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The Beta app is available in Mumbai starting today


Life happens close to home. In the course of a day, local questions come up all the time: Know a good pediatrician for my daughter? Which film festivals in our locality have free entry for kids? Any reliable mechanics nearby?


In cities across India, it’s getting harder to get good answers to these questions because cities keep changing, including the people who live there. People nearby often have the exact information you need, but they’re too busy these days to stop and chat on the street or in the park. And group chats keep getting bigger and noisier — and often fill up with those "Good Morning" messages.


And yet we need answers. That's why we built Neighbourly, a neighbourhood app that helps you ask your neighbours questions, share local expertise, and keep up with your neighbourhood. With Neighbourly, your questions get routed to the relevant neighbours instantly, and then they can write back with the most up-to-date and accurate info.
Neighbourly is a human, helpful and local way to ask and answer neighbourhood questions


Neighbourly helps you:

  • Ask your neighbours questions. Ask a question for your family, and it's routed to the neighbourhood experts who can help. Using Google's voice recognition, you can speak your question or answer into the app, just like talking to a neighbour. It works in English and eight Indian languages.
  • Share your local expertise. Easily swipe left and right through the questions and give answers. The more you answer, the more you’re recognized for your local expertise. Plus, every time you answer, that information directly helps one of your neighbours and makes your entire neighbourhood more informed.
  • Keep up with your neighbourhood safely. Browse, ask and answer questions without sharing all of your personal information. Personal details like your phone number, full name and other contact information are kept private when you use Neighbourly. And every member that joins Neighbourly makes the Neighbourly Promise so we can all work together to keep the app’s community safe and helpful.


Starting today, we’re making a Beta version of Neighbourly available on the Google Play Store for all smartphones in Mumbai running Android 4.3 (Jelly Bean) and higher. If you live outside Mumbai, join our waitlist and invite your neighbours. We’ll be looking to expand to other neighbourhoods across India that are excited to try Neighbourly.


Today is the first step for Neighbourly, and we want your feedback. We hope Neighbourly, like Google Search, can be another way you find the information you need, and, in the process, make neighbourhoods everywhere feel even more neighbourly.

Posted by Caesar Sengupta, VP, Next Billion Users Team

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Regional language Internet usage is growing at an unprecedented pace in India and generating great demand for local language content. While many publishers have focused on Hindi, there is now growing demand for other regional languages. We are delighted to share that we are bringing back the Google Search conference with an objective to help Indian language publishers make the most of the opportunity and bridge the Indian language content gap that exists on the web today.


We will be hosting conferences across 11 cities in India to help local language publishers and webmasters better understand how they can make their content easily accessible to the growing number of Internet users across India. In addition to Hindi, this year we will cover four other Indian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Bengali.


Conference cities and dates -


  • Gurgaon on June 20 (Wednesday)
  • Pune on June 22 (Friday)
  • Indore on July 2 (Monday)
  • Patna on July 4 (Wednesday)
  • Lucknow on July 6 (Friday)
  • Hyderabad on July 16 (Monday)
  • Visakhapatnam on July 18 (Wednesday)
  • Kolkata on July 20 (Friday)
  • Coimbatore on July 30 (Monday)
  • Chennai on Aug 1 (Wednesday)
  • Bengaluru on Aug 3 (Friday) - this event is focused on women webmasters


At each day-long conference, members of the Google Webmaster Outreach team will talk about a host of topics including ‘How Search Works’, ‘Tips for better visibility of Indian language websites in Google Search’, ‘Best practices for mobile-friendly websites’, ‘Google’s Search quality guidelines’ and many other important topics. We are also including a  session from the Google AdSense team to elucidate their policies and share how to avoid mistakes while running AdSense on your sites.


Please note that this is an invite-only event and filling out the form does not guarantee your spot at the conference. Please register your interest here! (The registration for the aforementioned cities closes 10 days before the listed date). Once selected, you will receive an invitation email from us confirming the venue details.



