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San Francisco, Calif — Feb 03, `08 — Yahoo! would consider a business alliance with Google as one way to rebuff a $44.6 billion takeover proposal by Microsoft, Reuters reported citing a source familiar with Yahoo’s strategy said on Sunday.

The report further said, “a second source close to Yahoo said it had received a procession of preliminary contacts by media, technology, telephone and financial companies. But the source said they were unaware whether any alternative bid was in the offing.

Few natural bidders exist beside Google that could engage in a bidding war, and Google would be unlikely to win approval from antitrust regulators, some Wall Street analysts said on Friday.

Yahoo!’s efforts to find an alternative bidder could simply be a measure to pressure Microsoft to boost its bid, which valued Yahoo at $44.6 billion when first announced on Friday.” More at Reuters.

In response to Google’s foul cry over Microsoft’s Yahoo! bid, Microsoft has released a statement from Bard Smith, General Counsel:

REDMOND, Wash — Feb 03, `08 — The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising. The alternative scenarios only lead to less competition on the Internet.

Today, Google is the dominant search engine and advertising company on the Web. Google has amassed about 75 percent of paid search revenues worldwide and its share continues to grow. According to published reports, Google currently has more than 65 percent search query share in the U.S. and more than 85 percent in Europe. Microsoft and Yahoo! on the other hand have roughly 30 percent combined in the U.S. and approximately 10 percent combined in Europe.

Microsoft is committed to openness, innovation, and the protection of privacy on the Internet. We believe that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will advance these goals. More at Microsoft.

Feb 03, `08 — In a statement released today on Google’s press center, Mr. David Drummond, Google’s Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer cries foul over Microsoft’s Yahoo! bid.

Mr. David Drummond in his rude and venomous language falsely accuses Microsoft of making ” hostile bid ”. He says, “So Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another.”

Now Mr. Drummond do you even know or have any remote idea how many take overs Google have made in last five years or so ??

He also says, “Users benefit from constant innovation. It’s what makes the Internet such an exciting place.”

Mr. Drummond do you actually mean supporting rampant piracy through YouTube, when you say “Users benefit from constant innovation” ??

Do you even have any remote idea of how many pirated videos of Movies, TV Shows, Dramas, Music Videos, etc are being hosted at any given moment ??

Mr. Drummond further goes on to say, “This hostile bid was announced on Friday so there is plenty of time for these questions to be thoroughly addressed.”

Mr. Drummond when even Yahoo! in its official response refers to Microsoft’s proposal as “an unsolicited proposal”, who are you in the world to refer that proposal as “hostile” ??

And Mr. Drummond when you say, “It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation”, do you actually mean that buying DoubleClick despite the immense privacy concerns from within the US and from Europe ??

If Google were to believe in its well publicized but never implemented ideology of ” Do NO Evil ” then Mr. Drummond why in the world Google needed to buy YouTube or DoubleClick? Google was already making tons of millions anyway… Google could have let YouTube / DoubleClick make money for themselves or let some one else buy ‘em (of course you would have stopped Microsoft from buying any of ‘em either, right?)

So Mr. Drummond before making entirely false claims using rude and venomous language, it would have been better if you have just took a little look at Google’s own past 10 years.

Or may be fear of loosing monopoly and loosing world dominance makes you speak highly rude & venomous language along with highly exaggerated claims and false acquisitions ??

Google’s statement on Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo!

MySpace will open its doors to software developers allowing them to create games and media-sharing applications for the popular social network, reports the BBC.

MySpace will formally launch its “Developer Platform” next Tuesday but is already allowing people to sign up. The tools have been developed with Google and will allow programmers to create programs similar to those used by millions on rival site Facebook.

Facebook opened up its site to outside developers last year. It has since had great success, with nearly 15,000 applications written for the site.

These include photo-sharing and music recommendation tools as well as games such as scrabble. However, despite its popularity, Facebook still lags behind MySpace in terms of overall users. MySpace has around 200 million registered users, compared to 63 million who use Facebook.

Last October MySpace announced that it would join OpenSocial, Google’s platform designed to allow developers to build applications that will work on any website.

Other networks such as Bebo, LinkedIn and Orkut already use the tools.

The tools, available from 5 February, will allow developers to build applications that make use of MySpace member profile information and their connections with other users.More at BBC News.

Dec 25, `07 — Slashdot reports on Google linking up Google Reader with Google Talk to make shared items visible to your contacts on Google Talk.

