Privacy advocates opposed to new privacy regulations at Facebook are attempting to get the attention of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, according to a complaint filed Thursday on behalf of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and several allied groups.
"These changes violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook's own representations," the complaint says of Facebook's new regulations, which push more content public, and make even more data available to third-party applications and advertisers. EPIC's goal is to force Facebook to restore the old settings and add additional controls for members.
"We've had productive discussions with dozens of organizations around the world about the recent changes, and we're disappointed that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them," a retaliatory statement from Facebook read. "We're pleased that so many users have already gone through the process of reviewing and updating their privacy settings, and are impressed that so many have chosen to customize their settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of Facebook's user empowerment and transparency efforts. Of course, the new tools offer users the opportunity to decide on privacy with every photo, link, or status update they wish to post, so the process of personalizing privacy on Facebook will continue."
It's one thing when Facebook users start complaining about new features that they deem excessively creepy--just look at the outrage that surrounded the News Feed, now a mainstay of the site, when it launched in 2006.
It's a bigger fish entirely when government regulatory bodies get involved, particularly the FTC, which has major sway over the advertising and marketing industries. It was only when privacy groups flagged concerns about Facebook's Beacon advertising program two years ago that participating advertisers started to pull out amid bad publicity. A class action settlement over the Beacon program was resolved recently.
Since then, Facebook hasn't had a privacy-related debacle on the same scale. Much of the philosophy behind Beacon was baked into its Facebook Connect universal log-in tool, which shares information from third-party sites on Facebook profiles and lets users log into other sites with their Facebook credentials. But with the public-relations pitch geared toward making the entire online experience easier for users (fewer passwords to remember, no more registration headaches) rather than helping advertisers exploit social-networking channels, the debut of Facebook Connect wasn't subject to the same scrutiny.
The controversial new privacy standards at Facebook have been a long time coming, considering the fact that the social network started to publicly set the groundwork nearly six months ago with a series of announcements about modified privacy controls. It's clear that the company was trying to avoid the sort of press bloodbath that came after the debut of Beacon.
That didn't happen. Facebook has already backtracked on one component of its new privacy regulations, one which made users' friends lists publicly available. It's unclear as to how much EPIC's coalition, not to mention the FTC, will prioritize this most recent controversy.
Behind Facebook's traditional willingness to make tweaks and modifications to new features and products, if they spark some kind of concern among government regulatory bodies or marketers, is a fight that the company will not give up easily. What it all comes down to is that Facebook's once-watertight log-in wall--remember the time that representatives mulled banning a blogger who'd posted Facebook-hosted photos publicly?--is getting in the way of the social network's potentially central role in one of the digital world's crazes du jour, searchable real-time information.
Search companies have been announcing big deals to pull Facebook status messages and Twitter tweets into results, and the media business has gone nuts over the potential to harness the "real-time Web."
Facebook, dependent on advertising revenues and still looking to expand its base of more than 350 million users, obviously wants in on this. But if it doesn't have enough status messages, shared links, and other information pulled into search results, it stands a chance at losing ground to the much-smaller Twitter--already the top name, in terms of a massive, searchable clearinghouse for up-to-the-minute information.
Plus, there are marketers and advertisers for Facebook to consider: more search results equals more page views and more ad revenue, and more public information on users' profiles means more ways for the advertising industry to reach them. But if those same marketers and advertisers are the ones pressuring Facebook to change course, in terms of user privacy, it could cause some friction between the social network and the businesses that have finally begun to accept it as a choice destination for their ad dollars.
Now EPIC is alleging to the FTC that Facebook's new regulations can be outright dangerous: "Dozens of American Facebook users, who posted political messages critical of Iran, have reported that Iranian authorities subsequently questioned and detained their relatives," an item in the complaint reads. "Under the revised privacy settings, Facebook makes such users' friends lists publicly available."
That's not good PR for Facebook, which has repeatedly pitched itself as a destination for open dialogue and grassroots organization across zones of political and ethnic conflict.
A recent simplification of Facebook's user privacy controls wasn't enough for some policymakers.
On Thursday, in conjunction with the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, Facebook announced a new set of modifications to its user privacy controls as well as its developer API, and the targets of these changes are the thousands of third-party applications built on Facebook's developer platform. That means there may be major implications for developers--some of whom rely almost exclusively on Facebook activity as a revenue source.
