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Google rolled out its latest version of Google Earth on Thursday. Calling it “the most beautiful Google Earth yet,” the update has managed to eliminate the “patchy” look of some of its images and now presents users with a more realistic depiction of how our planet really looks from up high.

Google Earth 6.2 smooths over visually distracting patchworks, left, for a more realistic view of the planet. (Credit: Google) Google has released Google Earth 6.2 to smooth over earlier versions' unsightly patchwork caused by stitching together widely varying satellite photographs. The result is a more realistic and less distracting (though still optimistically cloudless) view of the planet …

When Google launched Google+ in June, 2010, it was for adults only. Now it?s open to anyone 13 or older.  The reason Google kept teens off the service at first is not because the social network was ever about what we euphemistically call ?adult content,? but because Google wanted to take extra time to get it right before opening the doors to people under 18.  After several months of testing …

Google+ opened up to teenagers on Thursday, a move that Google no doubt hopes will help it challenge Facebook as the social network of choice. "Teens and young adults are the most active Internet users on the planet," said Bradley Horowitz, Google's vice president of products,in a post on his Google+ page. "And surprise, surprise: they're also human beings who enjoy spending time with friends …

Google doesn't do a very good job identifying us based on our Internet habits, according to our very small and not-too-scientific, 12-person study of The Atlantic Wire staff. Ars Technica's Casey Johnston discovered that this Ad Preferences page reveals what Google has inferred about us via our Googling in order to serve us all the best kind of ads. Like everyone else, after we learned about …

Yesterday Google announced it would be “simplifying” its privacy policy so that all separate Google product accounts would be tied together for a single signup system. As expected, privacy advocates are outraged by the change and Google’s failure to allow users to opt-out. To Google’s credit, there are some issues here that needed to be fixed–but in the process, it could sacrificing user trust …

Google’s announcement on Tuesday that it plans to track users as they move from one Google product to another once again has the company on the defensive over its privacy policies–and it may prompt new scrutiny from federal authorities.

Google’s announcement that it is sharing more user data across its services has already raised the hackles of privacy advocates, technology writers and at least one national data-protection agency. On Tuesday, the search giant announced that it was placing 60 of its Web services under a unified privacy policy that would allow the company to share data between any of those services. (Google Books …

Google announced a plan Tuesday to link user data across its email, video, social-networking and other services that it says will create a "beautifully simple and intuitive" user experience. But critics raised privacy concerns like those that helped kill the search giant's Buzz social networking service.

Google said Tuesday it is revising its privacy policies and changing how it collects and uses data from users of its services to provide more personalized search results and advertisements.