How to Use Google’s New My Activity Privacy Tool

                                                                   

Have you ever wondered what data Google collects on you as you surf the web and use its apps and services? My Activity, a new tool from the Alphabet-owned search giant, gives you a better picture than ever before of your digital tracks — but it still doesn’t tell you everything.

If you have a Google account (and you do if you use Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube or any other Google services), you’ll find My Activity at myaccount.google.com. Once logged in, you get a list of privacy and security options, including a link that says “Go to my activity.”

There you will see a timeline of websites you visited (with links), things you have looked up in Google’s search engine or the Google Play app store, places found in Google Maps and videos you watched in YouTube. A search box lets you find specific things in your vast timeline and filter searches by date or by a specific Google product (Chrome, YouTube, Maps, etc.).

Like a browser history, My Activity also lets you delete specific events. Just click the three-dot button for a menu. A Google spokeswoman said that when you delete anything from My Activity, Google no longer takes that data into consideration when profiling you.

Having this all in one location, across so many Google apps and services, is both helpful and more transparent. Here’s the catch: My Activity defaults to only showing data for the device you are on at the time. If you want to see this data across multiple devices, then you will need to opt in to an advertising privacy setting that will give Google permission to combine this data with other data on you that Google currently keeps separate. This includes the data it collects from your personal interactions inside Gmail, Google Calendar and other apps you won’t see listed in My Activity.

Google already tracks some of what you do inside those apps, to add booked flights to your calendar, for example, or block spammy emails. However, until now it didn’t use that data to target ads at you. A spokeswoman for the company said that combining these two silos of data will let Google better personalise the ads you see in apps and the web in the short term, and in the long term, it will lead to better privacy tools too. Even after you opt to combine all your data, there is still no way to see precisely what Google is logging when it is combing through all of your emails.

Bear in mind, whether or not you opt into Google’s personalised ad tracking, you still will see personalised ads — they just likely will be less relevant to your interests.

If you do want to opt in, go back to the My Account website. Under Personal Info & Privacy, there is a link for ad settings. Click that, then click “Manage ads settings.” Next to the check box for Google’s ad personalisation, there is some text that is worth reading: “Also use Google Account activity and information to personalise ads on these websites and apps and store that data in your Google Account.” You can opt out later if you want.

Like Google, Facebook tracks the websites you visit, and collects data on what you do inside of its apps and services, using all that data to target ads. But whereas Google gives you a choice whether or not to combine these different data sets, Facebook does it by default. If you don’t want Facebook to track your web activity to target ads, you have to dig into a series of confusing menus to turn it off.

I’ve opted out of Facebook’s tracking because there is no real benefit for me since I largely ignore the ads I see on Facebook anyway. But I’ve opted in to Google’s new personalised ad tracking because of the incentive of being able to see what Google is tracking across all my devices. If Facebook ever creates something as easy and transparent as what Google is doing with My Activity, I might change my mind.

Whatever your preference, My Activity is a great tool for anyone with a Google account — and an important reminder that when you do use all these free apps and services, you are giving up personal data to do it.

By Nathan Olivarez-Giles

With many thanks to The Australian
                                                                        

Can Our Culture Get Lost In The Cloud?

                                                                         

In the spring of 1997, the Library of Congress opened an ambitious exhibit featuring several hundred of the most historically significant items in its collection. One of the more striking of the artifacts was the “rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence.

 Over Thomas Jefferson’s original, neatly penned script ran edits by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and other Founding Fathers. Words were crossed out, inserted and changed, the revisions providing a visual record of debate and compromise. A boon to historians, the four-page manuscript provides even the casual viewer with a keen sense of the drama of a nation being born.

Imagine if the Declaration were composed today. It would almost certainly be written on a computer screen rather than with ink and paper, and the edits would be made electronically, through email exchanges or a file shared on the Internet. If we were lucky, a modern-day Jefferson would turn on track-changes and print copies of the document as it progressed. We’d at least know who wrote what, even if the generic computer type lacked the expressiveness of handwriting. More likely, the digital file would come to be erased or rendered unreadable by changes in technical standards. We’d have the words, but the document itself would have little resonance.

