Business Tech

Facebook users take their privacy very seriously--and the social-networking site received that message loud and clear.

Facebook created a firestorm of controversy earlier this week as word spread that it had changed a longstanding but little-publicized claim to an "irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license" for promotional efforts--which would no longer expire if a member deleted his or her Facebook account.

Facebook reorganized its terms of service on February 11. In a blog post, company legal representative Suzie White provided an explanation. "We used to have several different documents that outlined what people could and could not do on Facebook, but now we're consolidating all this information to one central place," White wrote. "We've also simplified and clarified a lot of information that applies to you, including some things you shouldn't do when using the site."

The blog post sounded benign. But the brouhaha arose on Sunday. Blogs declared the change a cause for alarm. Protest groups sprang up on the social-networking site, with more than 100,000 users joining one such group.

Privacy advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center was threatening to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, demanding that the massively popular social-networking service return to its previous policies.

To get an idea how its users felt about the changes, Facebook began a poll in its users' News Feeds, asking them their opinion on the TOS change. And an overwhelming majority favored returning to its previous terms of service.

Facing a revolt of tens of thousands of its users, Facebook quickly announced that it was returning to its previous terms.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the reversal in a blog post late Tuesday:

Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input.

Going forward, we've decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don't plan to leave it there for long.

Zuckerberg also said that the company would be adopting a new set of terms that would more carefully take users' rights into consideration.

Washington taps tech
President Obama signed into law a $787 billion stimulus package that includes $7.2 billion for broadband grant and loan programs. The bulk of the funds directed at broadband--$4.7 billion--will be distributed through a program run by the Commerce Department, while $2.5 billion will fall under the jurisdiction of the Agriculture Department, giving particular emphasis to broadband deployment in rural areas.

The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration's "Broadband Technology Opportunities Program" is intended to "award competitive grants to accelerate broadband deployment in unserved and underserved areas and to strategic institutions that are likely to create jobs or provide significant public benefits," the bill says. However, no part of the bill, however, defines the terms "broadband," "unserved area," or "underserved area."

In conjunction with the stimulus package, the White House launched Recovery.gov, a site that intends to bring transparency to the government spending. The site includes charts that break down how the money in the legislation will be distributed.

As federal agencies distribute funds, those allocations will be added to the site. A map of the country shows the number of jobs the legislation is expected to create in each state. The site also has a separate page explaining the president's call for transparency, as well as an "about" page that summarizes the bill and provides a timeline of its progress.

However, that transparency was quickly called into question when it was learned that the site was using a robots.txt file to block all requests by search engines that would ordinarily download and index each page to make the information more accessible to the Web-searching public.

Although the White House Web team did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the single-line comment at the top of the file disappeared about three hours after it was brought to the attention of CNET readers.

Meanwhile, more than 28,000 consumers called a federal help line Tuesday, after hundreds of television stations dropped their analog signals.

Even though the national deadline for television stations to switch from analog to digital broadcasting has been pushed back to June, 421 stations made the transition Tuesday, the date of the original deadline. The changeover prompted 28,315 people to call the Federal Communications Commission's DTV transition help line.

The number of calls Tuesday was 37 percent higher than on Monday, when 20,673 people called for help. However, most of the 421 stations that transitioned to digital broadcasting Tuesday did not do so until midnight, so the calls did not represent the full impact of the switchover. From midnight through 11 a.m. Wednesday, the FCC received 6,750 calls for help.

Tech goes to court
The landmark copyright-infringement trial against The Pirate Bay got under way in Sweden this week. The four men behind the popular file-sharing site are accused of helping millions of Internet users illegally download protected movies, music, and computer games. They face up to two years in prison and a fine of 1.2 million kronor ($143,529) if convicted of being accessories and of conspiracy to break Swedish copyright law.

A civil claim brought by a group of media giants is also being heard with the prosecution. The plaintiffs--Warner Bros. Entertainment, MGM Pictures, Columbia Pictures Industries, 20th Century Fox Films, Sony BMG, Universal, and EMI--seek 120 million kronor ($14.3 million) in compensation for lost revenue.