The Canadian Privacy Commissioner's office released a set of recommendations for Facebook last month, specifically highlighting concerns that third-party applications could access a significant amount of users' personal data. "It's clear that privacy issues are top of mind for Facebook, and yet we found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates," commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said in a release at the time.
Facebook's newest set of changes will require third-party applications to specify which fields of user data they access (birthdays, favorite music, geographic location, etc.) and will require users to offer explicit permission before an app can access any of their friends' profile data. This is also in tune with recommendations offered earlier this week by a chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which highlighted the amount of personal data that third-party apps can access--sometimes without a user knowing it.
"Our productive and constructive dialogue with the Commissioner's office has given us an opportunity to improve our policies and practices in a way that will provide even greater transparency and control for Facebook users," Elliot Schrage, Facebook's vice president of global communications and public policy, said in a release Thursday. "We believe that these changes are not only great for our users and address all of the Commissioners' outstanding concerns, but they also set a new standard for the industry."
But what does it mean for developers? This could make it difficult for some apps--particularly the sillier ones that rely on heavy viral spread and often one-time use--to gain traction and stay effective. These are similar concerns to those that arose when Facebook cracked down on apps that it deemed "spammy" (and often rightfully so). But on the other hand, the new privacy controls could stem off bad press that could easily paint the developer platform as a whole as unsafe or untrustworthy.
"It is important for developers to have access to information, but we want to balance that with transparency and control for users," Ethan Beard, Facebook's director of platform product marketing, said in a blog post geared toward developers.
"We have committed to making these enhancements over the next twelve months, and anticipate a lengthy beta period including opportunities for you to provide input, multiple blog posts, and updated documentation delivered well ahead of time," Beard's post continued. "Understanding that this will likely require modifications to your code base, we want to give you the earliest heads up that these enhancements are on our road map."
MySpace announced on Tuesday that it has deleted 90,000 accounts owned by registered sex offenders. It's good news for families, for MySpace, and for the state attorney general of Connecticut, who demanded last month that the News Corp.-owned social network turn over a roster of names.
It's especially good news for Sentinel, the security company that MySpace used to track down the accounts. And now Sentinel appears to be trying to take advantage of its success with MySpace into a PR campaign partly aimed at getting Facebook into signing a contract as well.
John Cardillo, the CEO of Sentinel, gave an interview to TechCrunch in which he said thousands of those who were banned from MySpace can now be found on Facebook--not yet one of Sentinel's clients.
"As the first and only social-networking site to use state-of-the-art technology to identify and remove registered sex offenders from its site, MySpace is proud of its leadership position and hopes that Facebook follows our lead in providing their members with the same protections," a statement from MySpace read. "As part of our long-standing partnership with law enforcement and state attorneys general, we will continue to readily provide information on these removed offenders for their investigations."
Unfairly accused? With the headline of the TechCrunch post referring to sex offenders on Facebook as "refugees," and Cardillo calling the Palo Alto-based social network a "safe haven" for them, you'd think that there was some kind of mass creation of Facebook profiles on the part of sex offenders who had seen their MySpace profiles axed. There is, however, no evidence of that. Millions of people have profiles on both social networks, so it's safe to assume that sex offenders probably do as well.
Facebook's representatives weren't thrilled by the "safe haven" allegation, to say the least.
"For a company that has a mission to keep kids safe, we find it irresponsible that they wouldn't share this with us," representative Barry Schnitt told TechCrunch in an addendum to the tech blog's original post. "Or, if not with us, how about with law enforcement? This could have been an announcement that Sentinel and Facebook removed 8,000 potential sex offenders. We still don't have the information on who they are. If you are willing to share that with us, we will investigate immediately."
Later, Schnitt told CNET News that while about 4,600 of the 8,000 names on Sentinel's list were directly tied to Facebook user IDs and have now had the corresponding accounts disabled, the rest only matched up to names. One of the names on the list, for example, was "Aaron Smith"--which has more than 500 member matches on Facebook.
Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer, also described in a reaction to the story how Facebook monitors its service to protect minors. "We have not yet had to handle a case of a registered sex offender meeting a minor through Facebook," he said in a statement.
PR scuffles between Facebook and MySpace are nothing new. In this case, however, it appears that a third party, Sentinel, is using its success with one client (MySpace) to force another (Facebook) into signing up for the service as well--and is doing so by manipulating media coverage to back Facebook into a corner.
