Apple isn't the only big U.S. tech company whose retail stores are being copied by Chinese entrepreneurs. A fake Google Android store has apparently opened for business in Zhuhai, China, billing itself as a "celebrity smartphone experience" store.

Two things worth noting about the faux-Android outlet: First, Google hasn't opened any Android-branded retail stores, save an experimental "Androidland" partnership with Australian mobile provider Telstra.

And second, this ostensible Android shop has a fake Apple kiosk inside, which is guaranteed to raise the eyebrows of both iOS and Android fanboys.

Considering how quickly fake Apple stores are shut down once photos hit the web, this Android kiosk may not be around much longer.

[engadget]

Digg founder Kevin Rose has been hired by Google, according to a report from AllThingsD.

The news comes after yesterday's announcement that Rose's current company, Milk, was shutting down its first -- and thus far, only -- app, Oink.

AllThingD says that Google isn't acquiring Milk, but it will hire some of Rose's co-workers. It's unclear what that means for Milk, which scored over 150,000 downloads for Oink in one month, largely on Rose's name recognition.

Neither Google nor Rose has commented on the hiring, and there's no word on what Rose will be working on in his new role.

[allthingsd]

Google has announced that it will combine the Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore into a new cloud-based service called Google Play.

With the advent of Google Play, Google is ditching the "Android Market" branding altogether, and Android device owners will soon see the Market app replaced by a Google Play app, as well as Play versions of Android's existing Movies, Books and Music apps.

All purchased media and apps will be stored in the cloud and synced across all your Android devices. Play will even save your progress in movies, games and books, so you can pick where you left off when you switch to a different device.

The Google Play store has already launched, and the app will roll out "in the coming days."

[theverge]

Google's new unified privacy policy, which allows the company to combine data from all of its sites into a single profile of a user, officially takes effect today.

The company says the new policy will be easier for users to understand, because it consolidates more than 70 separate policy documents from various Google services into one place. Google also says it won't be collecting any new data as a result of the change.

However, privacy advocates worry that tying a user's web history, past searches and YouTube viewing history to the same account gives Google a problematic amount of information about its users.

Short of deleting your Google account entirely, there are some precautions you can take to minimize what Google knows about you under the new policy, including deleting your web history and two separate YouTube histories.

[mashable / consumerist]

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum has had a Google problem since 2003, when sex columnist Dan Savage first redefined the then-Senator's name. Since then, spreadingsantorum.com -- the official site of the campaign to make "santorum" synonymous with a certain frothy mixture -- has been the top Google result for Santorum.

That has now changed, due to an update to Google's rank algorithms, SearchEngineLand reports.

Although Spreading Santorum's blog still ranks near the top of the "Santorum" results, the main page of the campaign has dropped all the way to the second page.

That's not necessarily good for the GOP presidential candidate, though. The new top result for his name is an Urban Dictionary listing that adds a few extra unpleasant adjectives to Savage's original definition.

Why the switch? After talking to Google, SearchEngineLand speculates that the search engine's SafeSearch feature nixed the Santorum site. SafeSearch now filters out "irrelevant adult content" that users might not expect to find when searching for a specific term.

It appears that, despite requests from the candidate in the past, Google didn't intervene to stop the spread of Spreading Santorum.

[searchengineland]