Historian Abby Smith Rumsey was one of the curators of the Library of Congress exhibit, and that experience informs “When We Are No More,” her wide-ranging rumination on cultural memory.

 “A physical connection between the present and past is wondrously forged through the medium of time-stained paper,” she writes. But that “distinctive visceral connection” with history may be much diminished, if not lost, when our cultural heritage is stored in sterile databases rather than in actual objects. Rumsey’s book poses a vital question: As more and more of what we know, make and experience is recorded as vaporous bits in the cloud, what exactly will we leave behind for future generations?

We tend to think of memory as a purely mental phenomenon, something ethereal that goes on inside our minds. That’s a misperception. Scientists are discovering that our senses and even our emotions play important roles in recollection and remembrance. Memory seems to have emerged in animals as a way to navigate and make sense of the world, and the faculty remains tightly tied to the physical body and its material surroundings. Just taking a walk can help unlock memory’s archives, studies have shown.

Rumsey draws a powerful analogy to underscore memory’s materiality. The greatest memory system, she reminds us, is the universe itself. Nature embeds history in matter. When, in the early 19th century, scientists realized that they could read nature’s memory by closely examining the Earth and stars, we gained a much deeper understanding of the cosmos and our place in it. Geologists discovered that the strata in exposed rock tell the story of the planet’s development. Biologists found that fossilized plants and animals reveal secrets about the evolution of life. Astronomers realized that by looking through a telescope they could see not only across great distances but far back in time, gaining a glimpse of the origins of existence.

Through such discoveries, Rumsey argues, people both revealed and refined their “forensic imagination,” a subtle and creative way of thinking highly attuned to deciphering meaning from matter. We deploy that same imagination in understanding and appreciating our history and culture. The upshot is that the technologies a society uses to record, store and share information will play a crucial role in determining the richness, or sparseness, of its legacy. To put a new spin on Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, the medium is the memory. 

Whether through cave paintings or Facebook posts, we humans have always been eager to record our experiences. But, as Rumsey makes clear, we’ve been far less zealous about safeguarding those records for posterity. In choosing among media technologies through the ages, people have tended to trade durability for transmissibility. 

It’s not hard to understand why. Intent on our immediate needs, we prefer those media that make communication easier and faster, rather than the ones that offer the greatest longevity. And so the lightweight scroll supplants the heavy clay tablet, the instantaneous email supplants the slow-moving letter. A cave painting may last for millennia, but a Facebook post will get you a lot more likes a lot more quickly.

We’re now in the midst of the most far-reaching shift in media ever, as we rush to replace all manner of physical media with digital alternatives. The benefits are compelling. We’ve gained instant access to a seemingly infinite store of information. But there are losses, too. 

“Digital memory is ubiquitous yet unimaginably fragile,” Rumsey reports, “limitless in scope yet inherently unstable.” All media are subject to decay, of course. Clay cracks, paper crumbles. What’s different now is that our cultural memory is embedded in a complex and ever-shifting system of technologies. Any change in the system can render the record unreadable. A book can sit on a shelf for hundreds of years and retain its legibility. All that’s required to decode it is a pair of eyes. A digital file is far more fussy. Dependent on computers for decoding, it can disappear or turn to gibberish whenever operating systems, software applications or document standards are revised. 

All of us have experienced the evanescence of the digital. 

Web pages change by the day, leaving little or no trace of their earlier versions. Hyperlinks dead-end in 404 error pages, with their irritating “Not Found” notices. Internet services and social-media sites shut down, their data disappearing with them. And as for opening that file you saved on a floppy disk with an obsolete software program: Well, good luck. If we’re not careful, Rumsey warns, “the history of the twenty-first century will be riddled with large-scale blanks and silences.” 

Rumsey is clear about the dangers of our “ephemeral digital landscape,” but she isn’t a doomsayer. She believes that we can protect our cultural legacy for our descendants, even if that legacy ends up mainly in the form of immaterial bits. But, she stresses, we’ll first need to overcome our complacency and start taking the long-term protection of valuable data seriously. We’ll need a reinvigorated system of libraries and archives, spanning the public, private and nonprofit sectors, that are adept at digital preservation. We’ll need thoughtful protocols for determining what data needs to be saved and what can be discarded. And we’ll need to ensure that control over culturally significant data doesn’t end up in the hands of a small group of commercial enterprises that focus on profit, not posterity.

