E-Commerce
February 06, 2012
* FTC Warns Marketers That Mobile Apps May Violate Fair Credit Reporting Act

News release: "The Federal Trade Commission warned marketers of six mobile applications that provide background screening apps that they may be violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The FTC warned the apps marketers that, if they have reason to believe the background reports they provide are being used for employment screening, housing, credit, or other similar purposes, they must comply with the Act. According to the FTC, some of the apps include criminal record histories, which bear on an individual's character and general reputation and are precisely the type of information that is typically used in employment and tenant screening."

February 05, 2012
* Consortium Launches enviacentroamerica.org To Make Costs and Conditions of Remittances More Transparent

News release: "The Center for Latin American Monetary Studies (CEMLA), the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF), a member of Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the World Bank today launched enviacentroamerica.org, a free online tool to compare and make transparent the costs of remittances from the United States to six Central American countries and the Dominican Republic. The website provides detailed and updated monthly information on how much it costs to send money from the U.S. to Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. Costs are calculated based on amounts of US$200 and US$500...Enviacentroamerica.org provides information on the costs that different operators charge in five major remittance-sending hubs in the United States (California, Florida, New York, the District of Columbia and Massachusetts) to Central America and the Dominican Republic as well as on the costs to wire money from Costa Rica to Nicaragua."

February 02, 2012
* Facebook, Inc. Files for IPO with SEC

via SEC: Facebook, Inc. Form S-1, February 1, 2012

  • "We had 845 million MAUs as of December 31, 2011, an increase of 39% as compared to 608 million MAUs as of December 31, 2010.
  • We had 483 million daily active users (DAUs) on average in December 2011, an increase of 48% as compared to 327 million DAUs in December 2010.
  • We had more than 425 million MAUs who used Facebook mobile products in December 2011.
  • There were more than 100 billion friend connections on Facebook as of December 31, 2011.
  • Our users generated an average of 2.7 billion Likes and Comments per day during the three months ended December 31, 2011."
  • Reuters: "It's the year's hottest initial public offering, but some wealth managers find themselves having a hard time recommending Facebook to their clients."

January 31, 2012
* European Union: Implementation of the Consumer Credit Directive

Implementation of the Consumer Credit Directive: "The study examines the state and the main difficulties of the implementation of Directive 2008/48/EC on credit agreements for consumers using the examples of fourteen Member States of the
European Union. The analysis focuses on fully harmonised aspects of the Directive as well as on the provisions for which the Member States were given a wide margin of appreciation in achieving the objective of the Directive and options provided by the Directive. Furthermore, new regulations and regulations requiring interpretation are dealt with. Finally, the study analyses the regulation of credit agreements which fall outside the scope of the Directive."

* Pew - The rise of in-store mobile commerce

The rise of in-store mobile commerce - "During the holiday season, 25% of cell owners used their phone inside stores to gather price comparisons; 24% used them to look up online reviews. And 19% of those who searched for a better price on an in-store product eventually bought the product online." Aaron Smith Senior Research Specialist, Pew Internet Project, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, January 30, 2012.

January 25, 2012
* Commission proposes a comprehensive reform of the data protection rules

News release: The European Commission has today [January 24, 2012] a comprehensive reform of the EU's 1995 data protection rules to strengthen online privacy rights and boost Europe's digital economy. Technological progress and globalisation have profoundly changed the way our data is collected, accessed and used. In addition, the 27 EU Member States have implemented the 1995 rules differently, resulting in divergences in enforcement. A single law will do away with the current fragmentation and costly administrative burdens, leading to savings for businesses of around €2.3 billion a year. The initiative will help reinforce consumer confidence in online services, providing a much needed boost to growth, jobs and innovation in Europe."

* ACLU Lens: Google's New Privacy Policy

ACLU: "Yesterday evening, Google announced a new privacy policy effective March 1. The new policy is consistent across the vast majority of Google products...the new privacy policy makes clear that Google will, for the first time, combine the personal data you share with any one of its products or sites across almost all of its products and sites (everything but Google Chrome, Google Books, and Google Wallet) in order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of you. And there’s no opting out. This comes on the heels of Google’s new Search, plus Your World, a feature combining search results from the public web with private information and photos you have shared (or that have been shared with you) through Google+ or Picasa...The head of Google’s privacy for product and engineering explained on Google’s blog that integrating an individual’s profiles across Google’s sites will help Google “figure[e] out what you really mean when you type in Apple, Jaguar or Pink,” provide more relevant ads, “provide reminders that you’re going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day” (thanks, Mom), and “ensure that our spelling suggestions, even for your friends’ names, are accurate...this data aggregation is not just about what ads you see, but as ACLU of Massachusetts describes, it creates an even larger treasure chest of personal information ripe for government picking."

January 24, 2012
* Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For

"Fat paychecks, sweet perks, fun colleagues, and over 70,000 jobs ready to be filled -- these employers offer dream workplaces. Like Google, which reclaims the top spot this year to become a three-time champion. Meet this year's top 100."

  • Related - "YouTube (owned by Google) Traffic Statistics
    • 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute, resulting in nearly 8 years of content uploaded every day
    • Over 4 billion videos are viewed a day
    • Users upload the equivalent of 240,000 full-length films every week
    • More video is uploaded to YouTube in one month than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years
    • 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
    • YouTube is localized in 25 countries across 43 languages
    • YouTube's demographic is broad: 18-54 years old
    • YouTube reached over 700 billion playbacks in 2010
    • 800M unique users visit YouTube each month"
  • January 22, 2012
    * Tablet and E-Book Reader Ownership Nearly Double Over the Holiday Gift-Giving Period

    Tablet and E-book reader Ownership Nearly Double Over the Holiday Gift-Giving Period, Lee Rainie Director, Pew Internet Project

  • "The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period. The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January. These findings are striking because they come after a period from mid-2011 into the autumn in which there was not much change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers. However, as the holiday gift-giving season approached the marketplace for both devices dramatically shifted. In the tablet world, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s Nook Tablet were introduced at considerably cheaper prices than other tablets. In the e-book reader world, some versions of the Kindle and Nook and other readers fell well below $100."
  • January 13, 2012
    * EPIC: FTC Adds Google+ to Antitrust Investigation

    EPIC: "Bloomberg News has reported that the Federal Trade Commission has expanded its antitrust investigation of Google to include Google's social networking service, Google+. The report comes after Google announced that it would include personal data gathered from Google+ in the results of users' searches, a move that led EPIC to urge the FTC to investigate the company. EPIC said that "Google's business practices raise concerns related to both competition and the implementation of the Commission’s consent order," referring to a settlement that the FTC reached with Google that establishes new privacy safeguards for users of all Google products and services and subjects the company to regular privacy audits. Google first confirmed the FTC’s antitrust investigation in June 2011. Recently, the Senate held a hearing on Google's use of its dominance in the search market to suppress competition, and EPIC urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Google's use of Youtube search rankings to give preferential treatment to its own video content over non-Google content. For more information, see EPIC: Google/DoubleClick and EPIC: Federal Trade Commission."

    January 12, 2012
    * The Book Depository - Free shipping worldwide on books sold

    The Book Depository is not Amazon - although it was purchased by the latter, it remains an icon driven, illustrative and content rich site to explore and from which to discover new titles, inexpensive older ones, read reviews and share ratings, and learn about upcoming releases. This site sells books and e-books, and you can also watch "The Book Depository Live - Thousands of customers all over the world enjoying our free worldwide shipping." Users may: Set your default eBook reader and format (39 devices are listed), read the blog, use the advanced search options, or browse for titles by topic, read the site's wonderfully designed, direct and personal Twitter feed, and remain hopeful that the folks who run this book site maintain what still looks and feels like a magical little kingdom for bibliophiles all around the world.

    * EU Sweeps Check on Violations of Consumer Rights

    "An "EU sweep" is an action co-ordinated by the European Commission, and carried out simultaneously by the national consumer enforcement authorities in the Member States, Norway and Iceland. In a given week each year, consumer authorities check hundreds of sites in a particular sector in order to see where consumer rights are being compromised or denied. When they find that a website does not comply with EU consumer law, they then contact the operator and ask for corrective action. Those who fail to correct illegal practices can face fines or be ordered to close their websites."

    * EU investigates consumer credit websites - a market underperforming for consumers

    News release: "Were you ever about to sign a contract for a personal loan, credit card, or other consumer credit and discovered that it was all working out more expensive than you had first expected? An EU-wide investigation of websites offering consumer credit took place to check whether consumers are receiving the information to which they are entitled under EU consumer law1 before signing a consumer credit contract. National enforcement authorities checked more than 500 websites across the 27 Member States plus Norway and Iceland. They flagged 70% (393) of sites for further investigation in relation to the following main problems: the advertising did not include the required standard information; the offers omitted key information that is essential for making a decision; the costs were presented in a misleading way. National enforcement authorities will now contact financial institutions and credit intermediaries about suspected irregularities and ask them to clarify or take corrective action. The sweep operation checked in particular how business is applying the Consumer Credit Directive (recently transposed in Member States), which aims to make it easier for consumers to understand and compare credit offers."