“One week ago Google Reader’s team decided to begin showing your private data to all your GMail contacts. No need to opt-in, NO way to opt-out. Complaints haven’t been answered. Some users share their problems, including one family who says they won’t be able to enjoy this Christmas because of this ‘feature.’ Will Google start doing this with all their products? You can browse the thread in Google Groups.”

Comments from Google Groups

User ‘banzaimonkey’ writes:
“I think the basic mistake here, as Modulo has noted, is that the people on my contact list are not necessarily my “friends”. I have business contacts, school contacts, family contacts, etc., and not only do I not really have any interest in seeing all of their feed information, I don’t want them seeing mine either. This is a major privacy problem.”

User ‘Paul Russell’ writes:
“Using my Gmail contacts as a friends list is a dangerous thing. Especially because a lot of the addresses in there were added automatically when people emailed me. I understand that sharing is a public activity, but to date Google reader shares were pseudo private by obscurity. In reality the only people that were going to see my share were people I told about it. I don’t like the idea of an opt out only mechanism. Facebook just took a bath on this concept. Granted Beacon was a complete disaster, but I think the lesson to be learned is when you change personal sharing to become more public it should be an opt in process.”

Chrix Finne at Official Google Reader Blog invites your feedback on Google Reader features here at Google Groups.

WASHINGTON — Dec 20, `07 — The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday approved Google’s $3.1 billion purchase of advertising rival DoubleClick, saying the deal would not substantially lessen competition.

The deal, which combines Google’s dominance in pay-per-click Internet advertising with DoubleClick’s market-leading position in flashier display ads, is also being scrutinized by European antitrust officials.

In a 4-1 vote, the FTC decided to end its eight-month investigation of the transaction.

Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour dissented and issued a separate statement expressing reservations, arguing that the deal “may substantially lessen competition.”

She said the takeover “will affect the evolution of the entire online advertising market” as this evolves and have wide-ranging implications for consumers. “The transaction will combine not only the two firms’ products and services, but also their vast troves of data about consumer behavior on the Internet,” she said.

European antitrust authorities are expected to rule on the deal sometime next year. The European Commission last month launched a probe and said the merger “would raise competition concerns.” The European Commission declined to comment on the FTC’s decision, spokesman Jonathan Todd said.

Microsoft and other critics argue the deal would enable Google to dominate two aspects of the Internet advertising market — ad sales and ad-serving tools.

The FTC said in a report on its investigation that both the online ad sales and ad-serving markets have numerous competitors, several of which have been bolstered by recent acquisitions.

Those include Microsoft’s $6 billion purchase of DoubleClick rival aQuantive, the acquisition of online advertising provider Tacoda by Time Warner’s AOL, and Yahoo’s purchase of Internet advertising exchange Right Media for $680 million.

Other competitors include ValueClick and 24/7 Real Media, which was purchased by London-based advertising giant WPP Group PLC for $649 million in May, the FTC said.

Privacy advocates say the combined company will have access to a huge amount of data on individual Web-surfing habits. The FTC said it lacked the legal authority to block the deal on any grounds except on antitrust matters.

However, in an apparent nod to these concerns, the FTC on Thursday proposed a set of privacy guidelines for the online advertising industry, describing them as something that “clearly transcend” the Google-DoubleClick deal. It remains to be seen how such guidelines would be enforced.

Google has a dominant position in pay-per-click ads, which are based on a computer user’s searches. Its ads are usually in the form of text and are shown on the right-hand side of the screen.

DoubleClick is a market leader in the display ads preferred by many corporate advertisers. More at FTC.

Beware of the Love Bots!

So you think you’ve found Mr. or Ms. Right online in, of all places, a Chatroom. Beware! A Russian company has just come up with software that can simulate online flirting, genuinely fooling people into thinking they’re making overtures to a real person.

The program, so far available only in Russian, will go on sale around February 15, just after St Valentine’s Day, said the CyberLover.ru website.

San Francisco, Calif — PC Tools, on Dec 12, uncovered new software developed in Russia that flirts with females or males seeking relationships online in order to collect their personal data.

The software, CyberLover, can conduct fully automated flirtatious conversations with users of chat-rooms and dating sites to lure them into a set of dangerous actions such as sharing their identity or visiting web sites with malicious content.

According to its creators, CyberLover can establish a new relationship with up to ten partners in just 30 minutes and its victims cannot distinguish it from a human being.