What we would prefer to see is a more pragmatic and methodical policing of social networks for ongoing threats. Shock-and-awe press tactics aren't the way to go, especially because threats on the Web are much more complicated than they may appear.
Let's all take a deep breath and remember that this is about the safety of kids everywhere, not about marketing or selling a product, or looking better in the eyes of the world than your industry competitor.
Former Vice President Al Gore onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit.
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News)SAN FRANCISCO--The central theme of former Vice President Al Gore's speech, concluding the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday afternoon, was electricity.
He spoke of "the electrifying redemption of America's revolutionary declaration that all human beings are created equal," as emphasized through Barack Obama's election victory on Tuesday, and how it "would not have been possible without the additional empowerment of individuals to use knowledge as a source of power that has come with the Internet."
Gore reiterated what so many people have said before--that the Obama campaign was a vindication for how the new tools of the Internet can be used toward legitimate change.
"What happened in the election opens up a full new range of possibilities, and now is the time to really move swiftly to use these new possibilities," he said. "I made a talk earlier today about how the early uses of electricity 100 years ago were aimed at sort of specialized applications and gimmicks and do-dads and whiz-bangs that demonstrated the special qualities of this new conveyor of power."
He meant, essentially, throwing an electric sheep. (Apologies to Philip K. Dick.)
"Now we just take electricity for granted as everywhere, and it has empowered a whole civilization," he said. Gore said the analogy stands for Web 2.0 as well. "When people are displaying interactivity or user-generated content or social networking, that's kind of the gee-whiz stuff...We need to move past that."
Electricity, too, is key to Gore's urgent call to action, which he detailed with an immediacy that was needed at a conference where some panels drifted a little too far into the speculative future. America needs a "unified national smart grid" distributing renewable solar energy across the country, something he estimates would cost $400 billion in a decade. But it would create thousands of jobs, Gore said, and it would pay for itself within three years.
When Obama takes office in January, Gore said the new president ought to set "a national goal of getting 100 percent of America's electricity from renewable and noncarbon sources within 10 years. We can do that."
He continued: "The declaration from President Kennedy that we would land a man on the moon and bring him back safely was thought by many to be impossible."
Gore had come onstage at the conference to a standing ovation and so much applause that he had to tell the audience to quiet down. His story is familiar: he famously won the popular vote for the presidency in 2000 but lost the electoral vote to George W. Bush, and he went on to win both an Academy Award for his environmental-awareness documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
In 2005, Gore founded Current TV, a cable news network that he created with Joel Hyatt in response to his dissatisfaction with the television industry. "One of the main reasons why our political system has not been operating very well until this election is the deadening influence of the television medium as it has been operated," he said.
Gore encouraged the digerati in the audience to keep pushing forward as they face what he says is the most pressing struggle of our time, climate change--the subject matter of An Inconvenient Truth. The fact that the Web's candidate of choice won this time is no reason to rest easy, he said. Media democratization needs to continue evolving.
"Just as Barack Obama's election would've been impossible without the new dialogue and new ways of interacting--the Web--the only way (climate change) is going to be solved is by addressing the democracy crisis, and the country hit a great blow for victory this week, but we have to take this issue and raise it in the awareness of everyone," Gore said. "I think that it is very much in its infancy, barely beginning, and I think that we are not many years away from television sort of sinking into the digital world and becoming a part of it."
Cynics might say Gore, who calls himself a "recovering politician," is still bitter at a sterilized news media that didn't sufficiently back his calling in the 2000 presidential election. Needless to say, his views remain controversial. But onstage, Gore seemed plenty comfortable in his new role as a thought leader rather than an elected official.
"Who knew that you were the guru of Web 2.0, as well as global warming?" conference organizer Tim O'Reilly asked Gore jokingly after the former vice president had illustrated an analogy involving "crowdsourced" information and cloud computing, two of the decade's most buzzworthy digital talking points.
If the audience was any indication, Gore has gained resounding acceptance as an information-age guru, a bit of an irony, considering that 10 years ago, erroneous reports circulated that he had once claimed to have invented the Internet.