    January 05, 2012
    * FTC Action Bans Payment Processor from Using a Novel Payment Method to Debit Accounts

    News release: "A payment processor and two of its principals are now banned from using a new payment method to process electronic payments under a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, which resolves charges that they debited consumers' bank accounts without their consent. The settlement furthers the FTC's ongoing efforts to protect financially-strapped consumers during the economic downturn by scrutinizing not only merchants, but all parties who participate in defrauding consumers."

    January 02, 2012
    * Nielsen’s Tops of 2011: Digital

    Nielsen’s Tops of 2011: Digital - December 28, 2011 - "As 2011 comes to a close, Nielsen reviewed the top online destinations, social media sites, and smartphone devices. Google was the most-visited U.S. Web brand, while Facebook held its lead among social networks and blogs. Smartphones were popular in 2011, making up the majority of new phone purchases with Apple as the top smartphone manufacturer and Android as the leading OS."

    December 28, 2011
    * Commentary - Online Archives Disappear Along With Unique Collections

    Print libraries, book collections, book shops - targets of fiscal austerity, the growing impact and power of e-books, social media, pay walls, e-commerce structures, and changing values about print media itself - are increasing disappearing. Regardless of the application of specific determining factors, the results are increased thresholds to open access to "knowledge." There is also a corresponding assault on the lifespan of websites, blogs, databases, metadata and web enabled content such as documents and emails, as users with no notice discover information simply going offline. There is however a cadre of official and unofficial guardians of the written word, photos, databases and other archival materials. This article by Matt Schwartz, with reporting by Eva Talmadge, in Technology Review, provides insight into the work of some individuals with a mission is to salvage the "intellectual" property of millions of web users whose terabytes of words, work and documents are disappearing despite quick, creative and technologically adroit efforts to save what can be called modern internet "history" on a global scale. This article documents some of the challenges in the struggle to manage massive data loss, the folks who are data defenders, and how truly valuable libraries collections are in serious danger. Variable associated with digitizing collections (copyright, cost, shear volume of the task, and global conflict to name just a few), continue to impact this dynamic problem.

  • "People tend to believe that Web operators will keep their data safe in perpetuity. They entrust much more than poetry to unseen servers maintained by system administrators they've never met. Terabytes of confidential business documents, e-mail correspondence, and irreplaceable photos are uploaded as well, even though vast troves of user data have been lost to changes of ownership, abrupt shutdowns, attacks by hackers, and other discontinuities of service. Users of GeoCities, once the third-most-trafficked site on the Web, lost 38 million homemade pages when its owner, Yahoo, shuttered the site in 2009 rather than continue to bear the cost of hosting it."
  • December 22, 2011
    * Report of Data Protection Audit of Facebook Ireland Published

    News release: "The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, Ireland 21 December 2011 published the outcome of its audit of Facebook Ireland(FB-I) which was conducted over the last three months including on-site in Facebook Ireland’s Headquarters in Dublin. The report is available in 2 parts: Report of the Audit, including recommendations and the Facebook Technical Analysis Report...It is a comprehensive assessment of Facebook Ireland’s compliance with Irish Data Protection law and by extension EU law in this area...Deputy Commissioner, Gary Davis who led the conduct of the Audit stated that “this Audit was the most comprehensive and detailed ever undertaken by our Office. We set ourselves a very ambitious target for completion and publication as both this Office and Facebook, felt it was important that the outcome be published and opened to public comment and scrutiny...Facebook is constantly evolving and adapting in response to user needs and technical developments. Like any successful technology platform, the service needs to innovate by introducing new products and features in order to adapt to changing circumstances. Indeed the almost Darwinian nature of the site means that there will constantly be an absolute need to have in place robust mechanisms to keep pace with the innovation that is the source of the site’s success."

    December 21, 2011
    * FTC Guidance - Cookies: Leaving a Trail on the Web

    "Have you ever wondered why some online ads you see are targeted to your tastes and interests, or how websites remember your preferences from visit to visit? The answer may be in the “cookies." A cookie is information saved by your web browser, the software program you use to visit the web. Cookies can be used by companies that collect, store and share bits of information about your online activities to track your behavior across sites. Cookies also can be used to customize your browsing experience, or to deliver ads targeted to you. OnGuardOnline.gov wants you to know how cookies are used and how you can control information about your browsing activities. Here are answers to some commonly asked questions about cookies – what they are, what they do, and how you can control them."

    December 20, 2011
    * EPIC: Senate Open Investigation Into Google Search

    EPIC: "Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) and Mike Lee (R-UT), Chairman and Ranking member of the Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, have sent a letter to FTC Chairman John Liebowitz, expressing concern about Google's business practices and the company's impact on competition in Internet search and commerce. In September, EPIC wrote to the FTC and described how Google biased YouTube search rankings to give preferential treatment to its own content following the acquisition of the Internet's largest video service provider. The EPIC letter preceded a Senate hearing on The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition? EPIC testified before the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee in 2009 on Google's growing dominance of essential Internet services."

    December 16, 2011
    * Pew: Where people get information about restaurants and other local businesses

    Where people get information about restaurants and other local businesses: "The internet is the source that people most rely on for material about the local business scene and search engines are particularly valued. Newspapers and word of mouth also rank high as sources."

    December 15, 2011
    * TRUSTe Privacy Index Shows Online Privacy Policies Are Lengthy, Complicated

    News release: "TRUSTe, the leading online privacy solutions provider, released its first privacy index as part of its new "Privacy Pulse" information series tracking changes and trends in online privacy. In the 2011 Website Edition of its Privacy Index, TRUSTe analyzed the privacy policies of the top 100 U.S. websites (as ranked by Alexa Sept. 2011) to evaluate privacy practices by measuring key policy attributes, as well as the type of disclosures contained in them. TRUSTe found that while nearly 100 percent of websites today include a privacy policy, existing policies are highly complex, lengthy and written in language that is confusing for the average person to understand. Additionally, the vast majority of privacy policies are not readily transparent regarding third-party usage of data or consumer choices."

    * Blueprint for a Secure Cyber Future: The Cybersecurity Strategy for the Homeland Security Enterprise

    "The Blueprint for a Secure Cyber Future builds on the Department of Homeland Security Quadrennial Homeland Security Review Report’s strategic framework by providing a clear path to create a safe, secure, and resilient cyber environment for the homeland security enterprise. With this guide, stakeholders at all levels of government, the private sector, and our international partners can work together to develop the cybersecurity capabilities that are key to our economy, national security, and public health and safety. The Blueprint describes two areas of action: Protecting our Critical Information Infrastructure Today and Building a Stronger Cyber Ecosystem for Tomorrow. The Blueprint is designed to protect our most vital systems and assets and, over time, drive fundamental change in the way people and devices work together to secure cyberspace. The integration of privacy and civil liberties protections into the Department’s cybersecurity activities is fundamental to safeguarding and securing cyberspace."

  • The Atlantic Council: The New US “Blueprint” for National Cyber Security
  • December 11, 2011
    * The 2011 Fortune 500 and Social Media Adoption: Have America's Largest Companies Reached a Social Media Plateau?

    The 2011 Fortune 500 and Social Media Adoption: Have America's Largest Companies Reached a Social Media Plateau? Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D. and Justina Andonian - Center for Marketing Research, Charlton College of Business, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

  • "One hundred and fourteen (23%) of the primary corporations listed on the 2011 F500 have a public-facing corporate blog with a post in the past 12 months. These include two of the top five corporations (Wal-Mart and Exxon). Three companies in the top 5 in 2011 without a public-facing blog are: Chevron, Conoco Philips, and Fannie Mae...Two hundred eighty-nine (58%) of the 2011 F500 are now on Facebook."
  • December 04, 2011
    * Harvard Law/Computer Scientist Declares PCs Dead

    "The following op-ed by Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain appeared in the Nov. 30 edition of the Technology Review - The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don't merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we're seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse. The transformation is one from product to service. The platforms we used to purchase every few years—like operating systems—have become ongoing relationships with vendors, both for end users and software developers. I wrote about this impending shift, driven by a desire for better security and more convenience, in my 2008 book The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It."

    November 25, 2011
    * Consumer Reports - 10 tips to prevent ID theft while holiday shopping

    "Consumer Reports' Guide to online security outlines some of the most common Net threats—such as phishing, online scams, and computer viruses. (See: Best ways to stay safe online.) But our latest security report also notes that mobile phones and social media sites can also present a rising amount of ID theft risks since more consumers are using their smart phones to shop and sharing news of online bargains on Facebook. (See: Mobile phones: The new risk and Concerns about Facebook.) The Consumer Federation of America, a non-profit association of almost 300 consumer organizations, has compiled a list of 10 tips for having an ID theft-free holiday season (PDF) on its website, IDTheftInfo.org."

