Kindle readers beware - big Amazon is watching you read 1984

The ebook reader may have advantages over unwieldy printed tomes, but it has unexpected drawbacks

CHRISTMAS IS coming and you're wondering what to put on your wish list. How about an Amazon Kindle – the gizmo that enables you to download books, magazines and newspapers and read them on the move?

According to the publicity blurb, this cool device "can hold 1,500 books and be read for up to two weeks on a single charge. Its electronic-ink display looks and reads like real paper and has no glare, even in bright sunshine". Sounds good, doesn't it? No more worrying about whether the piles of hardbacks you want to bring to Provence/Tuscany will fit within the miserly Ryanair baggage allowance. And if you ever find yourself stuck for something to read in the train, you can wirelessly order a book from the Amazon store and be reading the opening paragraph in just over a minute. And all for just under £170.

At Amazon.co.uk you find that the Kindle is now available in the UK. If you order today, you can have it in a couple of days. Hooray! Add it to your basket and head on over to checkout.

You're just about to click the "Place my order" button when a small, niggling thought pops up. Wasn't there something about Amazon and George Orwell a few months ago? Some kind of a row about consumer rights?

Google those words and the first result is a Guardian story headlined "Amazon Kindle users surprised by 'Big Brother' move". Ah, yes: now you remember. The report reads: "Owners of Amazon's Kindle electronic book reader have received a nasty surprise, after discovering that copies of books by George Orwell had been deleted from their gadgets without their knowledge. The books – downloaded from Amazon.com by American Kindle users – were remotely deleted after what the US company now says was a rights issue regarding the publisher, MobileReference.com." It seems that Amazon refunded the cost of the books, but told affected customers they could no longer read the books and that the titles were no longer available.

Here's the translation: you go to Waterstone's, buy a copy of Orwell's 1984 and take it home. Two days later you get up and find that agents of Waterstone's have entered the house during the night and removed the offending volume. They've left a terse note explaining what they've done and enclosing a credit note for the cost of the book. Enraged, you phone the manager of Waterstone's, who explains that everything is in accordance with the service agreement you accepted when you bought the book.

You don't have to be a lawyer to know that this would not be tolerated in the real world of physical objects.Yet it's commonplace – indeed universal – in the world of information goods. And what makes it possible is the "End User Licence Agreement" (EULA) that most of us click to accept when we first use hardware, software or online services.

The Kindle EULA is a good example. Section 3, which deals with "Digital Content" (such as downloaded books), says that "Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content." In other words, you are forbidden to lend or sell the book you've just "bought". In real-world terms, you can't lend your copy of 1984 to a friend or donate it to the school jumble sale.

Under the subsection on "Use of Digital Content', the Kindle EULA says: "Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use."

Translation: you can't back up your electronic books on to any other device – which means that if your Kindle packs up, or if Amazon moves on to another technical standard, you're screwed: your entire digital library has effectively been vaporised. Then you look round your house and note the number of electronic devices that no longer work.

I could go on, but you get the point. Verily, technology giveth, but also it taketh away. And sometimes we don't realise until it's too late. Caveat emptor.

Newspaper pay walls have confused writing on them

As Murdoch hesitates, there are no simple solutions over charging for digital content

So, this month, the pay walls begin to go up. The next edition of Retail Week you try to read on the internet will come as part of a subscription package, with 18 more Emap magazines waiting to pull the same trick. The days of "free", it seems, are coming to an end. But wasn't it only last November that the CEO of Emap said he was phasing out the pay walls he'd built? In, out, shake it all about?

And over the ocean, where the Supreme Leader once decreed every enclave of his empire would be a walled garden of profitability by June 2010? Well, says Murdoch, that may be slipping a bit, if not a lot. It seems damned difficult to talk to anyone without getting the anti-monopoly guys frothing. Cancel my last Earth-shattering diktat.

Meanwhile, while New York Times thinkers cudgel their brains and the rebuilding of their own (dismantled) pay wall proceeds at a sluggardly pace, the editor of the London Times has a short, shocking message for anxious staff: "It's a much tougher, more complicated decision than it seems to all the armchair experts. There is no clear consensus on the right way to go."

There ought to be a rough consensus; instead, there's a spiral of confusion. It begins in America. Reverberations of that latest 10.6% drop in US print circulations carried on all last week, but much of it feeds through as panic.

