other details of locations through the city. People fail to realise there isn’t much you can do from stopping someone taking a picture of your house, and putting it on a service like Panoramio, here is an example of a house close to my office. And the bigger question, is this something you should be able to request ? Is this an invasion of privacy (either morally or legally) to have a picture of your house on the internet without your permission ? All that Google is doing is making this information easy to use, and filling in the many holes in what other services offer. While I realise that Germany’s privacy laws on photography of people are stringent, I really don’t understand why this could extend to an image of your house.
There are other issues that I wonder about, like if you live in an apartment building, and one person requests your building removed, but the other 11 tenants are perfectly happy with the image being included. In the end, my fear is that it will just render this service unusable in Germany.
Google Video on Street View Privacy
Here is a video from Google’s Street View page in German that talks about data privacy {DE}, from their microsite about this topic.
Street View German Cities
The cities list of cities that google plans to roll out streetview in, via google blog {DE} :
Berlin, Bielefeld, Bochum, Bonn, Bremen, Dortmund, Dresden, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Hannover, Köln, Leipzig, Mannheim, München, Nürnberg, Stuttgart and Wuppertal.
Recently I was posed with a question using one of my favourite CMS’s, namely CMSMS. As will all apps that require email addresses, making sure it’s a valid email address is not as easy you would think. Coupled with the possibility of underscores, dashes, plus signs, etc, it can be a nightmare.
The FrontEndUser Module is a great addition, where it allows you to have a login for your site, and display certain parts of templates whether a user is logged in or not. Sadly their email validation is slightly flawed, as it didn’t like email addresses with dashes in the username part.
Note : this is just more a little mind wander, rather than an actual Google product, but it’s one that I can really could foresee them producing.
The next thing from Google
I’m thinking out loud here, while looking at my credit card bill earlier today I am really quite surprised that Google hasn’t launched their own version of a credit card. They already have a payment gateway, google checkout, which can provide data on consumer spending processes. But it is limited to online transactions. I’m sure that offline transactions, and the data set of
to allow them to create a comprehensive profile of a person, and ultimately target ads to people with products that now that they like to buy.
Again this would align with their strategy to organise the worlds data. hen I see Google touching into these markets with their recent credit card comparison tool for the UK, I really start to think that it could be a possibility.
We’ve seen how they will soon destroy the GPS industry with their Google Maps Navigation (which I wish would be launched in Europe, so please hurry up) to provide free turn by turn directions to users instead of having to buy rather expensive GPS devices. Google entered the market under the radar so to say, by licencing the content until they were in a position to use their own. Maybe with the comparison tool google will be able to see what offers interest consumers most, is it a low APR , balance transfer or rewards ?
Ways to make the Google Credit Card attractive
I’m sure they will want to avoid another backlash like they got from the launch of Buzz earlier this year, so it will have to be something people are willing to trade their data for. Most cards in the United States don’t have an annual fee, unlike European cards, so I don’t think that a no-fee card would be a such an attractive proposition. And offers of points, air miles and cash back are also quite standard. To catch the attention of the public it would probably need to be something significantl that people wouldn’t mind their purchasing data being analysed. My thoughts that it would be something with an extended credit limit, lower balance, and then tied in with another google product like say a free phone for example. Again these are just some random thoughts on what they could do.
One other possible entry into the market would be to purchase one of the smaller credit card companies, like say Discover.
After Google Credit Card
And what will Google do after that. Could Google start to be an cheap energy provider or even a bank ? Sure why not ! At the end of the day it’s all data.
Here is a quick tip on how to save paying PayPal fees. I was sending a large amount of euros today, and this would have resulted in about €50 of fees. So I did a bit of poking around and came across this tip, with this method it brought it down the fees to €30.
The stipulation for this to work is that you need to have either a Premier or a Business account. There is a feature called MassPay on Paypal where if you wanted to send multiple payments, you can simply upload a CSV file with the email address, the cash amount and the currency. The fees here are much less, and there is just a flat fee charge of 2%. Here is what you need to do :
open up notepad
enter in person@email.com <tab> cashvalue <tab> currency code (USD / EUR/ etc)
for multiple payments you can enter the same as 2 , on the next line
save as ASCII .TXT file.
login to paypal and find the mass pay link at the bottom of the page
click make Mass Payment on the left hand side of the info page
fill out the form, and identify people with email address when asked.
click review, do a review and see the fees.
Click send and save some fees !
Paypal Fee Savings
For example if you wanted to send someone exactly €1000, it would typically cost you 3.4% plus €0.35 for the transaction charge so you would need to send an extra €35.56 . With Mass pay this would be the flat 2% or €20. Also what is nice with this method, you don’t need to calculate what you should pay someone via paypal so they get €1000, rather you would have the CSV file person@email.com 1000 EUR
So not only does it save you a few quid, the payee doesn’t see the unusual €1035.36 transaction, and a fee charge, rather just get an entry for the whole €1000.
It obviously works for smaller amounts, so it depends on whether you want to spend the extra few steps to save cash. I always think, better in your pocket than someone else’s !
A quick post to say thanks to my few clients who trusted me to get their website back in the index or to tweak their pages to get a few more visitors to their pages. Thanks to those who have collaborated on projects, have shared their code, and even offered their business advice. It was more than a pleasure emailing, talking on the phone, skype or on IM with you. The first year in business was a bit of an eye opener, a challenge at times and a steep learning curve. Thanks for helping me get there.
From time to time you hear of Google tweaking their UI (User Interface). As they have such a large population of users it’s not often you actually get to be in one of these test groups. Below is a video of a recent test they performed, and my main google a/c was in the test. In this particular test Google remove all the surrounding links :
And once you focus your mouse on the input box to put in your search query, the other links are then shown. For this test it wasn’t every visit to google.de resulted in such a behaviour, it was more randomised.
Google UI Testing Video
Use full screen to see more details.
Google can generate valuable information from these testing sessions in the areas of usability / accessibility / user experience / conversion optimisation. What do you think of all these Google UI tests ?