Those are prudent suggestions. But, even as we continue down the path to a virtualized future, we shouldn’t lose sight of the enduring value of the material artifact. We should make sure that there’s always a place in the world for the eloquent object, the thing itself.

By Nicholas Carr

With many thanks to The Washington Post 

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Shakespeare’s World Revealed In 400-year-old Handwriting

                                                                      

Heather Wolfe isn’t a Shakespeare expert, but she can do something many Shakespeare scholars can’t: she can read his handwriting.

In 16th and 17th-century Eng­land, most documents were written in a style of cursive writing called secretary hand. To the untrained eye, it is nearly impenetrable. The h looks like a butcher’s hook; m, n, i and u often are indistinguishable. An s might look like the numeral 6 — or a carrot

Wolfe, curator of manuscripts and archivist at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, specialises in reading these documents. Now she is leading a project to digitise, transcribe and post online every known reference to Shakespeare and his family written in and around his lifetime. She is discovering details that have been overlooked for centuries, from mistranscriptions and mysterious seals to an unpublished document tucked away in the Venice state archives that describes Italian and French diplomats attending Pericles in London.

No handwritten drafts of Shakespeare’s plays survive — only published editions. But there do exist three pages that scholars believe Shakespeare wrote by hand to revise a play called Sir Thomas More by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle. Those pages are in secretary hand.

Wolfe’s project began when she was conducting research for an exhibition of 50 Shakespeare-related documents currently on view at the Folger for the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death. To prepare for the exhibition, she travelled to museums and libraries across Britain, examining and transcribing ­documents before they arrived at the Folger on loan.

At the Bodleian Library in Oxford, typing on her laptop, she made a transcription of an account by the astrologer Simon Forman, who in 1611 recorded his impressions — and the moral lessons — of four plays he had seen at the Globe Theatre. It is the most detailed surviving ­account of an audience member in Shakespeare’s time, and is frequently cited by Shakespeare experts.

Describing Autolycus, a peddler who tricks people out of money in The Winter’s Tale, Forman concludes: “Beware of trusting feigned beggars or fawning felons.”

For more than 80 years, scholars had been mistakenly citing the phrase as “fawning ­fellows”, repeating a mistranscription that ­appeared in EK Chambers’s William Shakespeare in 1930. (The author had confused an n for a u.)

Wolfe checked with Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, editors of the Folger Shakespeare Library editions. They agreed with her reading, which depicts Autolycus as a more malicious character — a felon rather than a fellow.

“Because I’m not a Shakespearean, I’m very nervous to say anything new about Shakespeare,” Wolfe says. “It’s riding on top of hundreds of years of scholarship. To put yourself out there … feels a bit audacious.”

Wolfe, 44, was born in Atlanta and attended high school in Pennsylvania. After graduating, she felt she hadn’t studied enough Shakespeare, so she decided to pursue a masters in medieval and Renaissance literature at the University of Cambridge.

She thought she would be reading Shakespeare plays. Instead, she was immersed in the archives, learning how to read 400-year-old handwriting. “I had never heard of palaeography”, the study of historical handwriting, she says. “There is an addictive quality to it once you learn how to read it.”

She was hooked. She stayed at Cambridge to complete a PhD, then earned a masters of ­library science at the University of California. While she was in California, she called the ­director of the Folger and asked: “Do you ­believe in the concept of a scholar-librarian?” She joined the Folger’s staff in 2000.

The transcription project, called Shakespeare Documented, was launched online in late January at shakespearedocumented.org. So far, it includes 500 references in 400 documents from more than 30 institutions. Images of most of the documents have been posted online.

There is much that scholars still don’t know about Shakespeare. Generations have scoured texts from the period for even a passing reference to him. One of Wolfe’s biggest discoveries is a document that had been known to Shakespeare scholars only from a summary printed by His Majesty’s Stationery Office in London in 1908.

In 1616, a former Venetian ambassador to England, Antonio Foscarini, was put on trial in Venice, accused of being a convert to Protestantism, a drunkard, a womaniser and a theatregoer. (He was later acquitted on all charges.) The court proceedings included the 1617 deposition in London of his former interpreter, Odoardo Guazzo.