PC Tools is concerned about the program’s ability to mimic human behavior during online interactions and urges internet users to beware of this new breed of software that can easily be used for malicious purposes. The concept behind this software could be the catalyst for a dangerous new trend in malware evolution.

“As a tool that can be used by hackers to conduct identity fraud, CyberLover demonstrates an unprecedented level of social engineering,” says Sergei Shevchenko, Senior Malware Analyst at PC Tools. “It employs highly intelligent and customized dialogue to target users of social networking systems.”

“Internet users today are generally aware of the dangers of suspicious attachments and URLs they receive, the documents they open or the websites they visit, but CyberLover employs a new technique that is unheard of – and that’s what makes it particularly dangerous.”

“CyberLover has been designed as a bot [robot] that lures victims automatically, without human intervention. If it’s spawned in multiple instances on multiple servers, the number of potential victims could be very substantial,” says Shevchenko.

According to PC Tools researchers, the CyberLover software:

- offers a variety of profiles ranging from ‘romantic lover’ to ‘sexual predator;’

- uses a series of easily configurable “dialogue scenarios” with pre-programmed questions and discussion topics;

- is designed to recognize the responses of chat-room users to tailor its interaction accordingly;

- compiles a detailed report on every person it meets and submits then to a remote source – the reports contain confidential information that the victim has shared with the bot, which can include the victim’s name, contact details and personal photo(s);

- invites victims to visit a “personal” website or blog which could in fact be a fake page used to automatically infect visitors with malware.

Though Cyberlover is currently targeting Russian web sites, social networkers and online daters in the are urged to stay alert to unusual activity credited to programs like CyberLover.

To protect themselves, PC Tools recommends:

• Never give your personal details to anyone over the internet.
• Consider using aliases/fake names on social networking sites and when chatting online.
• Carefully monitor the online behavior of your family members and educate them of the dangers.
• Ensure you have up-to-date AntiVirus and Anti-Spyware installed, with real-time and behavioral protection.

PC Tools warns the security industry to prepare itself for this potential new trend of malware which uses “natural language dialogue systems” – already deployed within gaming technologies. PC Tools.

WASHINGTON — Dec 14, ‘07 — The head of the Federal Trade Commission said Friday she won’t remove herself from an antitrust review of Google’s purchase of online advertising company DoubleClick, rebuffing requests from privacy groups opposed to the transaction.

Deborah Platt Majoras, chairwoman of the FTC, said she has reviewed a petition from the groups with the agency’s ethics official and other staff, and determined that “the relevant laws and rules…neither require nor support recusal.”

The Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy said in a petition Wednesday that Majoras’ husband, John M. Majoras, is a partner at the Jones Day law firm. The groups alleged that DoubleClick hired Jones Day to represent the company before the FTC on its acquisition by Google, the leading Internet search company.

The Majoras’ relationship “calls into question the ability of the commission to render decisions that are fair and just,” the groups said.

Deborah Majoras said Friday that Jones Day hasn’t appeared before the FTC on the transaction, and is only representing DoubleClick before the European Commission, which is also scrutinizing the deal. John Majoras said Wednesday that he has not been involved in any aspect of the transaction.

In a statement, Deborah Majoras said that her husband was no longer an equity partner in the firm.

“Any decisions that I may make in any case in which Jones Day represent a party cannot be said to directly and predictably affect my husband’s interest in Jones Day. Hence, I do not have a financial conflict in this matter,” Majoras said in a statement.

Marc Rotenberg, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Jeff Chester, of the Center for Digital Democracy, said in a statement that “we do not believe that the chairman has made a persuasive case against recusal.” The two groups requested the recusal on Wednesday.

They argued that, contrary to what Majoras said, Jones Day had advertised on its Web site that it represented DoubleClick at the FTC. But, they said, that information was pulled off the site after their recusal request.

Statement of Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras

More at FTC.

Related:

Senators Urge FTC to Review Google-DoubleClick Deal Closely

EU Opens In-Depth Investigation of Google’s DoubleClick Purchase

OAKLAND, Calif — Ask.com a search engine owned by IAC on Tuesday, Dec 11, announced the launch of AskEraser, the first product to give consumers privacy control over their online searches.

When enabled by the user, AskEraser completely deletes all future search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers, including IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete text of their queries.

An AskEraser link is featured prominently in the upper right corner of the Ask.com homepage and search results pages - clearly and constantly indicating to the user that their search activity will be ‘erased’ from Ask.com servers. AskEraser remains ‘on’ for searches conducted across Ask.com’s major search verticals: Web, Images, AskCity, News, Blogs, Video, and Maps & Directions - and can be turned ‘on’ or ‘off’ by the user at anytime.