"When we have really had these great leaps forward has been when new information ecoystems have made it possible for individuals who are thinking and processing information, and who have aspirations and hopes...to connect easily with lots of voters around core ideas," Gore explained. His preferred analogy was the invention of the printing press five centuries ago, in which he connected general historical events to the rise of literacy and eventually the creation of democratic governments.
"The installation of a new sovereign, the rule of reason, and the emergence of a marketplace of ideas that was accessible to individuals--that really empowered this kind of collective intelligence," Gore said. "And the American constitution could be, by analogy, a brilliant piece of software that regularly harvested the results of that."
An audience member asked Gore how much he thought governments should regulate Internet use, and Gore fired back, "As little as possible." There was more applause, and as he left the stage, there was yet another standing ovation.
Gore might not have invented the Internet (or even claimed to do so). But if the Web 2.0 Summit was any indication, plenty of Silicon Valley's most loyal are more than happy to have him help reinvent it.
No, we're not talking about vile blog commenters. A Jewish human rights group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, released a report last week that says online terror and hate is on the rise, particularly on social-media sites.
According to a briefing detailed by The New York Times' Brad Stone, the Wiesenthal Center flagged about 8,000 "problematic" sites on the Web pertaining to terrorism and hate, a 30 percent increase from last year.
In addition to religious terror groups, the sites identified also pertain to anti-Semitic, racist, xenophobic, and various anti-religion and anti-government sentiments. And social media is a particular concern, with games, Facebook groups, and Second Life having been identified as potential communication and event-planning tools for terrorist and hate groups.
"Every aspect of the Internet is being used by extremists of every ilk to repackage old hatred, demean the 'Enemy,' to raise funds, and since 9/11, recruit and train Jihadist terrorists," the report detailed. "Of special concern is the use of the Internet by the Iranian regime to justify terrorism and spread its influence throughout South America."
Most social-media sites have terms of use and regulations against hate speech and defamation, but it's often difficult for administrators to stay on top of the influx of content--especially when they have to keep an eye out for copyrighted content and porn, too.
The Wiesenthal Center, which says the first extremist Web site was identified in 1995, isn't the only party concerned about social media's ability to fuel terrorism. Earlier this week, Sen. Joseph Lieberman made public a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt asking the company to remove Islamic extremist content from its YouTube video-sharing property.
And last year, the Google Earth mapping software came under some scrutiny when reports spread that it had been used in planning a foiled terrorist plot.
After the Where 2.0 conference, I had a chance to catch up a bit with Jaron Waldman, the CEO of Placebase, which makes the demo site Pushpin that I covered from the conference. He had another demo to show me, but this one is a bit more useful: PolicyMap.
Made for Placebase customer The Reinvestment Fund, it's a collection of real estate, civil, and financial built into a mapping and charting engine. It can locate superfund sites; show you crime stats; tell you about mortgage originations (including things like subprime mortgages to various demographic groups), and age and educational background. The data is at a variety of resolutions (some is per ZIP code, some by census tract) and timeliness (census data, obviously, is only current up to 2000).
PolicyMap can drill deep into demographic information. This image shows unemployment stats from a four-square-block area.
In many data sets you zoom into deep detail on your information. You can also build charts, for data sets with information over time, and generate pre-configured "community reports" for particular regions or any areas you define.
It's a lot of data.
Unfortunately, despite all of the data and all the options to display it, a few useful views are missing. For example, while you can easily see the percentage of people per census tract within a certain age range (such as 18 to 34), there's no report that I found that can help you visualize average age. And here's a tip: Don't press the back button to try to undo a mapping step; it doesn't work as you expect and will just get you lost.
PolicyMap is free to use for public data. Some data sets, such as home sale statistics, require a paid membership, for $200 a month.
See also: Cyberhomes, Zillow, Trulia, and Swivel (BYO Data)
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Price Protectr is a service that monitors online stores and alerts you to any changes in price within 30 days of buying a product. If it sounds simple it is, and frankly that's the way it should be.
Nobody likes finding out they could have saved money if they had paid attention to price drops, but it's easier said than done. Price Protectr does the work for you. All you have to do is give them the URL of the product you bought and your e-mail, and it will keep an eye on it for 30 days. If there's ever a change, you get an e-mail alerting you to the fact.
Price Protectr doesn't work with every online store. In fact right now it only works with ten of the major online retailers, and only for the United States and some of Canada. Nonetheless, it's a simple solution to the simple problem of human laziness. See also RefundPlease.
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