For more than 100 years, Shakespeare scholars have referred to the summary of this deposition, which briefly mentions a performance of Pericles attended by Foscarini’s predecessor.

Wolfe enlisted Carlo Bajetta, a Cambridge classmate who is now an English professor in Aosta, Italy, to track down and translate the original deposition in the Venice state archives. Written in Italian, the deposition offers a much more colourful account of the playgoing habits of London’s diplomatic class.

Speaking of Foscarini, the interpreter says, “I believe he went twice, or three times, but I never went with him, because he would go in private, thinking no one would recognise him.”
Foscarini’s predecessor as ambassador, by contrast, had invited counterparts from France and Florence to Pericles, and paid “more than 20 scudi” for the performance — equivalent to more than $1500 today, by one estimate.

“Wow,” says Harvard University professor Stephen Greenblatt, when told by The Wall Street Journal that Wolfe’s colleague had found the document. Greenblatt has written about the episode but did not know a more detailed account existed. “So many things are lost and have disappeared,” he says.

Wolfe is also examining physical aspects of the manuscripts to see what clues they might reveal. She hopes to inspect the watermarks on the playwright’s will at the National Archives in Britain to investigate whether he may have added another page after the marriage of his daughter.

She is also studying the oft-ignored back of documents to see how they were folded. (A letter folded into a tiny packet might be a personal one; another folded broadly might be professional.)

And she discovered that Shakespeare borrowed a seal from Henry Lawrence, the scribe’s servant, for his signature on the deed for his purchase of the Blackfriars Gatehouse in London on March 10, 1613, for £140. He paid £80 in cash. In a document dated the following day, Shakespeare secured a £60 mortgage on the same property from the seller, Henry Walker. He used the same seal.

There’s a possibility, Wolfe thinks, that both transactions may have happened on the same day, in the same room. This could lead to new insight on the nature of the exchange. “It gives us some answers but it also raises more questions,” says Folger director Michael Witmore.

By Jennifer Maloney

                                                                

With thanks to The Australian

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The World's First Website Just Turned 25 Years Old

                                                                         

On 20 December 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at the CERN research facility in Switzerland, turned on the world’s first website.  

Hosted by the World Wide Web (where "www" comes from) on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer, the site was used internally by CERN scientists until the whole server was opened up to anyone with an Internet connection in August 1991.

The website itself is like a 'self-help' guide to the web - it tells you how to access other people's documents and how to set up your own server. In 2013, CERN made an effort to return it to its original address, and you can visit it here now, in stripped-down form. 
As Berners-Lee explained in his initial proposal for the World Wide Web project, clarity of words was more important than fancy graphics: "Where facilities already exist, we aim to allow graphics interchange, but in this project, we concentrate on the universal readership for text, rather than on graphics."  

There are now more than 4 billion webpages and just under a billion domains, but none are quite so special as the pages that started it all. Max Slater-Robins over at Business Insider has rounded up some of the key players, and let’s just say web design has come a long way since 1990. 

Produced by Martijn Koster at CERN in 1993, Aliweb was the world’s first search engine. While it allowed early web users to index their sites via keywords and written descriptions, it never really took off, and had a relatively short lifespan. You can still access it here. 

Amnesty International was super-quick to get on the World Wide Web bandwagon, launching its website in 1994.

While its design aesthetic leaves much to be desired, at least it’s not the first Pizza Hut website, also launched in 1994. This is what they managed to update it to in 1996.

Head to Business Insider to see more of the world’s first websites, including the first effort from the White House and Yahoo.  

Of course, no huge project is achieved without some lingering regrets, and for Berners-Lee, it's those damned forward slashes. "Sir Tim has admitted that he shouldn't have bothered putting two slashes after the HTTP: in URLs," says Iain Thomson at The Register.  

But at least he hasn’t embarrassed himself by posting any dumb cat videos over the past 25 years of being online. "To this date, he's never posted a cat picture online, although he did once send someone a picture of his dog," says Thomson.  

Who knows where the World Wide Web is headed in the next 25 years, but one thing's for sure - Tim Berners-Lee will always be cooler than all of us.

By Bec Crew

With many thanks to Science Alert.

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