The top stories in the world of technology
News
6 11 – 24 May 2022 • Issue 631
WHAT WE THINK
but not this... Funky Pigeon suspended
orders after a cyber attack (www.snipca.
c o m /4 1 7 9 0)You’ll like this... A developer used Raspberry
Pi to make a 70-year-old camera digital
(www.snipca.com/41815)Free VPN coming to Microsoft Edge
M
icrosoft is building a free VPN
for Edge that you’d
be able to use from within the
browser.
It reveals the ‘Microsoft Edge
Secure Network’ on its Support site
(www.snipca.com/41808), saying
it “encrypts your internet connection
to help protect your data from online
threats like hackers”.
However, it says that only 1GB of data amonth will be provided for free. By
contrast, Windscribe offers 2GB
for free by default, rising to 10GB
if you give your email address
when you sign up (see page 53).
The VPN will show you how
much data you’ve used, and when your
allowance will be reset (see screenshot).
Microsoft hasn’t said when it
will launch, only that it’s being
tested as a “preview feature”.Ask Google to remove your
address and phone number
personal content” that
if made public can
cause “direct harm to
people”. This includes
bank-account or
credit-card numbers that
could be used for financial
fraud, and confidential
government information
that can be used to steal
your identity.
It’s now extending this
protection to cover home
addresses, phone numbers
and passwords, as well as
photos of identity cards
and other login information
that could be used to
impersonate you.
Writing online (www.
snipca.com/41805), Google
said that “the internet is
always evolving – with
information popping up in
unexpected places and being
used in new ways — so our
policies and protections need
to evolve, too”.
However, Google doesn’t
guarantee that it will approve
your request for personalerase it completely,
you’d have to contact
the website it’s
listed on.
To submit a
request, visit http://www.
snipca.com/41807,
then scroll down and
click the blue ‘Start removal
request’ button. On the next
page click the pen icons to
select whether you want to
remove information from just
Google’s search results, or
from a website also (see
screenshot).
Next, answer the question
‘Have you contacted the site’s
website owner?’ and fill in the
details that Google asks for.Y
ou can now ask
Google to remove
your home address,
phone number and passwords
from its search results, as the
company cracks down on
“personally-identifiable
information” online.
It already lets you ask for
the removal of “highlydetails to be removed.
It will evaluate each
request to “ensure
that we’re
not limiting the
availability of other
information that is
broadly useful, for
instance in news articles”.
It added that it won’t
remove content that appears
“as part of the public record”
on the sites of government or
official sources.
Removing the information
from Google’s search results
won’t wipe it from the
internet, because it would
remain available through
other search engines. ToGoogle was founded on
4 September, 1998. That
means it has taken the
company nearly 24 years to
realise it might be quite nice
to offer people the option to
remove personal information.
That’s one of the reasons
we’re using Google Search
less and less, but our main
complaint is that the results
are nowhere near as good as
they once were. In our next
issue (out Weds 25 May) we
reveal what’s gone wrong,
and which search engines
we’ve switched to.