Take one stark contrast. Here's the San Francisco Chronicle, hailing a 25.8% circulation drop (because, in part, it put its cover price up around 60%). "Our reshaping the newspaper's business model is paying off financially even though, as anticipated, it has resulted in a sharp decline in circulation," its management claims. And here's the Newport Daily News on Rhode Island producing three tiers of pricing to help readers choose: $145 a year for the print version only, $245 for print plus online, and $345 for the full electronic edition.

Pause to make sense of that. Piling in web access on top and combining online and print readership figures to keep advertisers happy, the Chronicle is driving readers on to the net. The News, making its website ludicrously expensive, is doing precisely the reverse.

And the dislocations are just as gaping when digital push comes to digital shove. Murdoch still wants to build his wall of charges and subscriptions. Apostles of free – such as the Guardian's digital strategy chief, Emily Bell – take a precisely opposite view (though the Guardian group owns a chunk of Emap). Join a swirling debate about "engagement" (specific time spent with and loyalty towards a particular brand) and the disengaged number of unique users who drop in on a site every month. See if advertising alone, when and if it comes back, will pay staffing bills, or the walls can take the strain.

Again, no certainties. The New York Times reports online ad revenue down 18.5% in the third quarter of 2009 against 2008. Giant chains such as Gannett find similar disillusion. If advertising in general recovers, there's nil guarantee newspaper websites will boom in tandem. But neither is there great confidence that pay walls can make up for missing adverts.

Ask net readers if they'd be prepared to pay and there's barely an extra penny along that route. Yet one analyst at the Balderton Capital private equity firm estimated last week that most newspaper groups need only raise £3 a month from 5% of their readers to equal the sums that advertising based on the blunt mass audience figures of unique usage can supply.

The moment the walls go up, the consensus that counts the biggest numbers disintegrates. But it also shows that (varying a tad from group to group) newspaper futures will probably be built on still large, but diminishing, print and smaller online revenues for years, with costs pushed relentlessly down as revenue streams turn to trickles.

Such mixing and matching can work. Newspaper stocks are turning up a little because investors see profitability returning – and a better balance between cover price cash, advertising cash and the staff it needs to produce a paper. The bad news is that there are no simple solutions left in a world where pay walls may be no more than rubble.

The only real freedom around, it sometimes seems, is the freedom to keep changing your mind.

Roy Greenslade: Guardian has not talked to Murdoch about paywalls

When I posted yesterday on the remarkable candour of Rupert Murdoch in admitting that he was holding discussions with Telegraph Media Group about website paywalls, some commenters suggested that The Guardian might be involved too.

Aware of the fact that the paper had already issued a statement saying it would not charge for news content, I was about to respond with a definite "no". However, it's always better to check. So I did.

The unequivocal answer: Guardian Media Group has not been party to any discussions with Murdoch or any other publisher about erecting paywalls.

This morning I replied to this effect to specific commenters (see comment 12 at Why the Murdoch Paywall Construction Company raises competition concerns).

Incidentally, I am not alone in my views about this matter. See also Murdoch's plan for web paywalls 'raises questions of anti-trust law'.

How news will change in Google's eyes

Google's Eric Schmidt gives eight ideas on the future of journalism

When Google's CEO Eric Schmidt sat down on Thursday evening at the MIT in Boston, one topic that came up in the discussion with the audience was the future of news. As was reported by several journalists, Schmidt appeared to have a lot sympathy for newspapers and magazines and, well, interest. This might be no surprise, since delivering the news in the future seems to be an issue that Google is brainstorming about.

Their interest in news grew from a nice small idea that Krishna Bharat had about story ranking in 2001 to something which obviously keeps its CEO busy as it became a part of their future business. Indeed, Schmidt talked of "about 10 news stream ideas" they have for the future of news. What could they be?

To answer that, we need to understand fundamentally how Google addresses the issue, which is very much in a technology-driven way. As Schmidt joked at the Gartner Symposium, that in order to study the consumption of information in the future, you should find an early technology adopter, hence a teenager in your house, or borrow one, if you don't have one. So how can news be consumed in the future? The points Schmidt comes up with are convincing, although not totally new.

