Trimming our privacy policies

Cross posted on the Gmail Blog and the Official Google Blog

Long, complicated and lawyerly—that’s what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand.

So we’re simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies. To be clear, we aren’t changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable. As a first step, we’re making two types of improvements:

  1. Most of our products and services are covered by our main Google Privacy

via Google Blogs...

Trimming our privacy policies

(Cross-posted from the Google Blog)

Long, complicated and lawyerly—that’s what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand.

So we’re simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies. To be clear, we aren’t changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable. As a first step, we’re making two types of improvements:

  1. Most of our products and services are covered by our main Google Privacy Policy.

via Google Blogs...

Missed call notifications delivered to your inbox

Google Voice lets you take charge of your telephony experience, giving you one number that rings all your phones. But what if you’re not around to answer any of them?

Starting today, whenever you miss a call, you can see a notification in your Google Voice inbox, or receive an email notification, or both.

This setting can be turned on and off from the Calls tab in the Settings menu.

We’re excited to add this new feature that’s been a common request from Google Voice users. So keep those suggestions coming,

via Google Blogs...

Trimming our privacy policies

Long, complicated and lawyerly—that’s what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand.

So we’re simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies. To be clear, we aren’t changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable. As a first step, we’re making two types of improvements:

  1. Most of our products and services are covered by our main Google Privacy Policy. Some, however, also have their own supplementary individual policies. Since there is a

via Google Blogs...

Going Google Across the 50 States: Maryland start-up hopes to level the playing field in education

Editor’s note: Over the past couple months, thousands of businesses have added their Gone Google story to our community map and even more have used the Go Google cloud calculator to test drive life in the cloud. To highlight some of these companies’ Gone Google stories, we decided to talk to Google Apps customers across the United States. Check back each week to see which state we visit next. To learn more about other organizations that have gone Google and share your story, visit our community map.

This week we head to Maryland where StraighterLine is trying

via Google Blogs...

Wave open source next steps

Today we posted an update about our plans for Wave open source code and the federation protocol on our Google Wave Developer blog. The post includes a description of our planned code contributions over the coming months as well as resources for developers to follow the progress of the project and stay involved.

Wave on!

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Rich snippets: testing tool improvements, breadcrumbs, and events

Webmaster Level: All

Since the initial roll-out of rich snippets in 2009, webmasters have shown a great deal of interest in adding markup to their web pages to improve their listings in search results. When webmasters add markup using microdata, microformats, or RDFa, Google is able to understand the content on web pages and show search result snippets that better convey the information on the page. Thanks to steady adoption by webmasters, we now see more than twice as many searches with rich snippets in the results in the US, and a four-fold increase globally, compared…

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5 Tips for campaigns on YouTube

This post is part of our “BizBlog Series”, which was formerly its own blog. Check back each week to see articles for partners and advertisers on YouTube, or search under the label, “BizBlog“.

In this election season, we’ve been working with political campaigns to understand how best to take advantage of what YouTube has to offer on a free and paid basis for getting their message out. Recently, we hosted a webcast to provide some tips to candidates running for office and advocacy groups campaigning for ballot issues on ways to present your candidate or your issue and

via Google Blogs...

Drawing out ideas in documents

Have you recently toiled over instructions to assemble furniture? Now imagine the agony if you had no illustrations to fall back on. What’s the best way to teach kids about nutrition without a food pyramid?

Sometimes when working with text you realize that words can only articulate so much. And that’s why we have drawings in Google documents. Drawings can be useful for things like diagramming processes in a flowchart or clearly articulating the relationship between a groups of ideas.


To get started, select the Drawing option from the Insert menu:

via Google Blogs...

Back to the future: two years of Google Chrome

(Cross-posted from the Google Chrome Blog)

Watching the 1985 classic Back to the Future last night, I was struck by how much things can change with time. The main character Marty McFly travels 30 years back in time, only to find that his house hadn’t been built yet, skateboards hadn’t been invented and nobody had ever heard rock ‘n roll.

Looking back today on Chrome’s second anniversary, it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just a short time. In August 2008, JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature

via Google Blogs...