IDG News Service

In an attempt at clarity, Google has amended its terms of service to say that it analyzes private data, including e-mails, for purposes including the delivery of ads and customized search results.

The changes to its terms of service come as Internet users continue to grapple with how and why companies handle their data. For Google, the issue concerns its automated scanning of emails and other data.

"Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you with personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection," a new statement in the terms reads. The analysis occurs, Google said, as content is sent, received and stored.

The changes were made for clarity purposes, based on feedback the company received over the last few months, said Google spokesman Matt Kallman. "We want our policies to be simple and easy for users to understand," he said.

Verizon Communications is forcing customers in southern California to move from traditional telephone service to voice over IP or wireless services, The Utility Reform Network (TURN), a consumer advocacy group, said in a complaint filed with the state.

Verizon, in its "forced migration," is ignoring state and federal laws requiring it to provide telephone services to California residents, TURN said in a complaint with the California Public Utilities Commission. The telecom carrier is ignoring requests for repair of its existing copper-based network and forcing customers to VoIP service over Verizon's FiOS broadband service, TURN said in its complaint.

"Verizon is deliberately neglecting the repair and maintenance of its copper network with the explicit goal of migrating basic telephone service customers who experience service problems," Regina Costa, TURN's telecom research director, wrote in the complaint. "These migrations are often without the customers' knowledge or consent." A Verizon spokesman said the company is reviewing the complaint and will respond to the CPUC.

A court in California has prohibited the destruction of phone records collected by the government until further orders, raising a potential conflict with an order by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington (DC).

Judge Jeffrey White of the US District Court for the Northern District of California ordered the retention of the call details in two lawsuits that have challenged the US National Security Agency's program for the collection of telephone metadata. A number of lawsuits challenging the NSA program have been filed by privacy and other groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles. Reggie Walton, presiding judge of the FISC, denied a motion from the Department of Justice that the current five-year limit for holding phone metadata should be extended indefinitely, as it could be required as evidence in the civil lawsuits challenging the program. An extension of the time limit would further infringe on the privacy interests of US persons whose phone records were acquired in large numbers and retained by the government for five years to assist in national security investigation, Judge Walton wrote in his order.

"The great majority of these individuals have never been the subject of investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities," he wrote. In his temporary restraining order, Judge White has, however, prohibited the destruction of any "potential evidence relevant to the claims at issue" in the lawsuits, including the destruction of any telephone metadata or "call detail" records, pending a further order of the court. [March 11]

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has turned the European Union into a tapping "bazaar" in order to spy on as many EU citizens as possible, NSA leaker Edward Snowden said.

The NSA has been working with national security agencies in EU member states to get access to as much data of EU citizens as possible, Snowden said in a testimony sent to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). The NSA has been pressuring EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance, according to Snowden. This is done through NSA's Foreign Affairs Division (FAD), he said, adding that lawyers from the NSA and GCHQ work very hard "to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers," he said.

The efforts to "interpret new powers out of vague laws" is an intentional strategy to avoid public opposition and lawmakers' insistence that legal limits be respected, he said. Once the NSA has dealt with legal restrictions on mass surveillance in partner states, it pressures them to perform operations to gain access to the bulk communications of all major telecommunications providers in their jurisdictions, Snowden said.

“The result is a European bazaar, where an EU member state like Denmark may give the NSA access to a tapping center on the (unenforceable) condition that NSA doesn't search it for Danes, and Germany may give the NSA access to another on the condition that it doesn't search for Germans. Yet the two tapping sites may be two points on the same cable, so the NSA simply captures the communications of the German citizens as they transit Denmark, and the Danish citizens as they transit Germany, all the while considering it entirely in accordance with their agreements," Snowden said.

[March 7]

AT&T and IBM will start jointly offering services designed to help municipalities, utility companies and other organizations use "Internet of things" technologies to better manage their infrastructure.

"There is a huge amount of growth of the things that are connected" to networks, said Michael Curry, IBM vice president of product management. "When you have that many things connected in, you have a big data problem. Companies want to be able to take that data and use it to optimize operations and predict failures."

IBM estimates that there will be over 18 billion connected devices in the world by 2022. Examples of connected devices include mobile phones and sensors. AT&T will provide network connectivity and IBM will provide the software and integration. The two companies plan to help organizations build out systems that can collect data, wirelessly, from many remote end-nodes, an approach increasingly being called "The Internet of things" in the industry. The data can be analyzed and monitored, as well as fed to mobile devices for personnel in the field. The initial targets for the service will be municipalities, mid-size utility companies and transportation companies, though any sort of organization could benefit from remote monitoring should consider IBM and AT&T's assistance, Curry said. Cities could use this approach to better and control manage traffic. Utility companies could more closely monitor their customers' energy usage. Transportation companies could better manage their fleets of vehicles.