However, on the first day of the long-awaited criminal trial, Swedish prosecutors unexpectedly dropped half the charges against the site's operators. The amended charges focus on the act of making the material available.

"It's a largely technical issue that changes nothing in terms of our compensation claims and has no bearing whatsoever on the main case against The Pirate Bay. In fact, it simplifies the prosecutor's case by allowing him to focus on the main issue, which is the making available of copyrighted works."

A couple in Pittsburgh who sued Google claiming that its Street View feature is a reckless invasion of their privacy have lost their case. Aaron and Christine Boring sued the Internet search giant in April, alleging that Google "significantly disregarded (their) privacy interests" when Street View cameras captured images of their house beyond signs marked "private road."

However, the U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania wasn't impressed by the suit and dismissed it (PDF), saying the Borings "failed to state a claim under any count."

Also of note
Verizon will begin testing 4G service this year and launch it commercially in at least 25 to 30 markets in the U.S. in 2010, CTO Dick Lynch said during an interview with CNET News at the 2009 GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona...Fresh from removing content from TV.com, Hulu has now requested that Boxee, the maker of media-center software, stop making Hulu's videos available...A new service lets cell phone users unmask the Caller ID on anonymous calls.

Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, plans to expand a forthcoming program called Test Pilot to supply developers with detailed usage patterns not just about the open-source Web browser, but also Thunderbird and other projects.

(Credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla unveiled Test Pilot last March, describing it as a plan to get usage feedback from a full 1 percent of Firefox users, not just the technically sophisticated early-adopter crowd. On Tuesday, Mozilla's Aza Raskin fleshed out the Test Pilot details, though it remains in concept form only for now, with Mozilla trying to hire a project leader.

"It's not just Firefox that needs a usability lab. Thunderbird needs one. SeaMonkey needs one. Every Mozilla Labs project needs one. Test Pilot is a platform--starting as a Firefox extension--on top of which anything can be put through usability-testing boot camp," Raskin said.

Test Pilot will be an on-demand system: rather than recording data constantly, it sends the minimum amount of data back to Mozilla servers in response to a specific question when it's asked. Such test results will shared openly.

One big issue for such program is privacy. Here's what Raskin shared about the matter:

Security and privacy is of the utmost importance when dealing with user data. Just like Firefox, Test Pilot will always honor your privacy. Data is only reported in anonymous aggregate, with anything personally identifiable stripped out. Transparency is built in--all collected data is available to the public.

Even anonymized data can be revealing, though, as AOL found after it released search data to researchers. Although names had been removed, search data revealed enough to identify some people, and AOL's chief technology officer and two others lost their jobs after the matter.

One big difference with Test Pilot, though, is that Mozilla plans to release only collective data, not an individual's data. "We'll only collect aggregate anonymized data, publish all results under open-content licenses, and review every test to make sure your privacy is held sacred," Raskin said.

BT is to perform another trial of Phorm's ad-serving technology, after delays of more than half a year.

Phorm's technology, which BT will use under the brand of "Webwise," has attracted protests from peers, politicians, technologists and think tanks, who have expressed concerns over legal and privacy issues. The technology is also the subject of a probe by the European Commission.

Phorm's ad-serving technology works by assigning a user a unique identifier, through which the user's browsing habits are observed so as to target advertisements at them.

BT will commence the third trial of the technology on Tuesday, a BT representative said Monday. "Around 10,000 customers will be invited to opt into the trial when they commence their browsing session," the representative said. "We will issue invitations at random."

The interstitial landing page will let customers accept or decline the invitation, or ask for more information about the trials, the representative added.

BT announced a trial of Phorm's technology in April, but then delayed the trial, apparently due to technical issues. The BT representative declined to say what those issues had been.

"We can't go into the technical issues; they are confidential between us and Phorm," said the representative. "We're not going to be peering behind the curtain. You can assume, as we're going ahead with the trials, that we've resolved any outstanding issues to our entire satisfaction."