Posted by Vandana Bharvani, Director, Research & Outreach - Trust & Safety

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Dear Parents,


It's that time of the year when the temperatures are rising, schools are closed for vacations and more often than not, kids are glued to their screens! Yes it's summertime, and while you may be worried about your kids spending some extra hours on the Internet, we feel you can use that time to bond with them, learn together, encourage them to make new discoveries and help them be responsible explorers of the web.


So whether you are planning a holiday, choose to stay indoors to beat the heat, or simply want to help kids pick a hobby, we want to make the journey to your destination meaningful and fun!


We have partnered with our product leaders to bring to you, a series of activities you can do along with your kids to make this a memorable #SummerWithGoogle at the Summer Camp.


The road to the summer camp will include four assignments that will make the ‘Summer of 2018’ last a lifetime. From exploring the country that is home to all the pandas in the world on Google Earth, to saying gracias and por favor as you learn phrases in Spanish and other languages on Google Translate; taking dramatic virtual tours of museums to make your own gallery on Google Arts & Culture and ultimately building your very own app to share your summer experience.


Each assignment will also carry questions on the four fundamental codes of being Internet Awesome and teach the young internet explorers a lesson or two on how to be -- Internet Smart, Internet Alert, Internet Strong, Internet Kind and Internet Brave. Learn more here.

The assignments can be accessed on the #SummerWithGoogle website and Google’s social media handles every week, and will be accompanied by a set of instructions that will answer all your “how to” questions. Each assignment will be linked to the previous one, so its important you take out that one hour in a week, and carry positive marking for every correct answer you give. There will be subjective questions too, that will bring alive every child’s creativity and imagination.

At the end of four weeks, we will host a fun filled Summer Camp at Google’s Gurgaon and Hyderabad campus, flying upto 100 participants along with their guardians from across the country. If you don’t want your child to miss the Summer Camp, help them participate by following these four easy steps.
We are hoping that our fun assignments will bring you and your kids the next wanderlust experience you have been craving for and make you learn many things in the process.

Your first assignment is here:


Stay tuned for more from us.


Yours Truly,

Sunita Mohanty, On Behalf of Google

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When we first met Parveen Begum -- an Internet Saathi, from a small village in Guntur, last year, she had many apprehensions and asked, ‘Is the Internet meant for me?’, ‘Will my family allow me to step outside the house to train other women?’,  ‘How will the people of my village react to this change?’. And she isn't alone. Hundreds and Thousands of women we meet along the journey of the Internet Saathi program, ask us similar questions. But today, Parveen Begu and 48000 other Internet Saathis have not only learnt to use the Internet themselves, but have also helped over 15M women in 150000 villages to unlock their true potential.

These women have gone ahead to do amazing things, once they learn to use the Internet and one such story is that of Padmavati from Guntur who was trained by Parveen Begum. Padmavati started her own business of lemongrass oil. She learnt the production process and techniques and then came up with the idea of setting up a small production plant in Guntur.

Today is an important day for the Internet Saathi program,  as we reach the halfway point for our milestone. The program is spread across the villages of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, West Bengal, Tripura, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Tamil Nadu and has also expanded to four new states -- Uttarakhand, Goa, Karnataka, and Telangana, in the past couple of months.


We are committed to bridging the digital gender divide in India and will continue to work towards reaching our larger ambition of 300,000 villages across India i.e. covering 50% of total villages in the country.

The program focuses on educating women to use the internet, who then impart training to other women in their community and neighboring villages.  What’s incredible to see is the impact the program has had on millions of women, their families and communities.

We are grateful to Tata Trusts, our onground NGO partners, local activists and several Google volunteers who have contributed to the success of this program. We watch with pride as the family of 48000 Internet Saathis grows!

By Sapna Chadha, Director of Marketing, Southeast Asia & India, Google

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Last year, we outlined Google’s commitment to comply with Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), across all of the services we provide in the European Union. We’ve been working on our compliance efforts for over eighteen months, and ahead of the new law coming into effect, here’s an update on some of the key steps we've taken.


