Google pushes US states to open public documents
By providing free advice and software, Google helps the state authorities collect public documents that are either now unavailable or difficult to access on the Internet to make them open to web users.
Google ultimately hopes to convince federal agencies to use the same software: on the one hand, this is of interest to supporters of open government, and on the other, some experts are concerned about confidentiality.
Google plans to announce collaboration with four states - Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia - to remove technical barriers that have prevented their search service (like Microsoft and Yahoo) from accessing tens of thousands of government documents in the areas of education, real estate, health care and the environment.
New available documents will be provided not only for the search engines Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
')
Mr. Needham (JL Needham), the head of Google’s public sector content partnership, said that at least 70% of visitors to government sites were accessed exclusively from commercial search engines. The thing is that state computer systems are not programmed (as I understand, .htaccess and robots.txt are not used correctly), which allows only commercial search services to search for information in their databases. And since the user cannot find the information available in state sites, he blames not the sites themselves, but the search engine.
However, not everyone finds this news enjoyable. Clark Kelso, California’s chief press spokesman and Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, are concerned about privacy violations and call on state agencies to remove social security numbers and other confidential information from documents that will now be available on the web. Rotenberg also says that Google already has a bad past about privacy, hinting that Google will follow search queries by users accessing government data in order to make ads directed to them.
Google ultimately hopes to convince federal agencies to use the same software: on the one hand, this is of interest to supporters of open government, and on the other, some experts are concerned about confidentiality.
Google plans to announce collaboration with four states - Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia - to remove technical barriers that have prevented their search service (like Microsoft and Yahoo) from accessing tens of thousands of government documents in the areas of education, real estate, health care and the environment.
New available documents will be provided not only for the search engines Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
')
Mr. Needham (JL Needham), the head of Google’s public sector content partnership, said that at least 70% of visitors to government sites were accessed exclusively from commercial search engines. The thing is that state computer systems are not programmed (as I understand, .htaccess and robots.txt are not used correctly), which allows only commercial search services to search for information in their databases. And since the user cannot find the information available in state sites, he blames not the sites themselves, but the search engine.
However, not everyone finds this news enjoyable. Clark Kelso, California’s chief press spokesman and Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, are concerned about privacy violations and call on state agencies to remove social security numbers and other confidential information from documents that will now be available on the web. Rotenberg also says that Google already has a bad past about privacy, hinting that Google will follow search queries by users accessing government data in order to make ads directed to them.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/7821/
All Articles