    November 24, 2011
    * FCC Launches the Small Biz Cyber Planner

    News release: "The FCC is launching the Small Biz Cyber Planner, an online resource to help small businesses create customized cybersecurity plans. This is the result of an unprecedented public-private partnership between government experts and private IT and security companies, including DHS, NCSA, NIST, The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, The Chertoff Group, Symantec, Sophos, Visa, Microsoft, HP, McAfee, The Identity Theft Council, ADP and others. The online tool is available at FCC.gov/cyberplanner. By almost any measure small businesses have an outsized impact on our economy and it is critically important that small businesses, a vibrant engine for job and idea creation, are secure using the many broadband enabled tools they need to efficiently run their businesses. According to a survey released in October, 2011 by Symantec and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), two-thirds of U.S. small businesses rely on broadband Internet for their day-to-day operations...This effort is part of an ongoing program to raise awareness about the cybersecurity risks to small businesses and to help these businesses become cyber-secure. Earlier this year, the FCC and a coalition of public and private-sector partners developed a cybersecurity tip sheet, which includes tips to educate business owners about basic steps they can take immediately to protect their companies. The tip sheet is available at FCC.gov/cyberforsmallbiz".

    November 20, 2011
    * New on LLRX - ShoppingBots and Online Shopping Resources 2012

    Via LLRX.com - ShoppingBots and Online Shopping Resources 2012 - Marcus P. Zillman's guide, great for holiday and year round shopping, and comprises a comprehensive listing of shoppingbot and online shopping resources and sites on the Internet. Comparison shopping for books, electronics, gadgets, clothing, green products, hotels? Looking for coupons, discounts, vouchers or last minute deals? Do you want to support local, regional or national products and services? Marcus' wide ranging listing highlights reliable, efficient sites and services to compare and contrast your shopping choices, and to make the experience more cost effective and satisfying, now and year round.

    November 13, 2011
    * European Security Agency Report - Risks and benefits of emerging life-logging applications
    • To log or not to log? - Risks and benefits of emerging life-logging applications, November 11, 2011 via European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) - "European Union (EU) agency which acts as a centre of expertise for the EU Member States and European institutions. It gives advice and recommendations on good practice, and acts as a “switchboard” for exchanging knowledge and information. The agency also facilitates contacts between the European institutions, the Member States, and private business and industry."
    • "Recording aspects of one’s life, or life-logging, has a long established history in human society, but it is undergoing transformational change in terms of depth, volume and type of data. Before the 20th century, life-logging was restricted to recordings on paper media and involved written accounts, such as books, diaries, or collections of letters between people as well as person-constructed images such as drawings or paintings. By the 20th century, the media had broadened to include still photographic images, sound and moving images and most families kept at least an image life-log in the form of a photo album. By the end of the 20th century, most of these life-log data were digitally recorded with both the resolution and frequency of recording dramatically increasing year on year. Paper diaries and letters gave way to blogs, e-mail, and social networking status updates with the significant difference that the latter were potentially recorded forever and with a vastly more complete history than the episodic fragments of days gone by."
    • Appendix I Scenario Building and Analysis Template, accompanying the deliverable "To log or not to log? - Risks and benefits of emerging life-logging applications". File To log or not to log? - Risks and benefits of emerging life-logging applications [Appendix II]
    • Appendix II Risk Assessment Spreadsheet, accompanying the deliverable "To log or not to log? - Risks and benefits of emerging life-logging applications"
    November 02, 2011
    * New on LLRX.com - The Digital Death of Copyright's First Sale Doctrine

    via LLRX.com - The Digital Death of Copyright's First Sale Doctrine: An important copyright case won't be argued in the Supreme Court, which on October 3, 2011 declined to review Vernor v. Autodesk, a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision involving the applicability of copyright's first sale doctrine to transactions involving software and other digital information goods. Law professor Annmarie Bridy discusses the wide reaching impact of the first sale doctrine, without which there would be no free market for used books, CDs, or DVDs, because the copyright owner's right of distribution would reach beyond the first sale, all the way down the stream of commerce.

    November 01, 2011
    * Shopping Online This Holiday Season? FTC Offers Advice on Getting the Best Deal

    News release: "Whether your gift list is ready or you're wondering how long you can wait to start your holiday shopping, the Federal Trade Commission has online tips to help you get the best deals. The bottom line: Some extra research can really pay off."

    * Collection and sale of mobile phone user data

    CNNMoney: "Your phone company knows where you live, what websites you visit, what apps you download, what videos you like to watch, and even where you are. Now, some have begun selling that valuable information to the highest bidder. In mid-October, Verizon Wireless changed its privacy policy to allow the company to record customers' location data and Web browsing history, combine it with other personal information like age and gender, aggregate it with millions of other customers' data, and sell it on an anonymous basis."

    October 16, 2011
    * How Tablets, Smartphones and Connected Devices are Changing U.S. Digital Media Consumption Habits

    Digital Omnivores: How Tablets, Smartphones and Connected Devices are Changing U.S. Digital Media Consumption Habits, comScore, October 2011.

  • "Today’s digital media environment is rapidly evolving, driven by the proliferation of devices people use to consume content both at home, at work and on the go. Not too long ago, consumers depended solely on
    their desktop computer or laptop to connect online. Now, a growing number of consumers are likely to access a wide variety of digital content across a multitude of devices on a daily basis. With smartphones, tablets and other connected devices, consumers have become digital omnivores – not just because of the media they consume, but also in how they consume it. Cross-platform consumption has created a vastly different digital landscape, and it is one that requires insight into both the individual usage of devices as well as the nature of their complementary use. As consumers move toward an increasingly fragmented device diet, stakeholders across the industry are confronted with a growing number of questions, challenges and opportunities. What is the extent to which these devices have penetrated and are changing consumers’ media consumption habits? How does one efficiently and effectively reach these digital omnivores in a meaningful way? As this report analyzes the impact of devices that connect consumers beyond the computer, it aims to shed light on the direction of the ever-evolving digital media landscape."
  • * Markey to Amazon: Don’t Hold a Kindle Fire Sale on Privacy

    News release: "Concerned that the pairing of the new Kindle Fire tablet with its must-use Silk browser means Amazon could track each Web click of Kindle Fire users Congressman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) [October 14, 2011] sent a letter to Amazon’s CEO asking for responses to questions about tablets users’ privacy and security...In May 2011, Reps. Markey and Joe Barton (R-Texas) introduced the Do Not Track Kids Act of 2011, bipartisan legislation that amends the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 to extend, enhance and update the provisions relating to the collection, use and disclosure of children’s personal information. The legislation also establishes new protections for the personal information of children and teens."

    October 11, 2011
    * Tracking the Trackers: Where Everybody Knows Your Username

    Tracking the Trackers: Where Everybody Knows Your Username by Jonathan Mayer, posted on October 11, 2011

  • Click the local Home Depot ad and your email address gets handed to a dozen companies monitoring you. Your web browsing, past, present, and future, is now associated with your identity. Swap photos with friends on Photobucket and clue a couple dozen more into your username. Keep tabs on your favorite teams with Bleacher Report and you pass your full name to a dozen again. This isn't a 1984-esque scaremongering hypothetical. This is what's happening today."

  • October 08, 2011
    * Mining Data From Social Media for Marketing, Trend Spotting and More?

    The Economist: "The beauty of Twitter, the popular microblogging service, is that users have to keep it short: messages can only be 140 characters long. But companies that mine the stream of tweets for marketing and other purposes (see article in this week's issue of The Economist) get much more information. [Here is a map] of a tweet including all its metadata. The map was published by Raffi Krikorian, a developer at Twitter. It is 18 months old, but it is safe to say that the amount of metadata attached to a tweet has not decreased since."

    October 04, 2011
    * Report Release: Account Deactivation and Content Removal: Guiding Principles and Practices for Companies and Users

    Account Deactivation and Content Removal: Guiding Principles and Practices for Companies and Users by Erica Newland, Caroline Nolan, Cynthia Wong, and Jillian York.

