If you really feel the need to collect personal data and you *truly* care about the privacy concerns and needs of your customers, then don't go burying such disclosures in a privacy statement that the average user is unlikely to ever see let alone read.

If you truly care about privacy, then either require the user to *opt-in* to such sharing or prominently display the lack of such privacy on the initial splash screen.

Burying the collection of personal data in the middle of some lawyerly gobblygook privacy statement is like mortgage lenders burying key terms in the middle of 100's of pages of documentation. Yeah, it's legally there but no one is actually going to read or understand it.

IRONIC that a statistics professor taking an online statistics course who is critical of the underlying statistical competency of the online professor would judge an entire teaching methadology based on an N=1 observation, that itself is likely to be a "biased estimator" based on his own personal interests and sour grapes.

Morevover, I found many of his observations to be pedantic and nit-picking. I attended a top ranked school for multiple degree levels in Applied Math and the lectures varied *widely* in quality -- most ranging from poor to average with only a rare excellent (usually from a dedicated junior faculty member who was about to be denied tenure). Some of the most established and famous professors gave the most incomprehensible and disorganized lectures. In fact, even the reviewer's hand-picked examples of terrible pedagogy were often better than the average scribbled and elliptic proofs that I remember from school.

Darn foreign coffee pickers and 3rd world working conditions...

Oh this is slashdot.... never mind. Yeah security holes in Java suck too

Why not use this "technology" to resume allowing people to carry liquids >3oz in carry-ons?
Perhaps limit the number of such bottles to save time but if they can swab drinks bought in the security zone, they can swab our drinks while we wait to be nakey-scanned...

Even though the API was admittedly unsupported it was a core part of iGoogle and was used by many people as part of embedded scripts. While Google has admirably given a nice long notice for terminating iGoogle, it would have been nice had Google given at least a wee bit of warning of its abrupt termination of the weather API. Even its termination was not clear since the returned error page was an old page dated 2009 that seemed to imply that the user had done something wrong. It wasn't until I saw others encountering the same problem that I realized the problem was not on my mind, resulting in a fair bit of wasted debugging and head scratching on my end.

Is it asking too much of a company whose motto is "Don't be evil" to have given a week or two of warning or at least to have spent a minute or two setting up a meaningful and informative error page? Come on Google, you can do better...