“For people who worry about their online privacy, AskEraser now gives them control of their search information,” said Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com. “AskEraser is simple, straightforward, and easy-to-use. It is an idea whose time has come.”

Earlier this year, Ask.com also announced that it is implementing a new data retention policy to disassociate search history from IP address and User ID after 18 months.

In addition, Ask.com has taken steps to further industry collaboration and dialogue on privacy issues. In July, Ask.com and Microsoft joined together in urging the online industry to develop global privacy principles for data collection, use and protection related to searching and online advertising.

AskEraser launched Tuesday in the United States and in the United Kingdom - and will be deployed globally in 2008. More at Ask.com.

AUSTIN, Texas — Dec 05, ‘07 — Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott today took legal action against two Web sites that cater to children but fail to adequately protect their privacy and safety. Texas is the first state to file an enforcement action under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal law that generally prohibits Web sites from unnecessarily collecting personal information from children under 13.

According to Attorney General investigators, TheDollPalace.com and Gamesradar.com unlawfully collect personal information such as names, ages, and home addresses from children. Investigators also discovered that the sites’ parental consent features were easily manipulated and circumvented. The lack of reasonable controls readily allow children to access the sites’ various features, including interactive chat rooms and forums, without their parents’ knowledge.

“These defendants are charged with operating child-oriented Web sites that violate the law by failing to protect young users,” Attorney General Abbott said. “Federal law provides important protections to prevent children from divulging sensitive personal information and to shield them from inappropriate sexual or violent content online. The Office of the Attorney General will continue aggressively enforcing laws to protect young Internet users.”

Both Web sites violate COPPA by failing to include necessary disclosures and failing to obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from children. TheDollPalace.com, for example, simply asks young users who are attempting to register, “Is a parent with you right now?” Children who click “Yes” are directed to a page that allows them to simply click “OK” to vague disclosures regarding information collection and use. Gamesradar.com similarly fails to properly obtain parental consent.

Under COPPA, these Web sites must make a greater effort to ensure that parents consent to their children providing personal information online. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) offers several options for Web site operators to obtain verifiable parental consent. Among them, the FTC recommends that Web sites maintain a toll-free telephone number staffed by trained personnel for parents to call in their consent or provide a form for the parent to print, complete, sign, and mail or fax back to Web site operators.

On The Doll Palace Web site, kids who join a “friends” forum are encouraged to fill out a lengthy questionnaire and are given drop-down lists of possible answers. Under “smoking habits,” for example, kids can select answers such as “I occasionally smoke good cigars.” Among the choices for eye color are “sexy hazel” and “evening black.”

Children can also say, “I would like to meet someone older than myself” or “I like to talk about sexual issues.” One of the answers under “dress preference” allows kids to respond: “I prefer to be nude.”

More at AG,Texas.

San Francisco, Calif — Dec 05, ‘07 — Beacon, the online advertising system that was supposed to light Facebook’s way to riches, has created such a dark storm of controversy that Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg today told users they could turn it off.

The dramatic reversal in the face of huge public outcry is an attempt to restore the company’s battered image with its more than 55 million users and the marketers trying to reach them.

Excerpts from Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Thoughts on Beacon’ on The Facebook Blog

About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.

While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I’d like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.

When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn’t get in people’s way as they browsed the web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared.

But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends.

It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better.

People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.

This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

On behalf of everyone working at Facebook, I want to thank you for your feedback on Beacon over the past several weeks and hope that this new privacy control addresses any remaining issues we’ve heard about from you.

More at The Facebook Blog.

San Francisco, CA — Nov 29, ‘07  — Seeking to keep the peace in its popular online hangout, Facebook has overhauled a new advertising system that sparked privacy complaints by turning its users into marketing tools for other companies, the AP is reporting.

The AP further reports, “Under the changes outlined late Thursday, Facebook’s 55 million users will be given greater control over whether they want to participate in a three-week-old program that circulates potentially sensitive information about their online purchases and other activities.

Facebook provided two different opportunities to block the details from being shared, but many users said they never saw the “opt-out” notices before they disappeared from the screen.

With the reforms, Facebook promised its users will now have to give their explicit consent, or “opt-in,” before any information is passed along.

The concessions were made after more than 50,000 Facebook users signed an online petition blasting the system, called “Beacon,” as a galling intrusion that put the Palo Alto-based startup’s pursuit of profit ahead of its members’ privacy interests.