Always online: "...the reading will presumably be online not offline, just because of the scale of it."

Mobile: "The Kindle is a proto of what this thing could look like. People will carry these things around."

On a smallish display: "...probably on a tablet or a mobile phone"

Personalised: "It'll be highly personalised, right? So you'll know who the person is."

Semantic: "capable of deeper navigation into a subject"

Cross-financed: "It'll be advertising-supported and subscription-supported, so you'll probably have a mixture."

While we have heard of most of these ideas, there are two aspects which seemed to be new and less decrepit: integrated storytelling and differentiated news display.

"There'll be a lot of integration of media – so video, voice, what have you," said Schmidt rather briefly, but indeed, integrated storytelling might be the next step after the convergence of television, radio and newspapers. Since the way we told a news story has changed in the past, it is quite certain that it will change in the future as well.

While now we display text, video and audio next to each other there might be a future where the stories are told in a new medium that emerges out of a deep convergence of these three. Indeed, the development of integrated formats might change journalism fundamentally in terms of how to set out the line of a story, what to begin with and where to end, or how to provide additional information. The ways video games structure stories might give us a slight hint what could lay in front of us.

"...show me the differential. Since you know what you told me yesterday, just tell me what changed today. Don't repeat everything." What Schmidt is talking about here is a rather useful feature in a world of information overload. Indeed, every news site should have a button to mark articles as read or seen. Think of something like the "I like" button on Facebook, which would send an article to be stored in your personal archive.

In addition, the unsatisfied experience you make today when reading a news website could vanish by this feature. A list of looked at articles gives you a feeling that you have actually done something while now the only feeling that is left after scanning a website is that there is soo much more which you missed.

Of course, a flipped-through magazine or newspapers already gives you that satiesfied "been there, seen that" feeling today. Sometimes the future lies in the past.

(Via NiemanLab.)

Viral Video Chart: Christopher Walken reads lyrics to Lady Gaga's Poker Face

Watch Stephen Fry in the Marks & Spencer Christmas ad

Ikea. Of course, I've been there, everybody goes there. Yes, because it is so convenient. At least, we say that each time before we go and end up walking the aisles in line with the other Ikea sheep getting more and more aggressive. But there is help: here is what you can dream about next time. A cute little forklift is just nudging the shelf a tiny bit, and then whoooosh, the whole place falls apart, first a bit and then more and more and more. Thousands of boxes pile up. Rumours on the internet say this was filmed in a Russian warehouse and the crash destroyed bottles of vodka worth $150,000.

Otherwise all is well with the world this week - at least in the Viral Video Charts. Indeed, the best video is No 1 as the wonderful Christopher Walken reads Lady GaGa's Poker Face on BBC1's Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. Don't miss it. In his inimitable dry style this is a true moment of glory in the performing arts. And since you've started to get into it, watch South Park's Cartman performing Poker Face, too.

1. Christopher Walken Poker Face
Since the Lady got beamed from her weird early performances in restaurants on to the mainstream stages, it got kind of sad. But here comes Christopher Walken, the knight, and makes her a cool princess again.

2. Prince of Persia Film Official Movie Trailer HD
Welcome to the way they tell fairy tales today. Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer, known as the producer of The Pirates of the Caribbean, might have done it again. On my want-to-do-this-list.

3. [HD] Taylor Swift Pranked By Ellen Degeneres
The really funny part of that video is seeing Ellen DeGeneres masterfully disguised as a magazine, while it is only mildly amusing to see Taylor Swift scared so much she gets swiftly swept off her feet.

4. Eichborn Fliegenbanner auf der Frankfurter Buchmesse
Using real flies tied to a banner, the advertising agency Jung von Matt of a German book publisher had a rather buzzing idea for getting attention at the recent book fair in Frankfurt

5. Weezer Snuggie Infomercial
How low can hipsters go? With a hardcore infomercial regarding synthetic blankets with, er, arms, the sympathetic Los Angeles guys from Weezer try to figure that out. Yes, new album out now.

6. KEN BLOCK'S TRAX STI CAR
I confess, I am a downhill ski addict. Mountains, snow and steep ski-runs make me happy, and I love skiing so much because there are NO cars. So do I really have to find it amazing that a weird Subaru with triangle wheels can drive over me at the piste now?