Improved user transparency
We’re updating our current Privacy Policy to make it easier to understand what information we collect, and why we collect it. We’ve improved the navigation and organization of the policy to make it easier to find what you’re looking for; explained our practices in more detail and with clearer language; and added more detail about the options you have to manage, export, and delete data from our services. The policy now also includes explanatory videos and illustrations, because a visual description can be easier to understand than text alone. And we've made it easier to jump to your privacy settings directly from the policy, helping you make choices about your privacy.
Although we’re taking these steps to make our Privacy Policy easier to understand, it’s important to note that nothing is changing about your current settings or how your information is processed. You’ll continue to have granular control over the data you share with us when you use our services, but with clearer explanations. The updated policy is already available to read and we’ll be emailing all of our users about it individually.


Improved user controls
Every day, nearly 20 million people around the globe visit My Account, our central hub that brings together all the different ways you can review your Google security, privacy and ad settings. As part of our GDPR compliance efforts, we’ve improved both the controls and the clarity of information in My Account so that people are better informed about how and why their data is collected. Within My Account, you can:  

  • Use Activity Controls to choose what activity is saved to your Google Account. We provide simple on/off switches to control Location History, Web and App Activity, YouTube Search History and more, across all devices that are signed in to your account.
  • View or delete data—including search history, location history, browsing history—from our services using My Activity. To make it easier to browse your past online activity, we have given you tools to search by topic, date, and product. You can permanently delete specific activities, entire days or weeks of activity that you don’t want associated with your account.
  • Take a Security Checkup or Privacy Checkup to reassure yourself that your account is secure, and that your privacy settings work for you. We’ve recently added an option that allows you to subscribe to more frequent prompts to take the Privacy Checkup.
  • Manage or mute the ads you see on Google, on websites and in apps using the recently upgraded Ads Settings tool and Mute This Ad control. We have provided more information about how and why certain ads are personalized, and will also be further simplifying the look and feel of these tools in the coming months.
  • Get a clear overview of all the Google products that you use—and the data associated with them—via Google Dashboard. We’ve recently made the Dashboard more mobile-friendly so it's now easy to use across different devices.


Improved data portability
Since its launch in 2011, people around the world have used our Download Your Data tool to export data from products like Google Photos, Drive, Calendar, Google Play Music and Gmail, either to their own computer, or to storage services like OneDrive, Dropbox and Box. We are further improving and expanding this feature, adding more Google services, including more contextual data controls, and creating a new setting that helps people schedule regular downloads.
While we’ve enabled people to download data from our services for many years, the GDPR encourages companies to enable direct service-to-service data transfers where feasible, for example from Google Photos to another photo service. To support that aim, we've recently initiated the Data Transfer Project on GitHub, providing early-stage open source code that will, in time, be of use to any developer wanting to offer seamless transfer of data from one service directly into an alternative (or vice versa).


Parental consent and improved tools for children online.
Under the new rules, companies must get consent from parents to process their children’s data in certain circumstances. To obtain that consent and to make sure that parents and children have the tools to manage their online experiences, we’re rolling out Family Link–already available in various countries around the world–throughout the EU.


Through Family Link, parents can create a Google Account for their child and are required to provide consent for certain processing of their child’s data.  Family Link also allows parents to set certain digital ground rules on their child’s Android device– like approving or blocking apps, keeping an eye on screen time, or remotely locking their child’s device. We plan to evolve Family Link’s functionality over time, working closely with parents and advocacy groups.


Helping our business customers and partners
The GDPR places new obligations on Google, but also on any business providing services to people in the EU.  That includes our partners around the globe: advertisers, publishers, developers and cloud customers. We’ve been working with them to prepare for May 25th, consulting with regulators, civil society groups, academics, industry groups and others.


For our advertising partners, we’ve clarified how our advertising policies will change when the GDPR takes effect. We already ask publishers to get consent from their users for the use of our ad tech on their sites and apps under existing legislation, but we’ve now updated that requirement in line with GDPR guidance. We’re also working closely with our publisher partners to provide a range of tools to help them gather user consent, and have built a solution for publishers that want to show non-personalized ads, using only contextual information.


For our Google Cloud customers, we’ve updated our data processing terms for G Suite and Google Cloud Platform and provided detailed information to customers about our approach to data portability, data incident notifications, secure infrastructure and third party audits and certifications, among other features. For more information, visit the Google Cloud blog.