More than 40 different Web sites, including Fandango.com, Overstock.com and Blockbuster.com, had embedded Beacon in their pages to track transactions made by Facebook users.” More at AP.

DARDENNE PRAIRIE, Missouri — For nearly a year, the families living along Waterford Crystal Drive in this bedroom community northwest of St. Louis kept the secret about the boy Megan Meyer met in September 2006 on the social-networking site MySpace.He called himself Josh Evans, and he and Meier, 13, struck up an online friendship that lasted for weeks. The boy then abruptly turned on Meier and ended it. Meier, who previously battled depression, committed suicide that night.

The secret was revealed six weeks later: Neighbor mother Lori Drew had pretended to be 16-year-old “Josh” to gain the trust of Meier, who had been fighting with Drew’s daughter, according to police records and Meier’s parents.

After their daughter’s death, Tina and Ron Meier begged other neighbors to keep the story private. Let the local police and the FBI conduct their investigations in privacy, they pleaded. But after waiting for criminal charges to be filed against Drew, neighbors learned that local and federal prosecutors could not find a statute applicable to the case.

The community’s patience dried up. Furious neighbors — and in the wake of recent media reports, an outraged public — are taking matters into their own hands. In an outburst of virtual vigilantism, readers of blogs listed the Drews’ home address, personal phone numbers, e-mail addresses and photographs of the couple.

Cyberbullying has become an increasingly creepy reality, where the anonymity of video games, message boards and other online forums offer an outlet for taunts. Yet drawing the line between conduct that is illegal and constitutionally protected free speech can be difficult.

On Wednesday, Nov 21, City officials unanimously passed a measure making online harassment a crime, days after learning that a 13-year-old girl killed herself last year after receiving cruel messages on the Internet.

The six-member Board of Aldermen made Internet harassment a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail. Mayor Pam Fogarty said the city had proposed the measure after learning about Megan Meier’s death.

“It is our hope that by supporting one of our own in Dardenne Prairie, we can do our part to ensure this type of harassing behavior never happens again, anywhere,” Fogarty said, adding, “after all, harassment is harassment regardless of the mechanism or tool.”

The four-page measure defines both harassment and cyber-harassment, essentially making it illegal to engage in a pattern of conduct that would cause a reasonable person to suffer “substantial emotional distress,” or for an adult to contact a child under 18 in a communication causing a reasonable parent to fear for the child’s well-being.

City attorney John Young said constitutionally protected activity would be exempt. The measure would apply when one of the people communicating was in Dardenne Prairie.

City officials also passed a resolution encouraging state and federal officials to outlaw cyber-harassment and cyber-stalking. A state lawmaker has questioned how state law could be altered without running afoul of First Amendment constitutional issues guaranteeing freedom of speech.

Dardenne Prairie is an upper-middle-class enclave of about 7,400 people 35 miles northwest of St. Louis. Over the years, the flat expanse of farmland has been taken over by subdivisions, bistros and strip-mall cafes.

Targeted online advertising is set to face increased scrutiny from European Union regulators concerned about invasion of privacy, threatening the growth of a potentially big online revenue-booster for media companies. Reports, Astrid Wendlandt of Reuters.

“This is a very hot topic that can be expected to be part of our work programme next year,” Gabriele Loewnau, a senior legal adviser for the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection, said on Friday, Nov 23. The German commissioner currently heads the European Union’s advisory body on data protection matters, the so-called Article 29 Working Party.

When an individual makes an online search or purchase, the computer can remember the entry through so-called cookies and pass on the information to advertisers.

Brussels’ heightened awareness comes as more than 13,000 Facebook users have signed a petition protesting against the networking site’s new advertising system which alerts members of friends’ purchases online. Members can opt for their transactions to be kept private but critics say the option is easily missed.

Some Facebook members have even threatened to leave, complaining the new system allowed their friends to find out what they were planning to give them for Christmas. The Facebook petition was led by the civic action group MoveOn.org.

FAST GROWING

Online advertising is the fastest-growing segment of the ad industry, gaining more than 25 percent a year, or more than five times the recent average annual growth all media included.

“Online sites have to make sure they are not intruding people’s privacy, otherwise targeted advertising will backfire,” said Vincent Bonneau from French telecoms research group Idate. More at Reuters.

Nov 25, ‘07 — Bobbie Johnson of TheGuardian writes a fine article on Video sharing website YouTube refusing to filter out threatening material, despite calls for more restrictions in the wake of the school shooting in Finland.