  • "This report explores these dilemmas, and recommends principles, strategies, and tools that both user-generated content (UGC) platforms and users can adopt to mitigate the negative effects of account deactivation and content removal. We use select examples to highlight good company practices, including efforts to balance complex and often competing considerations—the enforcement of site guidelines, responses to government pressure, the free expression and privacy rights of users, and the potential risks faced by activists—in consistent, transparent, and accountable ways. Importantly, this report does not put forth a one-size-fits-all solution for the complex set of challenges raised by Terms of Use (ToU) enforcement. Platforms vary in terms of history, mission, content hosted, size, and user base, and no single set of practices will be an appropriate fit in every case. Moreover, while the examples in this report focus on platforms that host social media, the recommendations are broadly applicable to companies that host different types of user-generated content."
  • * Account Deactivation and Content Removal: Guiding Principles and Practices for Companies and Users

    Account Deactivation and Content Removal: Guiding Principles and Practices for Companies and Users, Erica Newland, Caroline Nolan, Cynthia Wong, and Jillian York. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society and. The Center for Democracy & Technology, September 2011

  • "This report explores these dilemmas, and recommends principles, strategies, and tools that both user-generated content (UGC) platforms and users can adopt to mitigate the negative effects of account deactivation and content removal. We use select examples to highlight good company practices, including efforts to balance complex and often competing considerations—the enforcement of site guidelines, responses to government pressure, the free expression and privacy rights of users, and the potential risks faced by activists—in consistent, transparent, and accountable ways. Importantly, this report does not put forth a one-size-fits-all solution for the complex set of challenges raised by Terms of Use (ToU) enforcement. Platforms vary in terms of history, mission, content hosted, size, and user base, and no single set of practices will be an appropriate fit in every case. Moreover, while the examples in this report focus on platforms that host social media, the recommendations are broadly applicable to companies that host different types of user-generated content."
  • October 03, 2011
    * FTC publication, A Business Guide to the FTC's Mail or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule

    News release: "As part of the Federal Trade Commission’s systematic review of all of the agency’s rules and guides, the FTC is seeking public comment on proposed amendments to the Mail or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule. The Rule, issued in 1975, requires that marketers who solicit buyers to order merchandise through mail or telephone must have a reasonable basis to expect that they can ship ordered merchandise within the time frame they advertise, or, if no time frame is specified, within 30 days. The Rule also requires that, when a seller cannot ship within the promised time, the seller must obtain the buyer’s consent to a delay in shipping or refund payment for the unshipped merchandise. In 2007, the FTC sought public comment on how the Rule could be amended to address changes in technology and commercial practices. Based on a review of comments received, the FTC has concluded that the Rule continues to benefit consumers and will be retained."

  • "An FTC publication, A Business Guide to the FTC's Mail or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule, offers information about the Rule and how to comply. The Commission also published a notice announcing some technical amendments to alphabetize the definitions and move them to the beginning of the Rule."
  • September 28, 2011
    * Representatives Barton, Markey Urge FTC To Investigate Use Of “Supercookies”

    News release: "Representatives Joe Barton (R-Texas) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Co-Chairmen of the House Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the agency to investigate so-called “supercookies”, files that can be installed on computers without a user's knowledge. Supercookies allow websites to collect detailed personal data about users, including websites previously visited. Even when consumers choose to delete regular cookies from their computers, supercookies persist. According to a report last month in The Wall Street Journal (“Latest in Web Tracking: Stealthy ‘Supercookies’, August 18, 2011), it was discovered that companies have been installing supercookies on users’ computers without their knowledge. Even technical experts at the websites in the report stated they had no knowledge that the secret files were being installed."

  • See also Tracking the Trackers: To Catch a History Thief, by Jonathan Mayer
  • September 25, 2011
    * BTN: Microsoft Becomes First Corporate User of Standard XML-Based Bank Statements

    Microsoft Becomes First Corporate User of Standard XML-Based Bank Statements

  • 'Microsoft collaborated with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi and SWIFT to develop a unified format that lets it receive electronic bank statements from all its banking providers in the same format. Extensible Markup Language is a way of formatting, parsing and tagging data such that computer programs can read and act on the information. (For instance, a customer name might be tagged). The ISO 20022 standard [ppt] provides a common schema for such messages, so that everyone uses the same tags and formats. It was developed mainly by European banks to handle new payment structures for Single European Payments Area payments sent between banks. But the standard has taken time to mature and crystallize. "Even within 20022, there are still lots of different variants, based on what country you're working in and banks' data processing requirements once the payment or cash reporting gets to the back end," says Colin Kerr, Microsoft industry solutions manager. "That places a huge burden on the corporate treasury that has to work with multiple banks." Microsoft works with eight major banks around the world and another 90 banks locally."
  • September 22, 2011
    * Report Provides Guidelines for Dilemmas of Account Deactivation and Content Removal

    "A report released today by the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society highlights the dilemmas companies and users face when enforcement of a website's Terms of Use policy results in deactivation of user accounts or removal of user-generated content. The report recommends principles, strategies, and tools that both companies and users can adopt to lessen the negative effects of account deactivation and content removal. The report, Account Deactivation and Content Removal: Guiding Principles and Practices for Companies and Users, outlines select examples of good company practices. Such practices feature rules and enforcement policies that are sensitive to users' free expression and privacy rights and to the potential risks faced by human rights activists, who are increasingly using social media tools in their work."

    * FINCEN: Identity Theft Trends, Patterns, and Typologies Based on Suspicious Activity Reports

    Identity Theft - Trends, Patterns, and Typologies Based on Suspicious Activity Reports. Filed by the Securities and Futures Industries January 1, 2005 – December 31, 2010. Report released September 2011.

  • "This report focuses on identity theft in the securities and futures industries. Based on Suspicious Activity Report by the Securities and Futures Industries (SAR-SF) filings, it describes recent patterns and trends of SAR-SF reporting and identifies methods by which identity thieves may access and abuse investment, retirement, and trust accounts to defraud individual account holders and/or securities firms. FinCEN added identity theft as a characterization of suspicious activity on the SAR-SF form in May 2004 following an increase in the reporting of this type of activity. This study is based on SAR-SF filings made between 2005 and 2010. It complements an October 2010 FinCEN report that described, in part, ways that identity thieves reportedly defraud individuals and depository institutions by gaining unauthorized access to credit cards, loans, and depository accounts...The number of SAR-SFs reporting identity theft grew by 89 percent from 2005 to 2010, and nearly 13 percent of all SAR-SF filings over the 6-year period in part characterized the reported activity as identity theft."
  • September 20, 2011
    * Illegal Internet Streaming of Copyrighted Content: Legislation in the 112th Congress

    CRS - Illegal Internet Streaming of Copyrighted Content: Legislation in the 112th Congress, Brian T. Yeh, Legislative Attorney, August 29, 2011

  • "Technological developments related to the Internet benefit consumers who want convenient ways to view and hear information and entertainment content on a variety of electronic devices (such as televisions, radios, computers, mobile phones, video game consoles, and portable media players). New technologies offer the potential to help copyright holders promote their creative works for artistic, educational, and commercial reasons. However, new technologies may increase the risk of infringement of the copyright holders’ rights because they often provide faster, cheaper, and easier means of engaging in unauthorized reproduction, distribution, and public performance of copyrighted works than previous technologies. The widespread consumer use of high-speed Internet connections as well as increased reliance on data storage offered by “cloud computing” services may also contribute to infringement problems. One of these new technologies enables the “streaming” of copyrighted content over the Internet
    from a website to an end user. There are many legitimate streaming websites such as Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, and HBO GO that offer on-demand streams of television programs, motion pictures, live sporting events, and sound recordings. However, streaming technology can also be misused for facilitating copyright infringement online."
  • September 17, 2011
    * UK Guardian - The death of books has been greatly exaggerated

    Radical change is certainly producing some alarming symptoms: "According to Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry standard for book sales data, book sales are pretty healthy, with one significant proviso which I'll come to. Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later – a decade in which the internet bloomed, online gaming exploded, television channels proliferated, digital piracy rampaged and, latterly, recession gloomed – 229m books sold. So, a 42% increase in the number of books sold over the last 10 years...For one thing, people are buying more and more books in Amazonia, and more and more of them are on Amazon's ebook platform the Kindle. In May this year, Amazon announced that, for the first time, it was selling more Kindle versions of books than paperback and hardbacks combined, and (here's the thing that doesn't get quoted so often) sales of print books were still increasing."

  • See also: "Nielsen BookScan collects the retail sales information from point of sale systems in more than 31,500 bookshops around the world, BookScan is able to present sales information in a variety of ways, including by the market size and share of different book categories, and by individual publishers, specific imprints, authors and price points. In most countries, statistics are also available by actual sales price and consumer discount levels. And because every single title making a sale is reported, the information covers specialised categories and small imprints as well as data relating to the major players."
  • August 17, 2011
    * comScore: Amazon Sites Visited by 1 in 5 Global Internet Users in June

    News release: "comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a report on selected global retail and auction sites based on data from the comScore Media Metrix service. The study found that of the destinations analyzed, Amazon Sites reached the largest global audience with more than 282 million visitors in June, or 20.4 percent of the worldwide Internet population. Other top brands in the study included eBay, which reached 16.2 percent of global Internet visitors, China’s Alibaba.com Corporation (11.3 percent reach), Apple.com Worldwide Sites (9.7 percent reach) and Japan’s Rakuten Inc. (4.2 percent reach)."