Strengthening our privacy compliance program
Over the last decade, Google has built a strong global privacy compliance program, taking advice from regulators around the world. Across the company, we have dedicated teams of engineers and compliance experts who work in full-time privacy roles, ensuring that no Google product launches without a comprehensive privacy review. We’ve now further improved our privacy program, enhancing our product launch review processes, and more comprehensively documenting our processing of data, in line with the accountability requirements of the GDPR.


This is a snapshot of things we’ve done to date to be ready for May 25, 2018. But our commitment to compliance with the GDPR, and the rights it gives people, will continue long beyond this date. As we evolve our products over time, we’ll continue to improve our Privacy Program and the protections we offer to users.  Our ambition is to have the highest possible standards of data security and privacy, and to put our users and partners in control.

Posted by William Malcolm, Director, Privacy Legal, EMEA

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Today, we welcome 48 incredible creators to the YouTube Creators for Change program as the 2018 class of Ambassadors. This global initiative, which we kicked off in 2016, spotlights inspirational creators who use YouTube’s global reach to change conversations around tough issues and make a truly positive impact on the world. Chosen for their passion and dedication to creating social change, these YouTube creators come from over 16 countries and represent a combined audience of 29 million fans:

The 2018 class features 31 new creators as well as 17 creators from last year’s program (those returning are distinguished with a *):
[Australia] L-FRESH the LION*, Sarah Grimstone
[Brazil] Nátaly Neri, Muro Pequeno
[Canada] Rossana from Eh Bee Family, AsapSCIENCE
[France] Swann Périssé*, HugoDecrypte, Lea Camilleri
[Germany] MaximNoise, Datteltäter*, ImJette*, Diana zur Löwen
[India] AIB*, Niharika Nim*, MostlySane, Girliyapa,
[Indonesia] Gita Devi*, Jovi Hunter*, Film Maker Muslim*, Cameo Project*, Duo Harbatah
[Malaysia] The MingThing
[MENA] Fly With Haifa, Maha AJ*, Shog AL Maskery*, Muaz Osman, Omar Farooq, Raneem Al Muhandis
[Mexico] Victoria Volkóva
[Philippines] Janina Vela
[Singapore] Ministry of Funny
[Thailand] Picnicly
[Turkey] İlker Gümüşoluk*
[United Kingdom] Humza*, Jazza John, SuperSamStuff*, Riyadh K, BENI*, Fun for Louis, Myles Dyer*, MyPaleSkin
[United States] Jouelzy, Yasmany Del Real, Beleaf in Fatherhood, Subhi Taha*, Jubilee Project, Hallease


As part of our $5M investment in this program, these creators will receive support from YouTube through a combination of project funding, mentorship opportunities, and ongoing production assistance at our YouTube Spaces. They’ll also join us for our second annual Social Impact Camp at YouTube Space London this summer. The Social Impact Camp is an exclusive two-day-long camp featuring inspirational speakers, video production workshops, and mentorship opportunities with experts as well as time for the Ambassadors to connect with one another.


We’re also joining forces with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and social change agency Love Frankie to support YouTube creators from the Asia-Pacific region who are passionate about creating social impact and tackling tough issues through their videos. First up for this new partnership will be a series of Boot Camps in Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand between June - November 2018 where local creators will workshop creating content about local issues alongside experts such as NGOs, academic authorities, and subject matter specialists. Following these Boot Camps, select local creators will participate in a three-month Academy Program that includes mentoring from Creators for Change Ambassadors, local experts, and NGOs to help produce informed, high-quality content that resonates in their countries.


Over the next few months, the 2018 Creators for Change Ambassadors will kick off projects addressing hate speech, xenophobia and/or extremism through different creative forms, such as a series celebrating the Black community within Brazil and a video project that creates awareness about the negative impact that hate speech can have on mental and physical well-being. There are many more incredible ideas in the works -- we can’t wait to share more from these inspiring YouTube role models soon.


To the creators who are joining us as 2018 Ambassadors: thank you. We’re humbled to be working with you on sharing your messages of hope and tolerance.


By Juniper Downs, Head of YouTube Public Policy