A recent report from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), following a 17-month investigation, reveals that, contrary to what Google’s position had been all this time, Google actually knew that their Street View drive-bys were sucking down people’s personal data through any open wifi routers that the Street View van encountered. And not just a little bit – but for nearly three years, between 2007 and 2010. Private data that was harvested from individuals includes email (the full text of!), passwords, sites visited, and other sensitive information. Until now Google had always maintained that they didn’t realize it was happening, and that it was an accident wraught by a single engineer at Google. Turns out that supervisors knew all along that it was going on. While the FCC concludes that Google did not break any laws, there was a heck of a lot of invasion of privacy going on, and, in addition, Google was slapped with a $25,000 fine for obstructing the investigation.

Gmail appears to be down, world-wide, for many users. We are not clear as to what the specific issues are at this point in time, but it does appear that this outage is affecting thousands, if not millions, of Gmail users. Users who are affected are receiving the same error, “Temporary Error (500) We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.” First reports of outages began appearing at approximately 11:30EST.

Ever wondered how many emails you have sent from Gmail or received at or through Gmail? Curious about what percentage of the time you are online with your laptop versus your phone or tablet? Perhaps more importantly, how about monitoring from what geographic locations your Google account has been accessed? Or maybe you are just curious about how much Google is keeping tabs on you. Now all of this, and more, is possible, with the new Google Account Activity Reports.

For those of you who are thinking “Hrmm…Sunday is April 1st – Google Self-Driving Car, April 1 – uh huh”, well, it’s no joke. No fooling. In fact, we saw the Google self-driving car ourselves this week; it drove right past us!

Frustrated about the amount of spam you receive in foreign languages? Be it Russian, Japanese or other Asian language; or Kanji, Hanzi, Hanja, logograms, pictograms, Cyrillic or other characters, foreign language spam is frustrating. And it’s all the more frustrating because if all foreign language email that you receive is usually spam, as is the case for many people, then your spam filter should have a way to tell it “All email not in English (or whichever your native language is) is spam.” Now, if you use Gmail, there is a way to do it (and even if you don’t use Gmail as your primary email program, you can use Gmail as a spam filter). Here it is.

Do you use Google Calendar? If you answered “no”, well, are you sure that you don’t use Google Calendar? Because even if you don’t use Google Calendar directly, if you use a calendar on the iPhone, or on an Android phone, you may well be using Google Calendar on the back end without even thinking about it. The same is true if you “share” your calendar from your Mac. And here’s the thing, your calendar on Google may be set to “public” view by default. Meaning that anyone can read your calendar. And it will turn up in public Google search results.

You may already be aware that Google has a new privacy policy going into effect tomorrow, March 1st, 2012 (don’t worry if you are reading this after March 1, 2012, this article will still help you to understand and deal with Google’s new privacy policies). But what does it really mean for you? And perhaps more importantly, how can you opt-out of Google’s having their finger in every part of your online life, and even remove data that Google has already collected? Here are the answers to those questions about Google’s new unified privacy policy.

Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Firefox’s Mozilla, have at last formally agreed to include a “Do Not Track” button (DNT button) in every browser. {Let’s take this opportunity to explain that the way this works is that using the “Do Not Track” option inserts a special “Do Not Track” header into your browser. In fact, as we shall see, there may not even be a DNT button involved – you may need to be a super-user type to even find the “Do Not Track” option.} Their capitulation comes just before the Obama administration’s appeal to Congress to pass a “privacy bill of rights”, but don’t expect it to mean that they won’t still be mining your data. (P.S. See below for how to enable Do Not Track in Safari.)

Microsoft Hotmail, the world’s largest email provider, is better at blocking spam than Google Gmail and Yahoo Mail, according to a study released by the independent research firm Cascade Insights. The study only tested these companies – the so-called big three email providers – and was sponsored by Microsoft, which funded the research to combat their bad reputation for allowing loads of spam into users’ inboxes.

Several email providers that normally compete with one another, like Google Gmail and Microsoft Hotmail, have teamed up in an effort to better protect email users from spam and fraudulent messages. The new system is called DMARC, short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. With a united front, the war against spam may have a powerful new weapon.

Lots of people are talking about the “new” Google privacy policy that was announced by Google yesterday (Tuesday, January 24th). But really, it’s not so much a new privacy policy as it is a restatement and consolidation of the privacy policies that they have had in place all along, and a statement of their intention to start doing more with the personal data to which use you have already agreed.

You may think that you are being oh-so-careful with your Google profile, Match.com profile, Facebook profile, or other social media or dating site (or other) profile. You never use your full real name publicly, you don’t share your address or where you work. But if you have an image in your profile that has ever been published anywhere else on the Internet, it can be very easy to use Google’s image matching search engine to quickly discover any information associated with that image anywhere online.

Google Maps is perhaps one of the most useful services which Google has rolled out; people have used Google Maps as the basis for all sorts of cool and interesting things. One such use is History Pin, a service through which people can upload photos from days of yore and ‘pin’ them onto a Google map of the region, indexed by the represented date. But the really cool thing about HistoryPin is that you can see the photo in context, inserted into the moden day street view.

Those scrolls of the Dead Sea, the Dead Sea Scrolls, once approachable by only a very select few, are now available for viewing by anyone with an internet connection, thanks to a collaboration between Google and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Most people have two questions about Dead Sea Scrolls: 1. What are the Dead Sea Scrolls? And 2. Where are the DeadSea Scrolls? Now the answer to the second question is easy: they are online (see link below). As to the first question, put simply, the Dead Sea Scrolls are the earliest known biblical documents from around the time of Christ (thought to be from 125 years before the birth of Christ through about 70 years after), and include the earliest known versions of the Hebrew bible, and other relevant documents. And now they are online!

Google has gobbled up restaurant review outfit Zagat, in their latest Pacman-like gobbling juggernaut. Since June 1st of this year, Google has acquired no fewer than PostRank, Admeld, SageTV, Punchd, Fridge, PittPatt, Dealmap, Motorola Mobility (if approved), Zave Networks, and, now, Zagat. In fact, Zagat will be Google’s 20th acquisition this year, and they still have three and a half months to go. And Zagat is the 102nd company acquired by Google in the past 8 years, with half of those acquisitions occuring in just the past two years!