7. BANGS Take U To Da Movies
Check out the sway beats of this 19-year-old rap artist storming the viral video charts from North Khartoum, Sudan via Melbourne.

8. Jay-Z - "Empire State Of Mind" ft. Alicia Keys
Oh New York, you are a special lady indeed and Jay-Z's video displays amazing snap shots of the city, only the strange moves that Alicia is doing in a leather sausage casing are a little bit over the top, don't you think?

9. Fork Lift Accident Brings Down The Warehouse Video
According to CNN a simple nudge can cause $150,000 of boxed alcohol to come tumbling down - and as I said, I know now what I will dream of next time in Ikea.

10. Future Designer Laptop
The time where your laptop is designed like a book may be over soon. Indeed, the drafts the of Orkin design are inspiring; I just hope they have better music in the future.

Source: Unruly Media. Compiled from data gathered at 17:00 on Guy Fawkes Day on the 5th of November 2009. The Viral Video Chart measures the viral dissemination of both brand-driven and user-uploaded videos across social media environments. Videos are ranked by the velocity of citations, based on a real-time analysis of over 50 million blogs and microblogging profiles. View and comment counts are cumulative and are aggregated across all known instances of the video. For more detailed metrics contact Unruly Media.

Flogging a DAB horse…

The UK radio industry may be approaching a turning point as its digital future is argued in front of the House of Commons Culture, Media & Sport Committee

Independent media analyst Grant Goddard has just posted some excerpts from last week's DCMS (Department of Culture, Media & Sport) committee meeting on his Radio Blog. One of the prime quotes is used as a headline: Let us get on this horse or get off it.

The pain caused by DAB in the commercial sector is right up front, with RadioCentre's Andrew Harrison saying:

One of the fundamental issues the sector faces right now is the appalling cost of dual transmission. Ultimately, right now, this is a small sector and very many of our stations are simultaneously paying for the cost of analogue and digital transmission. That clearly does not make any financial sense.

Later, Steve Fountain, head of radio at KM Group spells it out:

KM Group does have a digital platform. It is currently costing us over £100,000 a year and we get absolutely nothing back from it

.

Travis Baxter, managing director of Bauer Radio, still supports DAB as "a bespoke broadcast platform" (ie as distinct from Freeview, satellite, Internet radio etc) but says: "It has, however, taken 12 to 13 years of very slow development for that platform to get to its current state. Therefore, our proposition to Carter's Review was: let us get on this horse or get off it. We think we should get on it."

One problem is that getting on it will be expensive. Harrison puts the capital cost of building out the DAB platform as roughly £120 million, or £10 million a year. Commercial radio wants DAB's biggest user and main promoter to fund most of it. "We cannot afford it but we absolutely believe the BBC can," says Harrison:

the current Licence Fee settlement for the BBC at around about £3.5-£3.6 billion a year is that over 12 years that is £43 billion. The £100 million infrastructure cost for DAB radio is less than a quarter of one per cent of what the BBC's income will likely be over the next 12 years. So it is eminently affordable if there is a public policy decision that it is important to do that build-out.

Harrison also makes a good point in saying that the DAB build out is "designed to meet the BBC's obligations of universality rather than the commercial sector's obligations of viability." It's not in commercial radio's interests to spend pots of money it doesn't have to get DAB fishing and farming forecasts and government news to remote areas. It makes its money from breakfast shows and urban traffic jams.

Of course, the BBC is also coming under financial pressure to stop spending money on things that some would argue it really doesn't need, or shouldn't be doing anyway. (I probably have colleagues who don't think the BBC's web site represents fair competition for Guardian Unlimited, for example.) Whether the BBC Trust would frown on DAB radio is another matter.

So, we seem to be left with three broad choices:

(1) Ride the DAB horse, which is financially painful, and hope the public finally clambers on behind.

(2) Adopt DAB+ (or, more accurately, the WorldDMB standard) as the solution and announce a multi-year migration policy. DAB+ is several times more efficient so it will allow more stations (good) and better sound quality (good) while reducing transmission costs (good).

(3) Abandon DAB and stick with FM, because (a) FM already works well for most people and (b) there are other ways to get digital radio, including cable, DVB-T (Freeview), satellite, Wi-Fi/Internet streams, WiMax, LTE (next-gen mobile broadband), DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale, where mondiale is French for "worldwide") and so on.