The article further writes, “Pekka-Eric Auvinen, 18, used YouTube to publicise his plans to attack his high school in Tuusula, hours before he killed eight people then shot himself. But Peter Fleischer, privacy counsel at Google, which bought YouTube last year, said the website was not considering passing more information to the police to avert such events. “Logistically we couldn’t do pre-screening,” he said. “We don’t want to become censors of the web.”

Vetting every video on the site would prove a technical challenge, with more than seven hours of footage uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Mr Fleischer said privacy was of paramount importance but admitted there was no blanket ban on passing on information. “If it were child pornography then we would inform the authorities immediately. In the case of somebody doing a video that looks something like hate speech, however, we would remove the account. In most of these cases we don’t report it.”

YouTube users can flag up anything of concern, particularly pornography, bullying and violence. Moderators then decide whether the material breaks YouTube’s rules and often remove offending video in minutes.” More at TheGuardian.

Some users of the online hangout Facebook are complaining that its two-week-old marketing program is publicizing their purchases for friends to see.

Those users say they never noticed a small box that appears on a corner of their Web browsers following transactions at Fandango, Overstock and other online retailers. The box alerts users that information is about to be shared with Facebook unless they click on “No Thanks.” It disappears after about 20 seconds, after which consent is assumed.

Users are given a second notice the next time they log on to Facebook, but they can easily miss it if they quickly click away to visit a friend’s page or check e-mail.

“People should be given much more of a notice, much more of an alert,” said Matthew Helfgott, 20, a college student who discovered his girlfriend just bought him black leather gloves from Overstock for Hanukkah. “She said she had no idea (information would be shared). She said it invaded her privacy.”

The new program lets companies tap ongoing conversations by alerting users about friends’ activities through the feeds. About 40 Web sites have decided to embed a free tool from Facebook, known as a Beacon, to enable the marketing feeds.

The idea is that if users see a friend buy or do something, they’d take that action as an endorsement for a movie, a band or a soft drink. But it also raises privacy concerns.

Users are able to decline sharing on a site-by-site basis, but can’t withdraw from the program entirely.Liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org formed a protest group Tuesday and had more than 6,000 members by Wednesday. The group is calling on Facebook to stop revealing online purchases and letting companies use names for endorsements without “explicit permission.”

Facebook user Nate Weiner, 23, said he uses a tool for the Firefox Web browser called BlockSite, which he says prevents sites from sending data to Facebook.

“What if you bought a book on Amazon called ‘Coping with AIDS’ and that got published to every single one of your friends?” he said. More at AP.

Related Article:  Young Warned Over Social Websites

BBC News is reporting on The Information Commissioner’s Office in UK warning young people about the online footprint they leave on social networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook.

BBC News further writes, “Millions of young people could damage their future careers with the details about themselves they post on social networking websites, a watchdog warns.

The Information Commissioner’s Office found more than half of those asked made most of their information public.

Some 71% of 2,000 14 to 21-year-olds said they would not want colleges or employers to do a web search on them before they had removed some material.The commission said the young needed to be aware of their electronic footprint.

The ICO also said young people could be putting themselves at risk of identity fraud because of the material they post on social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.

ICO deputy commissioner David Smith said: “Many young people are posting content online without thinking about the electronic footprint they leave behind.

“The cost to a person’s future can be very high if something undesirable is found by the increasing number of education institutions and employers using the internet as a tool to vet potential students or employees.”

“We have to help teenagers wise up to every aspect of the internet age they’re living in. It may be fun but unfortunately it is not the safe space many think it is.”" More at BBCNews, ICO.gov.uk

London, UK — Nov 20, ‘07 — The BBCNews is reporting on Animal rights activists are thought to being the first Britons to be asked to hand over keys to data encrypted on their computers to the Police. 

Excerpts from the article: “The request for the keys is being made under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). Police analysing machines seized during raids on activist’s homes carried out in May have asked for the keys. The activists could face jail if they do not comply and snub a further formal request to hand over the keys.

Case law
In early November about 30 animal rights activists are understood to have received letters from the Crown Prosecution Service in Hampshire inviting them to provide passwords that will decrypt material held on seized computers.

The letter is the first stage of a process set out under RIPA which governs how the authorities handle requests to examine encrypted material. Once a request has been issued the authorities can then issue what is known as a Section 49 notice demanding that a person turn the data into an “intelligible” form or, under Section 51 hand over keys.