    August 07, 2011
    * Study: Flash Cookies and Privacy II: Now with HTML5 and ETag Respawning

    Flash Cookies and Privacy II: Now with HTML5 and ETag Respawning (July 29, 2011), Ayenson, Mika, Wambach, Dietrich James, Soltani, Ashkan, Good, Nathan and Hoofnagle, Chris Jay, Available at SSRN

  • In August 2009, we demonstrated that popular websites were using “Flash cookies” to track users. Some advertisers had adopted this technology because it allowed persistent tracking even where users had taken steps to avoid web profiling. We also demonstrated “respawning” on top sites with Flash technology. This allowed sites to reinstantiate HTTP cookies deleted by a user, making tracking more resistant to users’ privacy-seeking behaviors. In this followup study, we reassess the Flash cookies landscape and examine a new tracking vector, HTML5 local storage and Cache-Cookies via ETags. We found over 5,600 standard HTTP cookies on popular sites, over 4,900 were from third parties. Google-controlled cookies were present on 97 of the top 100 sites, including popular government websites. Seventeen sites were using HTML5, and seven of those sites had HTML5 local storage and HTTP cookies with matching values. Flash cookies were present on 37 of the top 100 sites. We found two sites that were respawning cookies, including one site – hulu.com – where both Flash and cache cookies were employed to make identifiers more persistent. The cache cookie method used ETags, and is capable of unique tracking even where all cookies are blocked by the user and “Private Browsing Mode” is enabled."
  • August 06, 2011
    * Dow Jones circulation chief calculates highlights content for which customers will pay

    Poynter: "Writing in the newsletter of the International News Marketing Association, Dow Jones senior vice president of circulation Lynne Brennen proposes five attributes to measure “a consumer’s willingness to pay.” She also assigned a percentage weighting to each. Keep in mind this is a measure not of what people would like to have as they consume news, but what they will actually pay for. What advertisers want is outside the scope of this particular exercise. Brennen’s big five and the weighting she assigned are:

    • Broad reliability of content — 30 percent
    • Vertical nature of content — 30 percent
    • Longevity of content — 30 percent
    • Immediacy of information — 8 percent
    • Social “trustworthiness” — 2 percent

    * Upcoming hearing: The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?

    The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition?” - Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. DATE: September 21, 2011

    July 28, 2011
    * WSJ: Marketers are spying on Internet users

    "Marketers are spying on Internet users -- observing and remembering people's clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests. The Wall Street Journal's What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of this Internet-tracking technology. The Journal analyzed the tracking files installed on people's computers by the 50 most popular U.S. websites, plus WSJ.com. The Journal also built an "exposure index" -- to determine the degree to which each site exposes visitors to monitoring -- by studying the tracking technologies they install and the privacy policies that guide their use."

    July 14, 2011
    * New FTC Video Helps Businesses Comply with CAN-SPAM Rule

    News release: "Say “spam” and most business executives think of annoying e-mail messages, like the ones that hold out a phony offer to split $50 million that’s sitting in a foreign bank. Of course, this type of message is covered by the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM Rule, which is designed to protect consumers from deceptive commercial e-mail. But CAN-SPAM covers e-mails from legitimate businesses, too, such as e-mail notifying customers about a new product line or a special sale. To help explain what the CAN-SPAM Rule covers, the FTC has produced a new video for businesses with a seven-point checklist for sending commercial e-mail messages. For example, e-mail marketers must use accurate headers and subject lines and provide a method for consumers to stop getting e-mails. In addition to the video, the FTC also offers a brochure, The CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business."

    June 30, 2011
    * FTC: Consumer Confidence in Internet Marketplace Depends on Privacy Protections

    News release: "The Federal Trade Commission told Congress that consumers must be confident that their privacy will be protected if they are to be willing to take advantage of all the benefits offered by the Internet marketplace. Commission testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, delivered by Commissioner Julie Brill, states that, “Privacy has been an important component of the Commission’s consumer protection mission for 40 years. During this time, the Commission’s goal in the privacy arena has remained constant: to protect consumers’ personal information and ensure that they have the confidence to take advantage of the many benefits offered by the dynamic and ever-changing marketplace.”

  • "Ioana Rusu, regulatory counsel for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, shared new poll results when she testified at a Senate committee hearing on online privacy and data security tomorrow. A May poll conducted by Consumer Reports shows that two-thirds of consumers feel that the government should be involved with safeguarding their online privacy, while 81 percent of respondents agreed that they should be able to permanently opt out of Internet tracking from a single location."
  • June 28, 2011
    * Facts from the FTC: What You Should Know About Mobile Apps

    "New technology can bring tremendous benefits to consumers, but it also can present new challenges. Mobile apps offered on cell phones and other portable devices such as tablets and music players can perform a range of consumer services such as locating the nearest retail stores, managing shopping lists, tracking family budgets, and allowing consumers to read news articles, play interactive games, and connect with family and friends. The FTC is making a concerted effort to ensure that consumers have the information they need about mobile apps, and is offering new information on OnGuardOnline, the federal government’s website to help you be safe, secure and responsible on the Internet."

  • Understanding Mobile Apps: Questions & Answers
  • June 24, 2011
    * Google Posts About FTC's Formal Notification of Business Review

    Follow up to posting, WSJ: FTC Plans to Serve Google With Subpoenas, from the Official Google Blog: "At Google, we’ve always focused on putting the user first. We aim to provide relevant answers as quickly as possible—and our product innovation and engineering talent have delivered results that users seem to like, in a world where the competition is only one click away. Still, we recognize that our success has led to greater scrutiny. Yesterday, we received formal notification from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it has begun a review of our business. We respect the FTC’s process and will be working with them (as we have with other agencies) over the coming months to answer questions about Google and our services. It’s still unclear exactly what the FTC’s concerns are, but we’re clear about where we stand...To learn more about our business, please visit google.com/press/competition."

    June 23, 2011
    * WSJ: FTC Plans to Serve Google With Subpoenas

    WSJ: "Federal regulators are poised to hit Google Inc. with subpoenas, launching a broad, formal investigation into whether the Internet giant has abused its dominance in Web-search advertising, people familiar with the matter said. The civil probe, which has the potential to reshape how companies compete on the Internet, is the most serious legal threat yet to the 12-year-old company, though it wouldn't necessarily lead to any federal allegations of wrongdoing against Google. While Google has faced several antitrust probes in recent years, the U.S. has limited its investigations largely to reviews of the company's mergers and acquisitions. The new inquiry, by contrast, will examine fundamental issues relating to Google's core search-advertising business, its biggest money maker, said the people familiar with the matter."

    June 20, 2011
    * ICANN Approves Historic Change to Internet’s Domain Name System

    News release: "ICANN’s Board of Directors has approved a plan to usher in one of the biggest changes ever to the Internet’s Domain Name System. During a special meeting, the Board approved a plan to allow an increase in the number of Internet address endings - called generic top-level domains (gTLDs) - from the current 22, which includes such familiar domains as .com, .org and .net. “ICANN has opened the Internet’s naming system to unleash the global human imagination. Today’s decision respects the rights of groups to create new Top Level Domains in any language or script. We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind,” said Rod Beckstrom, President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN. New gTLDs will change the way people find information on the Internet and how businesses plan and structure their online presence. Virtually every organization with an online presence could be affected in some way. Internet address names will be able to end with almost any word in any language, offering organizations around the world the opportunity to market their brand, products, community or cause in new and innovative ways."

    June 19, 2011
    * Average U.S. Smartphone Data Usage Up 89% as Cost per MB Goes Down 46%

    News release: "The mobile Data Tsunami initially described here is still growing at an astounding pace. According to Nielsen’s monthly analysis of cellphone bills for 65,000+ lines, smartphone owners – especially those with iPhones and Android devices — are consuming more data than ever before on a per-user basis. This has huge implications for carriers since the proportion of smartphone owners is also increasing dramatically. (Currently, 37% of all mobile subscribers in the United States have smartphones.) In just the last 12 months, the amount of data the average smartphone user consumes per month has grown by 89 percent from 230 Megabytes (MB) in Q1 2010 to 435 MB in Q1 2011. A look at the distribution of data consumption is even more shocking: data usage for the top 10 percent of smartphone users (90th percentile) is up 109 percent while the top 1 percent (99th percentile) has grown their usage by an astonishing 155 percent from 1.8GB in Q1 2010 to over 4.6GB in Q1 2011.

