Forrester analyst: Google-ITA Software deal “legitimate and fair”

Posted by by Adam Kovacevich, Senior Manager, Policy Communications

Forrester travel analyst Henry Harteveldt spoke on CNBC Tuesday about the Google-ITA Software acquisition, saying:

...In the end, Google has made a legitimate and fair claim to buy ITA Software, and I think there’s a little bit of sour grapes on the part of some of the companies that are not the companies buying ITA.

Check it out:

Handy tools to help Americans vote

Posted by Dan Berlin, Public Sector Engineering Manager
(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

As Americans gear up for the midterm elections on November 2, we wanted to share a few tools that make it easier to gather voting information.

When you search on Google for [polling place] or [where to vote], you’ll see a search box to help you find your polling place, candidates, and local election office. Just type in the home address where you’re registered to vote. The search looks like this:



This feature is powered by the Google Election Center, an experimental service that lets election officials provide data directly to Google in order to create a set of search tools. Anyone with a website can also provide this same functionality by embedding the open source Election Center gadget on your site, or use the gadget code or API to build your own.



And you don’t need to be at your computer to easily find this information. If you’d rather get it on your mobile device, we’ve also created a mobile landing page: m.google.com/elections.

As for election news, you’ll find a special Google News section with stories for each state so you can easily catch up on the latest headlines.


We hope all of these tools help you get and stay informed throughout the election season.

Giving users the best answer, and competing fair and square in travel search

Posted by Andrew Silverman, Senior Product Manager

Since we announced our plans to acquire ITA Software in July, we’ve spent a lot of time talking with players in the online travel industry -- airlines, travel agents, and search sites -- about our plans to build better flight search tools for users, and our commitment to competition in this space.

We’ve been encouraged by the travel industry support we’ve seen for this acquisition -- from airlines, online travel agencies, and also ITA’s competitors. Even longtime travel guru Arthur Frommer has weighed in. That said, it’s disappointing that a number of travel companies have today announced their concerns about the deal.

Our reason for making this acquisition is simple: ITA will help us provide better results for our users. When someone searches for “flights from San Francisco to London,” we'd like to provide not just “ten blue links” but exact flight times and prices as well -- just as our competitors do today.

We’ve already been experimenting with similar results in different areas. For example, in March we began showing hotel prices in Google Maps -- information which not only makes travel planning and budgeting easier for our users, but also improves the quality of the leads we send to travel websites and hotels:

In terms of the criticisms that have been made today, while we respect the views of these companies there are a few important areas where we need to set the record straight:

Claim: The deal could result in higher travel prices or fewer travel choices for consumers.
Fact: ITA and Google are not competitors so there will not be less choice for consumers. In addition, ITA does not set ticket prices or sell tickets, but merely analyzes data about seat availability and fares -- which are set by airlines -- and provides that analysis to websites. So it’s hard to see why it would result in higher prices. In fact, by acquiring ITA we hope to build flight comparison tools that make it easier for users to compare prices and find the best possible deal.

Claim: ITA powers most of the web’s most popular travel sites.
Fact: ITA’s QPX tool powers many websites; that’s why we’ve said that we’ll honor all of ITA’s existing agreements, and that we are enthusiastic about adding new partners. That said, the three most popular travel sites in the U.S. (Expedia, Priceline and Travelocity) use data provided by ITA's competitors. And over the past few months other travel companies have highlighted the alternatives to ITA. Kayak's CEO called Expedia’s Best Fare Search alternative "awesome" and Continental Airlines noted that "there are alternatives to the [ITA] shopping solution in the marketplace, both internally and externally.”

Claim: Google will be choosing winners and losers in online travel.
Fact: Our goal is to build tools that drive more traffic to airline and online travel agency sites where customers can purchase tickets. We also believe that giving users better ways to search for flights online will encourage more users to make their flight purchases online, which will create more overall online sales for airlines and travel agencies. Google does not plan to sell airline tickets directly.

Claim: Instead of buying ITA, Google could just license its data.
Fact: We think we can make more significant innovations and bigger breakthroughs in online flight search for consumers by combining our engineering expertise with ITA’s than we would by just licensing ITA's data service.

Claim: The deal will lead to less innovation in travel search.
Fact: Just the opposite! Today, finding the right flight at the best price is a frustrating experience; pricing and availability change constantly, and even a simple two-city itinerary involves literally thousands of different options. We’re confident that by combining ITA’s expertise in travel with Google’s technology we’ll be able to create great innovations in flight search.

Creating stronger privacy controls inside Google

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering & Research
(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

In May we announced that we had mistakenly collected unencrypted WiFi payload data (information sent over networks) using our Street View cars. We work hard at Google to earn your trust, and we’re acutely aware that we failed badly here. So we’ve spent the past several months looking at how to strengthen our internal privacy and security practices, as well as talking to external regulators globally about possible improvements to our policies. Here’s a summary of the changes we’re now making.

• First, people: we have appointed Alma Whitten as our director of privacy across both engineering and product management. Her focus will be to ensure that we build effective privacy controls into our products and internal practices. Alma is an internationally recognized expert in the computer science field of privacy and security. She has been our engineering lead on privacy for the last two years, and we will significantly increase the number of engineers and product managers working with her in this new role.
  
  
• Second, training: All our employees already receive orientation training on Google’s privacy principles and are required to sign Google’s Code of Conduct, which includes sections on privacy and the protection of user data. However, to ensure we do an even better job, we’re enhancing our core training for engineers and other important groups (such as product management and legal) with a particular focus on the responsible collection, use and handling of data. In addition, starting in December, all our employees will also be required to undertake a new information security awareness program, which will include clear guidance on both security and privacy.
  
  
• Third, compliance: While we’ve made important changes to our internal compliance procedures in the last few years, we need to make further changes to reflect the fact that we are now a larger company. So we’re adding a new process to our existing review system, in which every engineering project leader will be required to maintain a privacy design document for each initiative they are working on. This document will record how user data is handled and will be reviewed regularly by managers, as well as by an independent internal audit team.

We believe these changes will significantly improve our internal practices (though no system can of course entirely eliminate human error), and we look forward to seeing the innovative new security and privacy features that Alma and her team develop. That said, we’ll be constantly on the lookout for additional improvements to our procedures as Google grows, and as we branch out into new fields of computer science.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to update one point in my May blog post. When I wrote it, no one inside Google had analyzed in detail the data we had mistakenly collected, so we did not know for sure what the disks contained. Since then a number of external regulators have inspected the data as part of their investigations (seven of which have now been concluded). It’s clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and I would like to apologize again for the fact that we collected it in the first place. We are mortified by what happened, but confident that these changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users.