Google’s New Privacy Policy: What You Need To Know

On March 1st, Google implemented a new, unified privacy policy that affects the browsing history and information Google has on you, both past and present. Prior to this change, your Google history of the searches you made and sites you visited was not shared with Google’s other services, particularly advertisers. Naturally, Google is one of the biggest media and marketing companies in the world, and your preferences and search information is pure gold from a marketing standpoint. Marketers armed with that information would know exactly what products and services to display to you as you use the search engine.

However, your search history can reveal a lot about you including details on your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your web history with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your web history and stop your web history from being recorded in the future. To do this, sign into your Google Account and go to the “History” section, then select “Remove All History.”

Of course, clearing the web history in your Google account will not prevent Google from gathering and storing your preferences, searches and information and using it for internal purposes. It also does not change the fact that any information gathered and stored by Google could be obtained and used against you by law enforcement.

With web history enabled, Google will keep these records indefinitely; with it disabled, they will be partially
anonymized after 18 months, and certain kinds of uses, including sending you customized search results, will be prevented. This brings up a whole other topic of what kind of information should you post about yourself (or store) online. Facebook is another site that gathers tons of personal information about you, including your location, date of birth, friends and family, age, preferences and much, much more. In the future, we believe that cyber security will become an increasingly important issue for all of us.

How Do We Really Make Decisions?

Neuroscience has made unprecedented discoveries in the last 10 years with scientific studies pointing the way to how we really make decisions. It turns out that decision making is not intellectual. It’s emotional. For someone who’s involved in business transactions and other types of negotiation, this is a critical piece of information that can give you an enormous advantage.

The neurologist Antonio Damasio demonstrated in scientific studies that patients with damage to the part of the prefrontal cortex that processes emotions struggle with the making of even the most simple decisions. A patient named Elliot was among the first to raise this weird possibility in Damasio’s mind. Elliot had been an exemplary husband, father, and businessman. But he began to suffer severe headaches and lose track of work responsibilities. Soon his doctors discovered an orange-sized brain tumor that was pushing into his frontal lobes, and they carefully removed it, along with some damaged brain tissue. During his recovery, family and friends discovered that, though his language and intelligence were fully intact, at work he became distractible and couldn’t manage his schedule. Faced with an organizational task, he’d deliberate for an entire afternoon about how to approach the problem. He could no longer reach a decision. In spite of repeatedly being shown the flaw and how to fix it, he could not. His emotions were gone and so was his ability to make decisions.

This is important in the context of negotiations because a negotiation is, after all, about making one decision after another until an agreement is reached, including an agreement to disagree and go our separate ways. How many times have you watched someone who had a no-brainer decision do exactly the wrong thing – and you just couldn’t believe they did that? Decisions are 100% emotional until they are made, and then they are approved or rejected by our intellect based on knowledge, practice, training, or lack thereof.

In your next negotiation, try this. Before you go into the negotiation, try to wipe your mind clean of all emotions. I call this “blank slating.” Get rid of all neediness, fear, hope, excitement, anger, or worry. If you can maintain this emotionally neutral place, you will automatically have the advantage. That’s because your respected opponent is angling, fretting, manipulating, and acting from his emotions. You, on the other hand, are keeping your emotions in check and training your brain to relax and not be needy in any way.

If you can learn to blank slate, you will be better able to focus on your actions, words, thoughts, and behavior during the negotiation. It will enable you to ask the right questions, and answer in a smarter way. And you’ll avoid revealing too much or inflaming your opponent’s emotions. Negotiating from an emotionally neutral place plays a key role in how well you’ll be able to show your opponent that accepting what you propose is to his benefit.

Guest article provided by:
Jim Camp is the leading global expert on negotiations. Over the last 25 years, he has trained and coached over 100,000 people to negotiate better, more profitable agreements in more than 500 multinational organizations. He is the best-selling author of both, Start with No and No: The Only Negotiation System You Need for Work and Home. www.campnegotiationinstitute.com

Can’t Stand The Thought Of Losing Your Smartphone’s Data? (Then Here’s How You Back It Up)

Seems like just yesterday phones were simple devices for making and receiving phone calls. These days, smartphones are as functional as full-fledged desktop PCs and hold valuable applications, e-mail messages, photos, videos, documents and, of course, phone numbers and contact information. If losing the data on your phone would be a true disaster, then you’ll want to back up your phone as regularly and carefully as you do your other devices.

Major smartphone platforms can backup their data to a computer or to a cloud backup via the Internet. Here are a couple of resources you can use with popular Android smartphones to ensure that all of your data is properly backed up.

iPhone

iCloud is Apple’s new service for backing up your iPhone and other media you purchase through iTunes. When you sign up, iCloud will automatically backup the mail, calendar and contacts on your iPhone, as well as any music, books, apps, videos or media on your iPad, Mac or even your PC. iCloud uses the power of cloud computing to sync your devices automatically, so you don’t have to dock your device to keep things in sync.

Android

Start with the settings on your phone; go to “Settings > Privacy” on your phone and make sure the “Back up my settings” and “Automatic restore” options are checked. Next, go to “Settings > Accounts” and sync, open your Gmail account, and check off all options. With these settings in place, your contacts, system settings, apps, calendar, and e-mail will be restored whenever you set up a new Android phone with that same Gmail account. However, this is only a basic backup; it won’t save the photos and text messages on your phone.

For a more complete backup, you might try MyBackup Pro ($5 plus 50 MB online storage for free and $1 to $2 per month for more online storage). The program runs automated scheduled backups, supports a wide range of Android phones and will backup app install files that do not have copyright protections programmed into them. If your phone is rooted, you might consider Titanium Backup ($5.99 for Pro), which backs up all apps, all data associated with them and the Android Market links that show you’ve paid for them. It also saves most phone Pro versions and will integrate with Dropbox.

The Most Shocking Security Threat To Your Small Business

Hopefully by now you realize you need to keep a close watch over the security of your PC and other devices (or you’re smart enough to hire us to do it for you). Either way, cybercrime is BIG business, and small business owners are seen as the low hanging fruit by attackers who are looking for easy-to-steal financial data, passwords and the like. Some do it for profit, others do it for fun.

But there’s a much bigger threat to small business data security that can not only portend to leak your information out to the masses, but can also corrupt or erase data, screw up operations and bring everything to a screeching halt. What is it? Surprisingly, it’s your employees.

“Human error” is the #1 leading cause of data loss, system failure and virus attacks. In some cases, it’s an innocent “Ooops! I deleted it.” Other times it’s a malicious act of revenge from a disgruntled employee who didn’t get the raise they wanted or simply feels taken advantage of. Recently, a disgruntled employee working for oDesk, a third party content management firm, leaked Facebook’s highly detailed rulebook for flagging inappropriate posts. This document contained shocking guidelines regarding sexual content, death and disfigurement as well as racially charged content. Apparently, sexual acts should be blocked, but crushed heads are okay.

The above incident, while a problem, is a mild case. Often employees seeking revenge will steal and post client data, financials or other competitive information online. In some cases, they sell it. Other times, employees delete critical files to either cause harm to the organization or to cover their tracks. And when it’s your client’s data that gets stolen or compromised, you have a major PR nightmare to deal with aside from the costs and problem of recovering the data.

At a minimum, first, make sure you backup all critical data remotely. Second, monitor employee’s usage of data. Simple content filtering software can detect not only when employees are visiting inappropriate sites, but also detect if they delete or alter large amounts of data–all signs that something could be amiss. And finally, it’s worth a little bit of money to find a good employment attorney to help you craft various policies on using and accessing confidential information.