Google Privacy Telephone Numbers Concerns Many

There have been many articles written about the myriad of privacy issues surrounding Google and their policies. I haven’t had any serious issues with Google’s privacy policies until last week when my son typed our phone number into Google and not only did my name come up, but also a map to my house! This is a big problem!

I think it is imperative that everybody knows just how much information about you can be found through Google. Also make sure that your kids know NOT to ever give out their phone number to anybody over the Internet especially through chat rooms.

Why You Should Never Give Out Your Phone Number Over the Internet

If you do a search for my old phone number 727-856-4695 the results come up as follows:

By clicking on the map, anybody can drive right over to my house! This is a huge security problem since a sex offender or other type of weirdo can easily find where my kids live if they have our phone number. I strongly urge you to get the message across to your kids to not give out their phone number online. I am making all our phone numbers private!

Microsoft Buying Yahoo For Real

Back in June of 07 I wrote a post Ugly Rumor Microsoft Buying Yahoo Again which talked about Yahoo being worth 80 billion. Microsoft just offered 44 billion for Yahoo which is quite a bit less than what the pundits said in May of 2007. One reason is that Yahoo’s stock has been steadily declining for the last three years. Even so, they still pull in 40 billion a year in paid advertising. My post and a subsequent conversation on Digg talked about why this is a smart move by Microsoft.

As a search engine optimization engineer, I am hoping that this deal goes down, since both Live and Yahoo have always been much easier for me to obtain organic placement than Google. Even though I have had a lot of success in Google, having a Yahoo-Live hybrid engine that can compete with Google in the search space, is a good thing for SEO people, especially SEO people like me that use social network marketing as a tool for organic placement.

In fact Yahoo is now putting video in their natural SERP’s. Live has already been doing a lot of “new media” indexing. The majority of experts are staying focused on the paid advertising aspect of this proposed deal. That is why Microsoft is making the offer. The ramifications of a Live-Yahoo merger on the organic side have yet to be discussed in any detail. My feeling is that this will be very good for SEO people and we should be crossing our fingers that the deal happens. Any competition to Google is a benefit for us. If they continue to own the search space, than they will continue to do whatever they want, like make war on paid links. With stiff competition, Google will have to think twice before pissing off their advertisers and Adsense publishers.

WebProNews didn’t feel that Microsoft would buy Yahoo, and unlike me, don’t feel that the deal would be worth it to Microsoft. It was actually their article on May 12th that prompted me to write mine. Even though I am not a big fan of Microsoft, and I feel that they have missed the boat on the Internet since day 1, this is a really good move for them. It gives them what Google wants so bad, to be a one stop portal that takes care of general Internet user’s needs.

These posts explain why all this is important:

• The Changing Face Of Google – Universal Search is explained in this article.
• Search Engine Optimization and Social Network Marketing - SEO and Web 2.0 Optimized social network marketing is covered in this post.
• RSS Real Simple Syndication Explained - RSS syndication is explained here.
• RSS Syndication Services FeedBurner – this post explained how FeedBurner works. It was written prior to Google’s purchase of FeedBurner which is talked about in my Web 2.0 Podcast. Also of note is the updated post about FeedBurner RSS to Email service.

I will stay on top of this story.