Jaikumar Vijayan

Internet giants like Google and Facebook that have made their fortunes in the targeted advertising space could soon face powerful new rivals. Congress this week is considering a resolution to roll back a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule that would have prohibited wireless internet carriers such as Verizon and AT&T from selling data on their […]

Organizations using the Short Message Service (SMS) functionality in Google’s Hangout application for Android will soon need to find another app for the functionality. Effective May 22, Google will remove the carrier SMS functionality in Hangouts for Android. Administrators of enterprises affected by the move will soon receive notice of the impending change and will […]

Google’s problems with advertisers over ad misplacements on YouTube and other Google non-search properties appear to be mushrooming rapidly. This week Verizon, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and Enterprise Rent-A-Car joined a growing list of major companies to pull advertisements from Google after revelations that their ads were being placed next to jihadist and neo-Nazi videos […]

Google this week released a developer preview of Android O, the next version of its mobile operating system the includes several mostly incremental feature upgrades over the currently available version Android N also known as Nougat. Key among the upgrades are those that are designed to improve battery life, application notifications and the ability for […]

Google has announced expanded safeguards for advertisers on YouTube and the Google Display Network days after a senior executive promised changes in reaction to an outcry from advertisers in the United Kingdom and elsewhere over misplaced ads. The new safeguards are focused on the company’s ad policies, its enforcement of the policies and new ways […]

Google last year recorded a 32 percent increase over 2015 in the number of websites that its search engine flagged as being hacked. More than six in 10 of the webmasters of such sites, however, never received a notification from Google about their properties being infected because their sites had not been registered with Search […]

Google this week said it has initiated a thorough review of its ad policies amid a firestorm of criticism in the United Kingdom for allowing ads from the government and major companies to appear next to inappropriate content on YouTube and other Google properties. In a blog post March 17, Ronan Harris, managing director of […]

A federal judge in California this week declined to approve a proposed Google settlement in a class-action lawsuit involving claims the company violated California privacy statutes with its Gmail scanning activities. In a six-page order, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh described the language in Google’s settlement as confusing and not properly disclosing how Google intercepts, […]

Google has weeded out a particularly pernicious family of potentially harmful apps from its Android Play store and ad ecosystem. The rogue app family that Google has dubbed Chamois was responsible for generating a large volume of invalid ad traffic, illegal app promotion and installation activity and for downloading and executing plugins on end user […]

Google has announced general availability of a Quick Access feature in Google Drive that up to now has only been available to customers of its G Suite apps on Android. The feature uses machine-learning tools to predict the files that a user is likely going to be looking for in Drive and presents it before […]