  • See also AT&T, Data Calculator - "Use the sliders to estimate your daily or monthly usage. Wi-Fi usage does not count against the data included in your plan," and via NYT: Excited About the Cloud? Get Ready for Capped Data Plans
  • * Microsoft to Acquire Skype - FTC Approves, Awaiting DOJ

    The FTC provides antitrust approval [link to notice here] - Microsoft news release: Microsoft Corp. and Skype Global announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire Skype, the leading Internet communications company, for $8.5 billion in cash from the investor group led by Silver Lake. The agreement has been approved by the boards of directors of both Microsoft and Skype. The acquisition will increase the accessibility of real-time video and voice communications, bringing benefits to both consumers and enterprise users and generating significant new business and revenue opportunities. The combination will extend Skype’s world-class brand and the reach of its networked platform, while enhancing Microsoft’s existing portfolio of real-time communications products and services. With 170 million connected users and over 207 billion minutes of voice and video conversations in 2010, Skype has been a pioneer in creating rich, meaningful connections among friends, families and business colleagues globally."

    June 18, 2011
    * Cybersecurity, Innovation and the Internet Economy Cybersecurity, Innovation and the Internet Economy, Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force, June 2011
  • "The Internet allows users to gather, store, process, and transfer vast amounts of data, including proprietary and sensitive business, transactional, and personal data. At the same time that businesses and consumers rely more and more on such capabilities, cybersecurity threats continue to plague the Internet economy. Cybersecurity threats evolve as rapidly as the Internet expands, and the associated risks are becoming increasingly global. Staying protected against cybersecurity threats requires all users, even the most sophisticated ones, to be aware of the threats and improve their security practices on an ongoing basis. Creating incentives to motivate all parties in the Internet economy to make appropriate security investments requires technical and public policy measures that are carefully balanced to heighten cybersecurity without creating barriers to innovation, economic growth, and the free flow of information."
  • June 08, 2011
    * Commerce Department Proposes New Policy Framework to Strengthen Cybersecurity Protections for Businesses Online

    News release: "The U.S. Department of Commerce today released a report that proposes voluntary codes of conduct to strengthen the cybersecurity of companies that increasingly rely on the Internet to do business, but are not part of the critical infrastructure sector. The report, Cybersecurity, Innovation and the Internet Economy, focuses on the “Internet and Information Innovation Sector” (I3S) – these are businesses that range from small and medium enterprises and bricks-and-mortar firms with online services, to social networking sites and Internet-only business, to cloud computing firms that are increasingly subject to cyber attacks."

    * UK: Review of the Money Laundering Regulations 2007: June 2011 the Government response

    HM Treasury Review of the Money Laundering Regulations 2007: the Government response, June 2011

  • "The Government’s approach is to ensure the UK financial system is a hostile environment for money laundering and terrorist finance while minimising the burden on legitimate businesses. In so doing and in order to prevent the UK being put at an economic disadvantage, the UK Government remains committed to the effective implementation of global standards (those agreed by the 36 Member States of the Financial Action Task Force) and the EU 3rd Money Laundering Directive (EU Directive). The implementation of these requirements by the UK is underpinned by the principles of effectiveness, proportionality and engagement; and is driven by a commitment to the risk-based approach provided for in the Regulations. This gives businesses flexibility in their implementation of the Regulations and it helps to avoid the ‘tick-box’ application of the regulations under which emphasis is placed on formally discharging requirements rather than the substance of effective AML practice. It should help to minimise costs on business and to ensure the Regulations are effective and proportionately implemented on a case-by-case basis, by reflecting the considered judgement of individual businesses of the risks they face."
  • June 05, 2011
    * Study - Privacy leakage vs. Protection measures: the growing disconnect

    Privacy leakage vs. Protection measures: the growing disconnect, Balachander Krishnamurthy - AT&T Labs Research; Konstantin Naryshkin - Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Craig E. Wills - Worcester Polytechnic Institute, May 2011.

  • "Numerous research papers have listed different vectors of personally identifable information leaking via traditional and mobile Online Social Networks (OSNs) and highlighted the ongoing aggregation of data about users visiting popularWeb sites. We argue that the landscape is worsening and existing proposals (including the recent U.S. Federal Trade Commission's report) do not address several key issues. We examined over 100 popular non-OSN Web sites across a number of categories where tens of millions of users representing diverse demographics have accounts, to see if these sites leak private information to prominent aggregators. Our results raise considerable concerns: we see leakage in sites for every category we examined; fully 56% of the sites directly leak pieces of private information with this result growing to 75% if we also include leakage of a site userid. Sensitive search strings sent to healthcare Web sites and travel itineraries on flight reservation sites are leaked in 9 of the top 10 sites studied for each category. The community needs a clear understanding of the shortcomings of existing privacy protection measures and the new proposals. The growing disconnect between the protection measures and increasing leakage and linkage suggests that we need to move beyond the losing battle with aggregators and examine what roles first-party sites can play in protecting privacy of their users."
  • May 16, 2011
    * Google Economic Impact Report 2010

    "Local businesses are growing. We’re helping. Google's not just a search engine. We've also helped hundreds of businesses in every U.S. state to grow. Across the U.S., Google's search and advertising tools provided $64 billion of economic activity in 2010. Click the map to see Google’s economic impact in your state. The state-by-state advertiser, publisher, and non-profit totals listed in the map are rounded to the nearest thousand."

    May 11, 2011
    * UK Financial Regulator Consultation paper - 'Data Collection: Retail Mediation Activities Return and complaints data'

    "The FSA's Consultation paper CP11/08 is entitled 'Data Collection: Retail Mediation Activities Return and complaints data'. It was published in May 2011. Comments should reach us by July 8 2011.

  • The changes we are proposing to the Retail Mediation Activities Return (RMAR) and complaints data will be of interest to both advisers and providers active in the retail investment and corporate pensions markets. In addition, consumers and consumer bodies may be interested to know how we are proposing to use data to help us supervise and enforce the new Retail Distribution Review regime and ensure that the new rules are properly implemented. This is important because the data we propose to collect is intended to help us achieve our objective of establishing a resilient, effective and attractive retail investment and corporate pension market in which consumers can have confidence and trust."
  • * Google Announces First Quarter 2011 Results and $500M Set Aside for DOJ Investigation

    Google Announces First Quarter 2011 Results: "In May 2011, in connection with a potential resolution of an investigation by the United States Department of Justice into the use of Google advertising by certain advertisers, we accrued $500 million for the three month period ended March 31, 2011. Although we cannot predict the ultimate outcome of this matter, we believe it will not have a material adverse effect on our business, consolidated financial position, results of operations, or cash flows. As a result, we have updated the affected financial data in this release, as noted, as well as the accompanying financial tables."

    May 08, 2011
    * UK - Consumer empowerment strategy - Better Choices: Better Deals

    Better Choices: Better Deals - Consumers Powering Growth. UK Department for Business, Innovations and Skills, April 2011

  • "This document aims to show how consumers can become empowered to make better choices and get better deals. It is about helping consumers to get better value, better customer service and better support when making choices or seeking help. By empowering consumers, Better Choices: Better Deals can also contribute to long term growth. More active consumers mean that our best and most innovative businesses benefit most, helping to improve overall economic performance. Many of the changes set out in Better Choices: Better Deals would have been impossible a decade ago. The internet, smart phones and new data management methods have increased the information available to consumers. This has created new opportunities for consumers, which we want to support. These technological changes have also given businesses more information about their customers’ shopping habits. In some areas, businesses know more about customers’ spending habits than they do themselves – with detailed knowledge of how they use their phone, or how likely they are to go over their overdraft limit. Better Choices: Better Deals is about putting customers in charge: in charge of their own personal data which can be used to inform their purchasing decisions and lifestyle choices. However, our vision of consumer empowerment goes far beyond the hidden value in information. We want, for example, to foster renewed and widespread interest in collective purchasing, enabling consumers to be stronger by acting together. We want Government organisations to publish more of their data on consumer issues, especially on complaints. And above all, we want this strategy to stimulate feedback to Government about how we can support consumers to get better choices, better deals from business and Government. Please go to www.bis.gov.uk/betterchoices
    to let me know what you think."
  • * Google Business Photos

    Google Business Photos - See also the FAQ: "Do you own a business? Apply today for a Google photo shoot of your business. Millions of potential customers visit Google every day to learn about places and businesses. Through scheduled photo shoots, Google is introducing a new way for you to showcase your business to the world. Where are photo shoots available? Google photographers are currently visiting businesses in select cities in the US, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Any business can apply for a photo shoot, and demand will help us decide where to send our photographers next. Where will the photos appear? Pictures from the shoot will be added to your Place page."

    April 29, 2011
    * Four Major Communications Carriers Respond to Questions About Customer Data Collection

    The big four phone carriers spill on their location and customer data collection policies: "The recent uproar over location tracking in smartphones has gotten ugly and fingers are bound to be pointed. But in the spirit of transparency, the four major carriers have outlined and detailed their location tracking applications s well as what exactly that data is being used for. The honesty does come as a response to the revelation that iPhones, Android devices, and Windows Phone 7 units are tracking user location."