I've spent a few years banging on about option (2), and several countries are now adopting it. What I want is "DAB done right". I gather the UK radio industry doesn't like it because it makes a few million current DAB sets obsolescent. To which I respond: "You shouldn't have been so stupid as to produce a digital system that can't be upgraded, especially since you were also stupid enough to use a codec that predates MP3."

Over the past few years, I have noticed that there has been a shift of opinion away from option (1) and towards option (3). That's reflected in my latest DAB piece, published in Media Guardian on Monday.

None of us knows exactly how things will look in 2015, but I'll be quite surprised if the tide turns back towards DAB.

The new ways to hire journalists

Can news organisations thrive in troubled times by using charity funding, amateurs and student interns?

Believe it or not, newspapers and news organisations are still hiring journalists - but not quite in the way they used to …

—The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which launched with a £2m grant in July, is using its charitable funds to hire up to 20 staff to carry out its investigations, as Journalism.co.uk reports.

—At the same time Newsquest's Brighton Argus has signed up journalism students from a local college to staff its 25 community news sites (via HTFP).

Is this how journalism will be conducted in the future: by amateurs, students and via charity handouts? Those worried about the erosion of professional journalism in the UK will hope not, but any realists who care about media holding authority to account (and maybe even making some money) should say, why not?

Like all UK newspaper publishers, Newsquest has reduced its workforce by hundreds in the past year — and by many hundreds over the past five years. With a stripped down staff it can't achieve its hyperlocal ambitions without public participation.

Though the National Union of Journalists won't like to hear it, students are a willing, cheap workforce that can make a real contribution to local news—thousands already do through free "work experience". Newspapers may even benefit from some colleges' superior facilities: Nottingham University's Centre for Broadcasting and Journalism recently invested in a 85-seat multimedia "hub" with broadcast studio - by contrast, newspapers seem content for journalists to do pieces-to-camera sat in their inky newsroom.

Could charitable funding prop up the news biz? The Bureau of Investigative Journalism may have won £2m but, as newspaper group CEOs will testify (just look at their balance sheets), a few million doesn't buy you many journalists or many investigations. PA is pitching for public funds for a UK pool of reporters, but the bill is £18m a year—a huge chunk of money for one public body to stump up.

The truth may be that nothing can replace the staffing level that UK journalism has enjoyed in recent years—alternative sources of funding and help from pro-am contributors could simply be two facets of the post-professional news landscape.

Related Stories

• Journalism Now A Charity Case As New Group Gets £2 Million Grant, Google Backing
• The Time Must Finally Be Now For Grassroots Media
• Trinity Mirror's GazetteLive Recruits Schoolkids As Hyper-Local Bloggers

Rupert Murdoch conference call highlights

Three key exchanges in Rupert Murdoch's conference call with reporters covering the News Corporation quarterly results

Brian Stelter (New York Times): There was much talk in the past three months about an agreement between News Corporation and General Electric to limit the attacks between Fox and MSNBC. Is News Corporation continuing to seek to limit those attacks? And on a related note, do you view the tensions with the White House as being good for business for Fox News?

Rupert Murdoch: Well, on the first thing, we did not start this abuse, which we thought went way beyond – it was personal and went way beyond – not on me, but on others, and it was finally we had to allow people to retaliate. And the moment they stop, we'll stop. We don't believe in it. We don't think it's good business.

As for tension with the White House, no, I think they're overplayed it and it's probably been good for us in terms of ratings. But in fact we – it was very interesting when they – I don't know what prompted it, probably tempers I think, when they tried to bar us from a pool press conference. And all our competitors, ABC, CBS, NBC, immediately went to the White House and complained and said this was not the way to treat anybody in the media. I suppose they thought they might be next. So we don't really have any continuing problem there at all. We cover them, and they have said publicly, that we are absolutely fair in our reporting of the White House. They just don't like one or two of our commentators, which I understand.

James Quinn (Daily Telegraph): Rupert, last time, at the end of the last quarter you talked about charging news and paper websites by the end of the current financial year, by the end of June. Could you give us an update on how that work is going?

Murdoch: No. We are working all very, very hard, but I wouldn't promise that we're going to meet that date.

