Business Insider reports on Google’s updating of its privacy policies.

Google scans your email:

Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.

Google can reuse whatever you upload:

When you upload,or otherwise submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.

Of course, on the surface, it is just a way for Google to ensure that they have permission to scan your emails for virus and data about you. Data that is used to customise your search results and ads targeting. And to translate your uploads, assuming these are content that can be accessed by people who will need it to be translated in the first place.

It is better to be vague than specific in this case to ensure that it blankets all possible instances where the policy can be effected. However, it is worrying for Google to have a policy that gives it so much leeway in what it can do with user data.

Ars Technica reports on the mobile industry committing to introduce anti-theft kill switches to their devices.

Remote wipe the authorized user’s data (i.e., erase personal info that is added after purchase such as contacts, photos, emails, etc.) that is on the smartphone in the event it is lost or stolen.

Render the smartphone inoperable to an unauthorized user (e.g., locking the smartphone so it cannot be used without a password or PIN), except in accordance with FCC rules for 911 emergency communications, and if available, emergency numbers programmed by the authorized user (e.g., “phone home”).

Prevent reactivation without authorized user’s permission (including unauthorized factory reset attempts) to the extent technologically feasible (e.g., locking the smartphone as above).

Reverse the inoperability if the smartphone is recovered by the authorized user and restore user data on the smartphone to the extent feasible (e.g., restored from the cloud).

Apple has already introduced Activation Lock in iOS 7. Its commitment to this anti-theft tool will see enhancement to the existing security features on the iOS.

John Gruber writes about the article by New York Times columnist Joe Nocera.

Much like how Kane, in her piece back in February for The New Yorker’s website, tried to have it both ways regarding Scott Forstall — arguing that Apple Maps was “a fiasco” in the very next paragraph after arguing that Tim Cook should not have fired Forstall, the executive who was responsible for Apple Maps in iOS 6 — Nocera here has painted Apple into a damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don’t scenario. He spends most of his column arguing that Apple is screwed because they’re lost without Jobs. But now he’s saying they’re screwed because they’re doing exactly what Jobs expressly told his biographer he wanted to do: fight Android handset makers — and by proxy, Google — tooth and nail in court.

It seems that it doesn’t matter if Nocera contradicts himself, as long as he writes something that sells. Bashing Apple will definitely bring in readership.

Waffle writes about the day Microsoft decided to give up wanting to dominate all platforms.

Ballmer and Gates think losing the platform war, no longer being the largest and the no-one-ever-got-fired-for choice means the end of the Microsoft as we know it, and they may be right. But it’s the also the beginning of the only Microsoft that can stop the bleeding and thrive. The time to make a choice either way is long gone. Now it’s a matter of survival and you can’t yearn yourself to the future.

Took them long enough.

Interestingly, someone else realised this earlier and benefited.

Steve Jobs at MacWorld 1997:

We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us, that’s great because we need all the help we can get. And if we screw it and we don’t do a good job, it’s not somebody’s else’s fault. It’s our fault.

Microsoft released a statement on the change in their stance towards privacy.

Effective immediately, if we receive information indicating that someone is using our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property from Microsoft, we will not inspect a customer’s private content ourselves. Instead, we will refer the matter to law enforcement if further action is required.

Something they should have done from the start.

WSJ Digits reports on the resignation of three Mozilla board members over choice of new CEO.

How did the CEO appointment go ahead when three board members, who felt so strongly against it that they are willing to quit over it, and Mozilla employees oppose the decision?

I can’t even begin to imagine how messed up their decision making process is.