Legal row
The section of RIPA that deals with decryption requests was controversial when it was drawn up and debated. Peers, academics and cryptographers called the proposals “flawed” when invited to comment on them by the Home Office.

Commentators pointed out that sSection III, which is aimed at serious criminals, such as paedophiles and terrorists, is flawed because those involved would much rather serve a few years for refusing to hand over keys than provide them and potentially incriminate themselves.

Others were simply likely to say that they had forgotten the complicated passphrase they used when encrypting material. Under certain circumstances RIPA allows this to be a plausible defence”. More at BBCNews.

WASHINGTON — Nov 19, ‘07 — Two U.S. senators on the antitrust subcommittee urged the Federal Trade Commission’s chairman to only approve Google’s purchase of Internet advertising company DoubleClick Inc. if it concludes there will be no adverse impact on competition in the Web advertising market as a result of the transaction.

In a letter, Sen. Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat, and Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, told FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras that the outcome of the agency’s review of the proposed merger would have far-reaching impact.

Senators argued that Google had a dominant position in a form of Internet advertising called contextual ads while DoubleClick was a market leader in display advertising. They said industry experts believed the deal could harm competition on the Web.

“While we have not reached any definitive conclusion regarding this issue, we urge that you only approve the merger if you determine that it will not cause any substantial lessening of competition with respect to Internet advertising,” they wrote.

Kohl and Hatch also raised questions about privacy implications since both Google and DoubleClick collect information about Web usage. “We believe that this deal raises fundamental consumer privacy concerns worthy of serious scrutiny,” the letter said.

FTC spokeswoman Nancy Judy said Chairman Deborah Majoras had received the letter but that it would inappropriate for her to comment on it.

Kohl is the chairman of the Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights subcommittee, while Hatch is the ranking minority member of the panel. The committee held a hearing on the deal in September where Google’s top lawyer and Microsoft’s general counsel testified about the merger.

“Antitrust regulators need to be wary to guard against the creation of a powerful Internet conglomerate able to extend its market power in one market into adjacent markets, to the detriment of competition and consumers,” said the letter.

It also referred to the privacy concerns opponents to the deal have raised, saying the sheer amount of private information both companies hold about individuals Web habits is a cause for concern.

The Google-DoubleClick merger is the subject of a number of antitrust reviews globally. In addition, to the FTC investigation, the European Union recently announced it was launching a detailed review of the deal.

Full text of the letter is available at Sen. Hatch’s Press Releases.

Nov 19, ‘07 — According to XianLi, a senior member at Hackintosh forum, the iPhone spies on you. The evidence in the code shows that the Stocks and Weather applications send your IMEI number—the unique number that identifies your iPhone and which is tied to your personal information—to Apple, along with the kind of app you were using to access the data.

If this is confirmed I can see some privacy lawsuits would be knocking Apple’s door.

Excerpts from Giz:
“While there’s no evidence that Apple actually uses this information for any purpose, good or evil, the code shows that every time you try to access a detailed information on whatever stock, the information will be sent embedded in the URL. This could be combined with IP location and the information in Apple or its partner’s databases to know what are you accessing, when and from where, all over the world. This could be a powerful data mining source for Apple and, if true, a breach on your privacy.

More importantly, there’s no op-out and Apple covers its back with the iPhone’s license, as readers have pointed already in the comments.”

Here is what some of the Hackintosh forum members say about this:

A Comment from “brand1130″:
“This is how they know exactly how many iphnoes have been unlocked. total # of IMEIs minus the number of IMEI’s that have contacted the stocks/weather pages and were never activated

The bad thing about this is they konw exactly which IMEIs have been unlocked or at least bypassed activation. Hopefully, they can’t do anything further with it.”
Another comment from a senior member, “NotFound”:
“Apple is evil and monopolist.
1. They seal the batteries. You have to pay them $50 to $75 to replace the problematic batteries after warranty.
2. They use non-standard headset plugs. Technically, standard plug interface is enough in doing what iPods and iPhones should do with it.
3. They steal development ideas from 3rd party developers. For example, they stole widget from Konfabulator. It’s just the tip of the iceberg.
4. They rob the open source community and barely contribute. For example, Apache, Virtual Desktop and so on.
5. They don’t donate. While Bill Gates became the most generous donor on Earth many years ago, we barely heard Apple or its executives being on the news for the same reason.
6. Commercials, way too many commercials. If you notice, Steve Jobs and his team keeps advertising iTunes Store etc. They even put a iTunes Store icon on the SpringBoard. They charge for everything. All they talk about is money. Only money.”

