Google has confirmed that personal data of U.S. employees hired prior to 2006 have been stolen in a recent burglary.
Records kept at Colt Express Outsourcing Services, an external company Google and other companies use to handle human resources functions, were stolen in a burglary on May 26. An undisclosed number of employees' details and those of dependents such as names, addresses, and Social Security numbers were on the stolen computers. It is understood that Colt did not employ encryption to protect the information.
It's still unclear how many more of Colt Express' clients were affected by the breach. CBS' CNET Networks, publisher of News.com, was also affected by the burglary, with about 6,500 employees' details stolen.
Although there is no evidence of misuse of the data to date, the information obtained could be used by identity thieves to create fake accounts and identities.
It's only come to light now that Google was one of the companies affected. Google itself was not burglarized, nor were any of its internal systems compromised.
Danny Thorpe, former chief scientist at Borland and engineer at Google who now works for Microsoft, was informed of the theft on July 1.
A letter from Google said personal data of Google employees hired prior to December 31, 2005, may have been stolen in the May 26 burglary of Colt Express Outsourcing Services. No credit card numbers were in the stolen data; just names, addresses, SSNs--all the information needed for a thief to open a credit card account under another's name.
According to Thorpe, Google has offered to cover the cost of a one-year subscription to a credit report and identity theft-monitoring service. Similar benefits were offered to CNET Networks employees.
ITWorld reported last week that Colt Express Outsourcing Services was in financial difficulty and could not help those affected. The company's CEO, Samuel Colt III, said in a statement "We do not have the resources, financial and otherwise, to assist you further."
"We take the security of our employees very seriously and require outside vendors to meet appropriate security standards. We review and update these standards on an ongoing basis," a Google representative said. "Google is not currently using Colt's services and had made this decision long before this incident."
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Friday, July 4, 2008
Friday, October 5, 2007
What's Next for Google
Google ponders its next steps in an e-commerce environment shaped by mobile, social networking and, yes, search.
The typical American business executive likes incremental changes, like, perhaps, an 18 percent speed increase. Or maybe a little bit more efficiency over here, and some additional functionality over there.
PowerPoint slides to the contrary, a paradigm shift is the last one thing most executives honestly want because, to the typical executive with a large company, any monumental shift raises the frightening possibility that the company will end up a lot smaller than it is today.
That's why it's typically the startups and the small niche players that embrace big-picture change, if only to get someone to listen to them.
But what if one of those small companies that embraced big change—say, the Internet and its subsidiary, the World Wide Web—got big?
That's the question—and the challenge—facing $11 billion search giant Google. At a recent media day at Google's New York offices, Google executives and managers discussed the enormity of the current e-commerce conundrum, and how the company is struggling to find the best way to deal with it.
Consider this: In the early days of e-commerce, a typical retailer and manufacturer might have been marketing between eight and 12 products, especially with search-engine links. Today, that same company would typically be doing the same kind of Web marketing with some 12,000 products, said Tim Armstrong, who serves Google as its president of advertising and commerce for North America.
This new environment, Armstrong and other Google people said, requires a very different approach. Google's answer is something called an Asset Map, a way to visually lay out every single one of a retailer's assets, including all of its products and services. This, theoretically, allows a company to see not only which of their products are not covered, but to try and project some kind of return-on-investment analysis.
Armstrong argues that this is morphing ad budgets into operational budgets. Is a Google ad akin to a traditional piece of advertising—something that an ad budget should fund—or is it closer to the cost of a car dealer building a new showroom and dealership?
Google is making the argument that their auction-driven pricing model is more than a marketing cost. Google execs argue that it's actually a tool to help match inventory and purchase patterns with inventory. That's because, they argue, the variable pricing allows budgets to fluctuate with consumer interest.
In theory, that should allow better real-time information about demand, in a much more predictive way than simply examining purchases. In other words, if the number of times consumers look at ads for SUVs fluctuates in the same way during different months (or during different weather patterns), that can help influence core business purchasing decisions.
Another core change for e-commerce is the explosion of social networking and video sites—primarily launched for a younger audience—including Facebook, MySpace and YouTube (now owned by Google). These sites create the potential for customized, focused campaigns in a way that simply didn't exist a decade ago.
Armstrong said the social networking sites caught him off-guard—"the traffic is really incredible," he said—because he didn't initially expect search to be a factor. He saw videos as something people would merely browse. The high demand for video searches was "a very nice surprise."
Then there's the mobile movement, which places limits on ads (minimal screen size, less RAM and much slower bandwidth) but also opens up possibilities by being with a consumer at all times, and including very precise location information.
The typical American business executive likes incremental changes, like, perhaps, an 18 percent speed increase. Or maybe a little bit more efficiency over here, and some additional functionality over there.
PowerPoint slides to the contrary, a paradigm shift is the last one thing most executives honestly want because, to the typical executive with a large company, any monumental shift raises the frightening possibility that the company will end up a lot smaller than it is today.
That's why it's typically the startups and the small niche players that embrace big-picture change, if only to get someone to listen to them.
But what if one of those small companies that embraced big change—say, the Internet and its subsidiary, the World Wide Web—got big?
That's the question—and the challenge—facing $11 billion search giant Google. At a recent media day at Google's New York offices, Google executives and managers discussed the enormity of the current e-commerce conundrum, and how the company is struggling to find the best way to deal with it.
Consider this: In the early days of e-commerce, a typical retailer and manufacturer might have been marketing between eight and 12 products, especially with search-engine links. Today, that same company would typically be doing the same kind of Web marketing with some 12,000 products, said Tim Armstrong, who serves Google as its president of advertising and commerce for North America.
This new environment, Armstrong and other Google people said, requires a very different approach. Google's answer is something called an Asset Map, a way to visually lay out every single one of a retailer's assets, including all of its products and services. This, theoretically, allows a company to see not only which of their products are not covered, but to try and project some kind of return-on-investment analysis.
Armstrong argues that this is morphing ad budgets into operational budgets. Is a Google ad akin to a traditional piece of advertising—something that an ad budget should fund—or is it closer to the cost of a car dealer building a new showroom and dealership?
Google is making the argument that their auction-driven pricing model is more than a marketing cost. Google execs argue that it's actually a tool to help match inventory and purchase patterns with inventory. That's because, they argue, the variable pricing allows budgets to fluctuate with consumer interest.
In theory, that should allow better real-time information about demand, in a much more predictive way than simply examining purchases. In other words, if the number of times consumers look at ads for SUVs fluctuates in the same way during different months (or during different weather patterns), that can help influence core business purchasing decisions.
Another core change for e-commerce is the explosion of social networking and video sites—primarily launched for a younger audience—including Facebook, MySpace and YouTube (now owned by Google). These sites create the potential for customized, focused campaigns in a way that simply didn't exist a decade ago.
Armstrong said the social networking sites caught him off-guard—"the traffic is really incredible," he said—because he didn't initially expect search to be a factor. He saw videos as something people would merely browse. The high demand for video searches was "a very nice surprise."
Then there's the mobile movement, which places limits on ads (minimal screen size, less RAM and much slower bandwidth) but also opens up possibilities by being with a consumer at all times, and including very precise location information.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
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