The representative said BT had been exploring network-based ways to track anonymized users without having to use cookies, but that this had not been the reason for the delay, contradicting earlier BT statements.

"In parallel, we have continued to explore network-based options," said the representative. "The trial will not involve network-based options."

The trial will follow previous trials which took place in fall 2006 and summer 2007. These earlier trials caused an outcry among U.K. privacy campaigners (click here for similar U.S.-based concerns), as they were conducted without gaining the consent of customers and without their knowledge. Phorm's opponents claimed the trials were illegal under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) and the Data Protection Act.

One opponent of the trials, the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR) think tank, still has legal concerns about the upcoming trial. Richard Clayton, FIPR treasurer, told ZDNet.co.uk on Monday that the organization was concerned not only about the privacy implications but also about interception and copyright issues.

At a protest against the trials of the ad-serving technology, peers, protesters, and BT shareholders aired their grievances.

"We don't see how an opt-in system can work when one adult in a house can opt in on behalf of another adult or children in the house, or children can opt in on behalf of their parents," said Clayton. "We're also surprised they are going ahead with the trials because of the interception element."

Clayton said that, to be legal under RIPA, both sides of the interception have to give their consent. As the other end of the interception would be search sites like Google or Yahoo, or Web sites such as FIPR's, Clayton said he failed to see how consent could be gained by all parties.

However, Kent Ertugrul, chief executive of Phorm, told ZDNet.co.uk on Monday that he expected FIPR's legal concerns to be allayed.

"Over the course of several months, the people at FIPR have expressed concerns and virtually all of them have turned out to be unfounded," said Ertugrul. "Over the past few months, a number of people have raised concerns and we have addressed every point that has been raised."

Ertugrul said that Phorm had been working with the European Commission in its probe into the legality of Phorm's technology, and said he was confident that the Commission would be satisfied.

"There is a pattern that people become more confident through engagement with the technology, including the (Commission)," said Ertugrul. "We're confident that people will not only tolerate it but welcome (Phorm) as a big step forward. The fact is (that Phorm) is something that is being welcomed by all of the Web sites we've spoken with and with advertisers. Market research by ISPs suggests (Phorm) is welcomed by consumers."

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Of the two big browsing features of 2008, one seems to run counter to where developers are driving their browsers. The melding of the location bar to the search bar was expected in Firefox and Opera, thanks to beta versions. Chrome has it, too, calling it the Omnibar. What seems to have caught developers off-guard has been the clamor for a universal switch to stop the cache and browsing history from recording anything at all.

Internet Explorer 8's InPrivate.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Microsoft's InPrivate debuted in Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, and Google Chrome's version is the well-received Incognito feature. So far, in Firefox, the feature has only been available via the Stealther plug-in, which basically copies all the features of InPrivate except that you don't have to open a new browsing window. Now, Mozilla has announced through the Firefox 3.1 status tracker that a privacy toggle will be a baked-in feature.

It turns out that Mozilla has had such a toggle on its radar since 2004, when Apple's Safari introduced a cache-avoiding browsing session. So what took so long for Firefox to decide that this should be a rolled-in feature? As others have noted, Firefox director Mike Beltzner declared that the feature would need to take a backseat to keeping the browser on schedule.

Google Chrome's stealth mode, Incognito.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Pressure from this being a near-universal feature has no doubt accelerated its importance, although Mozilla plans to put its own spin on what it can do. In addition to turning off the page cache and the browsing history recorder, there will be no autofill for passwords and new passwords used will not be saved. Also, all cookies acquired during the session will be discarded, as will downloads in the Download Manager. Essentially, pages visited will be stored in the memory, not on the hard disk--although there's no word on if or how this will affect performance.

Another aspect of the current unnamed feature will save all tabs and close the session, re-opening a new blank browser window. When the private session is finally turned off, the older session will re-open. One difference from Microsoft's InPrivate will be that there won't be any neon advertising that private mode has been activated, according to Mike Connor, the lead developer on Firefox. The fact that you are using a privacy mode will remain private.