More at Hackintosh, Giz.

What’s on your old hard drive? If you think a) There’s nothing interesting on my drive or b) Reformatting/repartitioning a hard drive is good enough or c) Deleting all of the files is good enough, think again.

A lot of information is stored on your hard drive. What you look at on the internet, emails, personal photographs, passwords to online banking, social security numbers, the list is endless. Probably enough for an attacker to know your name, address, location, what you look like, and probably quite a bit more. If nothing else, the people in your email contact list deserve anonymity.

Starting at $100 for a standard version to $200 for a Drive eRazer Versatile bundle, WiebeTech is offering its newest hardware solution to completely erases all your data from a hard drive quickly and easily. Stand-alone operation. No computer required! Faster than software.

Why use hardware? Drive eRazer is faster than software programs, and Drive eRazer doesn’t tie up a computer. What’s more, it’s far easier. Simply connect it to a drive and flip a switch. No computer needed. More info at WiebeTech here and you can get one at here.

Brussels – Nov 13, ‘07 — European Union regulators started an in-depth investigation into Google’s plan to buy DoubleClick Inc., saying the purchase may hurt competition for online advertising dollars.

The European Commission, the EU’s antitrust authority in Brussels, said in a statement today that it will review the $3.1 billion acquisition for 90 working days and make a ruling by April 2. Google announced the proposed purchase in April to bolster sales of Internet ads that include pictures and videos.

An in-depth EU probe sets the stage for a wider fight over the deal, which is already under scrutiny in the U.S. after competitors including Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AT&T Inc. expressed concerns that the combination would hurt competition in the $40.6 billion global online advertising market. Other groups have complained that the combination may harm consumers’ privacy.

The inquiry is one of the few major business challenges that Google, the dominant Internet search engine and a stock market favorite, has encountered in its nine years. The company makes most of its money from text advertisements that appear next to search results and on partner sites, while DoubleClick, a privately held company, places banner ads on Web sites and sells analyses of who sees them.

In Brussels, many of the mounting objections filed to the commission in recent weeks centered on privacy issues, rather than questions about how a Google-DoubleClick merger would affect competition. A commission spokesman said that by law the EU inquiry could not make an antitrust decision on anything but its market impact.

BEUC, the umbrella group of European consumer organizations, as early as July had complained to the commission that the DoubleClick takeover would damage privacy rights and limit Internet content. Others joining BEUC included the European Publishers Council and the World Federation of Advertisers.

Their concern revolves around the information that Google and DoubleClick collect about the demographics of Internet users as they go from site to site. Most of the information is generic description that cannot be used to identify an individual, but some of it can. More at European Commission.

On the heels of MySpace, Facebook unveils Facebook Ads with  60 Leading Consumer and Internet Brands Announce Participation in New Ad System.

New York, NY — Facebook Social Advertising Event — Nov 06, 2007 – Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg today introduced Facebook Ads, an ad system for businesses to connect with users and target advertising to the exact audiences they want. Through Facebook Ads, these users can now learn about new businesses, brands and products through the trusted referrals of their friends.

“Facebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online,” Zuckerberg told an audience of more than 250 marketing and advertising executives in New York. “For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation. And they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do.”

The keynote opened the Facebook Social Advertising event, which also featured senior executives from landmark partners including Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, The Coca-Cola Company, Microsoft, Sony Pictures Television and Verizon Wireless. More than 60 major consumer and Internet brand partners were highlighted at the launch of Facebook Ads.

Today, Facebook Ads launched with three parts: a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads; and an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about.

More than 100,000 Facebook Pages Launch Today
Zuckerberg detailed how Facebook Pages allows users to interact and affiliate with businesses and organizations in the same way they interact with other Facebook user profiles. More than 100,000 new Facebook Pages launched today covering the world’s largest brands, local businesses, organizations and bands.

Distribution through the Social Graph
Advertising messages will gain distribution through what Facebook has termed the “social graph,” the network of real connections through which people communicate and share information. When people engage with a business’ Facebook Page, that action will spread information about that business through the social graph.

Unique Ads with Social Actions
“Social actions are powerful because they act as trusted referrals and reinforce the fact that people influence people,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s no longer just about messages that are broadcasted out by companies, but increasingly about information that is shared between friends. So we set out to use these social actions to build a new kind of ad system.” More at Facebook.