  • Markey, Barton Respond to Wireless Companies - Follows Inquires of Apple Collection of Personal Location Information by iPhones, iPads: "Congressmen Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Tex.) today released the responses from the four major U.S. wireless carriers – AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile – after the lawmakers wrote to the companies inquiring about their data collection, storage and disclosure practices for customers’ personally identifiable information. Reps. Markey and Barton, co-Chairmen of the House Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, wrote to the wireless carriers in response to a New York Times report that a German mobile phone company tracked the locations and destinations of one of its customers, including latitude and longitude coordinates. “The responses of the wireless carriers provide important insights into how each company collects, uses and stores personal location data, including examples of how consumers can grant or withhold consent when location-based services are utilized,” said Rep. Markey. “Consumer consent and control are critical to ensure adequate privacy protections, and the responses shine a light on the various methods used to safeguard consumers’ sensitive information."
  • April 26, 2011
    * PC World: A trade group raises concerns about the FTC settlement with Google over Buzz

    A trade group raises concerns about the FTC settlement with Google over Buzz, by Grant Gross

  • "The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's proposed settlement with Google over its bungled launch of the Buzz social-networking service could have disastrous effects on the rest of the e-commerce industry, the head of a trade group said. Privacy groups and some FTC officials are pressing to set the Buzz settlement as an online privacy standard. And one provision of the proposed settlement would be a "real killer" for the rest of the e-commerce industry, said Steve DelBianco, executive director of trade group NetChoice. The proposed settlement, with public comments due next Monday, requires Google to get "express affirmative consent" from its users for "any new or additional sharing" of personal information with third parties if the new sharing is a change in Google's practices. This provision, if it becomes an industry standard enforced by the FTC, would require all online businesses to get opt-in permission from customers for minor changes in the way they share information with partners or other businesses, DelBianco said. Opt-in requirements would make it difficult for social-networking and online content sites to roll out new innovations and pay for their free services, he said. The calls for the settlement to become a privacy standard "can't be allowed to produce side effects for the rest of the industry for something Google did inappropriately," DelBianco said. "If the FTC gets its way and imposes the Google settlement on the entire industry, Google's competitors have to obtain express, affirmative consent before releasing any new features that would just share non-sensitive user data with third-party apps and advertisers."
  • * Introducing the WebM Community Cross-License Initiative

    News release: "It's been almost a year since Mozilla, Opera, Xiph.Org, Matroska, Google and over 40 other partners launched the WebM Project with the goal of developing a world-class, open source media format for the web. The open development model has led to rapid quality improvements in WebM, and the format is now supported in HTML5-capable browsers including Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Internet Explorer. Leading silicon vendors are adding WebM support to their chipsets,and some hardware implementations are already on the market. A key measure of success for WebM is a diverse range of contributors. For example, we are already seeing a growing number of code contributions from independent developers as well as independent implementations. We are pleased to now offer another way to contribute, through a licensing initiative that allows the community to help further support the WebM Project. Google, Matroska and the Xiph.Org Foundation make the components of WebM openly available on royalty-free terms. Today we're announcing the formation of the WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) initiative with 17 founding members. Organizations that join the CCL agree to license patents they may have that are essential to WebM technologies to other members of the CCL."

    * Commentary: Welcome to the age of data: Watch your back!

    Welcome to the age of data: Watch your back! by Molly Wood

  • "This week's iPhone location tracking scandal is just the latest glaring spotlight on how much of your personal information is gushing out the door, whether unprotected on your own devices and ripe for the picking, or into corporate and botnet servers worldwide. Personal information is the currency of the post-technological age, and the cost of "free" has never been higher. Your data, on an increasingly minute and personal level, powers every Web or network-based company, from start-up to monolith. Google maintains literally acres of servers dedicated to storing your communications--from e-mail to texts to the transcripts of your voice mail; your browsing and shopping habits; your blog posts; your photos; your calendar appointments; and of course, your intensely personal search histories. If you're logged in to a Google service, that information is all tied to your IP address. Only the thinnest of artificial technical barriers--a sort of loose privacy honor system--keeps Google from combining the data into a scarily accurate digital version of you (like the first digital Cylon, if you will). But pity poor Google, which must gather all this information by increasingly intrusive means, like the DoubleClick ad cookie that tracks your browsing all across the Web, surreptitious Wi-Fi sniffing, and sending location information about you back to its data centers even when you're not running location apps. On the other side of the aisle lies Facebook, which has cleverly cajoled 500 million users (and growing) into giving up virtually all the same information for free. Profiles, Places, Deals, and of course, the ever-present Like button, which lets you easily record your preferences for everything from opinions to shoes to celebrities and bands...you can almost imagine Facebook whispering a little "thank you" every time you click that little blue button."

  • April 23, 2011
    * Report on Major Outage Impacting Cloud Computing Services

    NYT: "As technical problems interrupted computer services provided by Amazon for a second day on Friday, industry analysts said the troubles would prompt many companies to reconsider relying on remote computers beyond their control...Amazon set up a side business five years ago offering computing resources to businesses from its network of sophisticated data centers. Today, the company is the early leader in the fast-growing business of cloud computing. In business, the cloud model is rapidly gaining popularity as a way for companies to outsource computing chores to avoid the costs and headaches of running their own data centers — simply tap in, over the Web, to computer processing and storage without owning the machines or operating software. Amazon has thousands of corporate customers, from Pfizer and Netflix to legions of start-ups, whose businesses often live on Amazon Web Services. Those reporting service troubles included Foursquare, a location-based social networking site; Quora, a question-and-answer service; Reddit, a news-sharing site; and BigDoor, which makes game tools for Web publishers."

    * Tracking Citizen Whereabouts Using SmartPhone Logs

    Declan McCullagh,Chief political correspondent, CNET: How police have obtained iPhone, iPad tracking logs

  • "Law enforcement agencies have known since at least last year that an iPhone or iPad surreptitiously records its owner's approximate location, and have used that geolocation data to aid criminal investigations. Apple has never publicized the undocumented feature buried deep within the software that operates iPhones and iPads, which became the topic of criticism this week after a researcher at a conference in Santa Clara, Calif., described in detail how it works. Apple had acknowledged to Congress last year only that "cell tower and Wi-Fi access point information" is "intermittently" collected and "transmitted to Apple" every 12 hours. At least some phones running Google's Android OS also store location information, Swedish programer Magnus Eriksson told CNET today. And research by another security analyst suggests that "virtually all Android devices" send some of those coordinates back to Google."
  • WSJ.com: Apple, Google Collect User Data
  • 3 New Thoughts on Mobile Location – A Follow up to Apple Location Tracking
  • April 04, 2011
    * Transcript: “Buying & Selling EContent'

    Interview with Jim Jansen, Senior Fellow, Pew Internet & American Life Project, Recorded at “Buying & Selling EContent” Conference, For podcast release Tuesday, April 5, 2011

  • "..the ability to buy digital content online is critically important to a lot of people, a lot of businesses, a lot of artists, photographers, a whole gamut of people. So we were very interested in that aspect of this technology and whether consumers were willing to put out their money to buy this stuff...Certainly, the most common products purchased are music and software. However, games and information from articles and stuff are also purchased quite frequently. The average spend was about $47 in a given month, although the typical user spent $10 to $15."
  • March 29, 2011
    * German study reports on mobile phone tracking of personal lives

    Via EFF: "Your cell phone company knows everywhere you go, twenty-four hours a day, every day. How concrete is this fact for you? It's very concrete for Malte Spitz, a German politician and privacy advocate. He used German privacy law — which, like the law of many European countries, gives individuals a right to see what private companies know about them — to force his cell phone carrier to reveal what it knew about him. The result? 35,831 different facts about his cell phone use over the course of six months. As the German newspaper website Zeit Online reports:

  • This profile reveals when Spitz walked down the street, when he took a train, when he was in an airplane. It shows where he was in the cities he visited. It shows when he worked and when he slept, when he could be reached by phone and when was unavailable. It shows when he preferred to talk on his phone and when he preferred to send a text message. It shows which beer gardens he liked to visit in his free time. All in all, it reveals an entire life."
  • To show just how extensive this data is, Spitz chose to make it all available to the public; Zeit Online used it to prepare a remarkable interactive map, which animates Spitz's movements, moment by moment, over the course of half a year. It's correlated with information Spitz willingly posted on the web, and, according to him and the newspaper, is remarkably, eerily accurate. Try it out."
  • Tell-all telephone reveals politician’s life
  • March 22, 2011
    * EPIC: Courts Rejects Google Books Settlement as Unfair

    EPIC: "Judge Denny Chin struck down a proposed settlement between Google and copyright holders that would have imposed significant privacy risks on e-book consumers. Google's proposal would have entitled the company to collect each users' search queries as well as the titles and page numbers of the books they read. In a February 2010 hearing before the Court, EPIC President Marc Rotenberg explained EPIC Press Release: EPIC Urges Court To Reject Google Books Settlement; EPIC: Google Books Settlement and Privacy."

