Google have confirmed rumours that they are developing agumented reality glasses this week.
The internet firm posted a small preview video along with photos on their social network Google+
The photos depict the glasses sleak and minimalist design, A single semi transparent lens over users right eye, with an inbuilt microphone for voice control activation.
According to reports from Google, they have just claimed ownership of a patent that would provide advertising to users, based on information collected from their surrounding environment and location.
The patent predicts that mobile devices of the future will be fitted with sensors that are able to detect atmospheric conditions and data.
Google claims that this is the new forefront of the technology battlefield. Claiming patents for ideas you have designed, but don’t have the infrastructure to build yet is the name of the game.
There has been a major uproar about this patent with Gus Hosein, the executive director of Privacy International, expressing his discontent. ”Not content with collecting vast amounts of information from your online activities, it seems Google are looking to start exploiting the offline space as well. Patents like this may never come to fruition, but they force us to ask ourselves: how many aspects of our lives will advertisers try to exploit, and where will it end?”
Google was quick to respond saying:
“We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t. Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications,”
Andrew Alton, a patent lawyer, said this was “a completely logical extension of Google’s advertising strategy“.
“If you spend money on research and development of new products, the costs may be massive but getting licensing rights when someone else invents it is free money for firms,” he added.
Google makes new changes to Privacy Policy
Google’s new Privacy policy has been causing a big stir this month.
In the last month the internet has been set alight by the ramblings of human rights activists and internet blog sites going mad with scary headlines, and predictions of a gloomy ”Internet Overload” in the style of George Orwell’s 1984. So what’s the truth of the matter and should you be worried about these changes?
What’s actually changing?
Google main change is they will be having one unified privacy policy that covers all of the businesses and websites. i.e. YouTube, Google Search, Google buzz, Google Mail, Google Calender, Google Maps etc.
The idea is to simplify and enable the integration of user data across all of Google platforms. Which will enable them to Taylor advertising to an individuals taste based on a users browsing, search and internet activity.
What is the problem?
The main issue that Google’s user base are having is concerned about having so much personal data stored into one neat little package from the company to use. Worried that Google might end up knowing more about them then some of their own family members. Google representatives have repeatedly stated that they are not collecting any new information, just collating it. Of course this isn’t very reassuring for most people and if you don’t want to opt out of the data collection there is a very simple way to do it.
To Delete your history within Google simply Sign into your Google Account, go to https://www.google.com/history, click “remove all Web History” and click “OK” .
Simple as that.
Although it should be noted that if Google really had evil intentions. It would of been more worrying if they had been consolidating the data behind closed doors. They have access to all the information, there wouldn’t be much of a legal issue for Google to be consolidation information without a users permission. Google made the changes in their new policy very public, it was posted at the header of every website they own, plastered so in your face, that it was actually getting quite annoying. Given these facts, people should probably take these changes in Google’s privacy policy as a sign of honesty on Google’s behalf. Rather than the move of a sinister evil internet empire.
That being said, even though the policy is described as a simplified version, it is extremely complicated to understand. Even privacy specialists seem to be having a tough time getting the heads around some of the technical jargon intertwined through out the policy. Which has obviously made a lot of users suspicious that Google has something to hide.
But more and more, in the world of the data age. The only way you can avoid large amounts of data being collected about you and your every move, is just to avoid using the internet or any technology altogether. So it’s something we might just have to get used to.
At least if we have company’s like Google are being honest enough to make us aware of what they are collecting, we can take possible measures against being tracked.
Google makes new changes to serach algorithm
Google is of course known for its on-going efforts to improve search results, this is to help their users find high-quality content from the websites listed in their search results. To this end they have recently launched an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage, and the amount of content the user sees on the page once they click on a search result.
“We’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience.” Google reports on a slew of complaints they have received in recent months. They go on to say “Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change.” The new feature is designed to penalise those sights that do not show relevant content above the line at the bottom of the user’s page or “Above-the-fold”.
Problematically, this line is apparently different depending on how large the user’s resolution is. So how Google have chosen to define what really counts as “above” isn’t as clear as one might hope. Common sense would suggest it will most likely be dependent on the average resolution of the websites own user base, whether this is the case, Google have not stated. They do say this change will affect less than 1% of all its pages, but even 1% of Google’s listings has to be in the billions, therefore it has to be remembered that while 1% is small in relative terms, it still accounts for a large number of web pages.
For users this is a great improvement and Google is to be commended by them, No user likes to be spammed with adverts when visiting any website, so for the users, this is only a user enhancing experience, less ads and more content. I doubt any sane internet surfer could argue with that, unless their favourite website is penalized, but there is always bookmarks to get around that.
This is certainly the more important question. Whether you consider Google’s new changes fair or not is not really up for debate here, as this change clearly improves overall user experience. What it does mean is that web designers/developers and webmasters will have to be more selective over their strategy when it comes to advertising. Web developers will now have to consider carefully where they place a websites search engine readable content in relation to the websites cash cows.
Although many websites already take this into consideration to deliver the best user experience they can, this is clearly not the case for all websites, and many of them have been happy to game the search engines by hiding content at the bottom of a page below a large field of advertisements, making any visitors fight their way through them, before reaching what they want to see. Forcing websites to comply with this kind of standard will hopefully improve overall website design in order to appeal to the search engines new changes and improve user experience.
Google has commented that this is only one of over 500 new changes they are making during the next 12 months, which means that website designers better stay on top of their game if they want to stay on top of Google’s listings. This year is looking to be a big one for Google, with Google Plus still on the rise and rolling out so many new features, exciting times are ahead in the world of the internet.
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