Quinn: What's the delay?

Murdoch: With everything.

Quinn: Say again?

Murdoch: I'm not prepared to comment on that at all.

Quinn: OK.

Murdoch: It's a work in progress and there's a huge amount of work going on. Not just with our sites, but with other people.

Quinn: Sure.

Murdoch: Like your company.

Quinn: Indeed. Thanks.

Andrew Clark (Guardian): Can you tell us whether the Wall Street Journal is profitable at the moment?

Murdoch: Yes.

Clark: It is.

Murdoch: Barely, but yes.

Clark: I noticed it increased its circulation slightly in the recent ABC figures. And pretty much everyone else was down. What magic did you work to get the circulation up there?

Murdoch: We produced a better newspaper.

Clark: I mean, did that …

Murdoch: I'm sorry but it's as simple as that.

Clark: Was there a lot of marketing spending that went on to get …

Murdoch: Not at all. Well, nothing more than in the past or nothing extraordinary.

The Twitter Times generates a newspaper from your account

A new project gives you an overview of what's being talked about by the Twitterers you follow, through the medium of a personalised newspaper

In a world of information overload, the reading lists of friends and interesting people you follow are becoming more important; a lot of traditional news organisations have grasped this, and integrated social media features deep within their sites. However, the effect can also be achieved the other way around, by social media platforms giving you an overview of what is talked about. The Twitter Tim.es does exactly that for Twitter uses.

The personalised newspaper displays news items and blog posts from people you follow on Twitter, sorted by how recent they are how often they've been tweeted. "From the massive volume of daily news the most interesting ones are those actively discussed by people you follow, your friends, respected persons and celebrities you admire. This is the most effective filter," says Maxim Grinev, who is leading the project. To rank items more effectively, Twitter Time.es is not only using your direct followers but crawls the followers of your followers as well, which helps you finding people that might interest you at the same time.

At the moment it takes about half an hour before your personal newspaper gets delivered. It is then updated every half hour. If you want to get a preview of The Twitter Tim.es, the project features newspapers for some internet stars such as Esther Dyson, Tim O'Reilly, and even the Guardian's Jack Schofield.

The service was launched in the middle of September 2009 and has 10,000 subscribers so far. At the moment it is still being tested, and some features don't work with every article. For example, only the text of some articles are displayed without leaving the site. Others must be retrieved by links, because the project can only pull content via RSS which works best for blogs, while the support for major newspapers works via APIs.

Global news is another issue. Ranking of these could simply follow their global popularity, like it does on Tweetmeme, as Maxim told Eric Ulken from Online Journalism Review recently. Future plans also involve a "Like" button while there are plans to make the retweet button inactive for already retweeted news, says the programmer.

Personally, I'm wondering when Facebook will pick up on this idea.

Google centralises privacy control

As Google's dominance continues, it gives users a dashboard to manage their settings in one place

With the new Google Dashboard, the personal data and product settings of different Google products are combined on one side to make it simpler for users to deal with them. The feature, which has just been launched, looks like a console for your personal data. Now you can do what Google can do too, as it links from one place to the data stored on different Google sites. And yes, it does make it easier to manage your personal data.

Users can change their privacy settings, delete data on the dashboard, or read the privacy policies from various accounts instead of looking for them everywhere. "We think of this as a great step, and we hope this helps shape the way the industry thinks about data transparency and control," said Alma Whitten, the Google software engineer for security and privacy.

Because Google is one of the most important gateways to information, with the new feature the frenemy is obviously answering the growing public discomfort about its dominance of the internet. Most internet searches are passing on the servers of the quasi-monopoly, and a growing number of people are using more and more Google products as YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and Google Docs become more and more popular.

So the dashboard makes Google's strong position transparent, but it enables users at the same time to overview their own data. "The speed and scale of the growth of the internet has opened an important conversation about individuals' control and ownership of their data; we hope the Dashboard helps push forward the way we think about answering these questions," explains Whitten.

Indeed, Google emphasises users' control over their data for a while now. In September it announced that Google products are becoming part of the Data Liberation Front, which is aimed at letting users export any data stored on Google products. Google Dashboard, which was developed in Munich and Zurich, can be accessed at www.google.com/dashboard or in the settings page of the Google Account.

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