    March 16, 2011
    * FTC Testifies Before Senate Commerce Committee on Privacy; Industry Efforts to Implement "Do Not Track" System Already Underway

    News release: "In testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission discussed its efforts to protect consumer privacy through enforcement actions, consumer education, and policy initiatives like the FTC staff’s recent preliminary privacy report. The report proposes a framework to balance consumer privacy with industry innovation by: 1) building privacy protections into everyday business practices (“privacy-by-design”); 2) simplifying privacy choices for consumers; and 3)improving transparency with clearer, shorter privacy notices. The Commission told Congress that industry stakeholders have made important progress in implementing Do Not Track, a mechanism proposed in the staff's preliminary privacy report last December that would allow consumers to choose not to have their Internet browsing tracked by third parties. The testimony noted that two of the major Internet browsers – Microsoft and Mozilla – “have recently announced the development of new choice mechanisms for online behavioral advertising that seek to provide increased transparency, greater consumer control, and improved ease of use.”

  • "...the ACLU's Chris Calabrese testified before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee on the state of online consumer privacy. In his testimony, Chris describes the danger that looms if Congress does not enact some online protections. He says: "If this collection of data is allowed to continue unchecked, then capitalism will build what the government never could — a complete surveillance state online."
  • February 16, 2011
    * Google: A simple way for publishers to manage access to digital content

    "Google One Pass is a payment system that enables publishers to set the terms for access to their digital content. It offers purchase-once, view-anywhere functionality, so users can view the content they buy across all of their devices. By providing a system for user authentication, payment processing, and administration, Google One Pass lets publishers focus on creating high quality content for their readers. Publishers have flexibility over payment models and control over the digital content for which they charge and the content that is free for consumers. Google One Pass is easy to implement and simple to manage. The set up is minimal and content will be managed through a simple online interface, so publishers can try out different approaches to selling content with minimal development cost and see what works for their business. It is powered by Google Checkout, so publishers’ e-commerce and payment processing needs are covered, and there is no need to build a third-party payment system into publishers sites."

    February 07, 2011
    * Digital Signage Federation Releases Digital Signage Privacy Standards

    "The Digital Signage Federation (DSF), a professional membership association, announced today the release of new industry standards for digital signage privacy. The “Digital Signage Privacy Standards” are a set of voluntary privacy guidelines recommended by DSF for digital signage companies, their partners and the venues that host these systems....The DSF Standards Committee is comprised of eight members from different sectors of the industry, and is chaired by Ken Goldberg, CEO of Real Digital Media. Harley Geiger, a committee member and Policy Counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology, was instrumental in leading the effort to develop policies that safeguard consumer privacy and preserve the public’s trust in the digital signage industry. Subsequently, the Digital Signage Privacy Standard includes strong principles in the following categories:

    • Transparency
    • Individual Participation
    • Purpose Specification
    • Data Minimization
    • Use Limitation
    • Data Quality & Integrity
    • Security
    • Accountability

    January 31, 2011
    * CDT Releases Draft Definition of 'Do Not Track'

    News release: "The Center for Democracy & Technology today released a proposal that sketches the parameters of what Do Not Track (DNT) means. The document is intended to identify the types of behaviors that DNT should prohibit, and jumpstart a discussion aimed at developing a common understanding of the terms of this emerging technology. The concept of DNT technology is gaining momentum; however, definitions underlying technology—such as what "tracking" actually means—are still in flux...CDT suggests that the following definition for "tracking" in the context of Do Not Track:

  • Tracking is the collection and correlation of data about the Internet activities of a particular user, computer, or device, over time and across non-commonly branded websites, for any purpose other than fraud prevention or compliance with law enforcement requests."
  • January 24, 2011
    * Do-Not-Track" Option Now on IE, Firefox and Chrome

    National Journal: Google and Mozilla both announced that they will be adding "do-not-track" options to their Internet browsers, allowing users to prevent websites from gathering personal information and selling it to advertisers. Mozilla announced its plan Sunday with Google following suit Monday. According to a company statement, Google's "Keep My Op-Outs" feature will be available as an extension for download on its Chrome browser Monday. "We made available, for all major browsers, a downloadable browser plugin that enables you to permanently opt out of Google's advertising cookie, even if you deleted all your browser's cookies," according to the statement." Mozilla's Firefox version will be an HTTP header that will tell websites that a user wants to opt-out what's called "online behavioral advertising." "The advantages to the header technique are that it is less complex and simple to locate and use, it is more persistent than cookie-based solutions, and it doesn't rely on user's finding and loading lists of ad networks and advertisers to work," said Mozilla technology and privacy officer Alex Fowler wrote in a blog post Sunday. Microsoft announced a similar feature for its Internet Explorer in December."

    January 12, 2011
    * Commentary - Undersea Cables: The Achilles Heel of our Economies

    Follow up to Critical Undersea Internet Cables Damaged Between Europe and Mideast, this related commentary, Undersea Cables: The Achilles Heel of our Economies, by Franz-Stefan Gady

  • "Hardly any people know that our global digital connectivity rests upon a relatively few fiber optic cables lying at the bottom of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. They wrongly believe that their international communications are carried via satellite links. The truth is that 99 percent of transcontinental Internet traffic travels through these connecting cables; these are the lifelines of our economies. For proof, simply take a quick look at the financial services sector. In 2004 alone, nine million messages and approximately $7.4 trillion a day were traded via undersea cables worldwide. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a provider of financial messaging, sends about 15 million messages a day over cables. 1 million of these are financial transactions, amounting to over $4.7 trillion dollars a day commuting via the same undersea cables. The finance hub Hong Kong doubles its dependency, i.e. the volume of messages going through these cables, every 18 months."
  • * Report: Protecting the Digital Economy

    "On January 10, 2011, the EastWest Institute released a report detailing the results of the First Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit: Protecting the Digital Economy, and outlining the cybersecurity initiative’s next steps as it prepares for the Second Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit in London on June 1-2. At the summit, held from May 3 to 5, 2010 in Dallas, Texas, EWI brought together over 400 technical experts, policy elites and national security officials from the Cyber40, an informal grouping of the world’s most digitally-advanced countries—among others, the United States, China, India, Russia and Estonia. Participants worked to identify problems facing crucial sectors of the Internet, such as financial services and essential government services, and forge concrete solutions to protect the world’s digital infrastructure."

    January 03, 2011
    * Green Paper: Commercial Data Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy: A Dynamic Policy Framework

    The commercial data privacy issues discussed in the Department’s green paper, Commercial Data Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy: A Dynamic Policy Framework, provide a clear lens through which to assess current policy. Throughout the history of the Internet as a commercial medium, the Department of Commerce has been a key avenue of government engagement. Today, the Department continues this role, primarily through the Internet Policy Task Force, established by Secretary Locke. This Task Force is examining policy approaches that reduce barriers to digital commerce while strengthening protections for commercial data privacy, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and the global free flow of information."

    January 01, 2011
    * Pew: 65% of internet users have paid for online content

    65% of internet users have paid for online content, Jim Jansen, Senior Fellow, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 12/30/2010

  • "Nearly two-thirds of internet users – 65% – have paid to download or access some kind of online content from the internet, ranging from music to games to news articles to adult material. Music, software, and apps are the most popular content that internet users have paid to access or download, although the range of paid online content is quite varied and widespread."

  • December 31, 2010
    * Commentary: Journalism in the age of WikiLeaks

    "Mass collaboration is revolutionizing not only the way we work, but the way we live, learn, create and care for each other. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, authors of Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World, analyze some of the trends reshaping our world. Today: Journalism in the age of user-generated content and Wikileaks - "It turns out people will not pay for news as a commodity. In an age of Twitter, bloggers, WikiLeaks and social networks, people can find the news without buying a paper. As one youngster said, “If the news is important it will find me.” The Internet has destroyed the business model for print. Print publications will survive, but not in the long term, and this has big implications for journalism. Compared to the massive physical assets of, say, The New York Times, online newspaper The Huffington Post has almost zero printing and distribution costs. The New York Times employs more than a thousand people in its editorial department alone. The Huffington Post employs 60 and a volunteer roster of thousands of writers. The site is thriving, with 20 million readers."

    December 29, 2010
    * S&P Equity Research Issues Internet Predictions for 2011

    News release: "S&P Equity Research sees big developments for the Internet segment in 2011, including continuing challenges for Google, changes at Yahoo, a cloud offering from Apple, and excitement from China. "The coming year should also be another year of solid growth, with double-digit gains for U.S. Internet advertising and retail spending," observed Scott Kessler, Information Technology analyst at S&P Equity Research."

    December 22, 2010
    * Gallup: U.S. Internet Users Ready to Limit Online Tracking for Ads

    Follow up to FTC Staff Issues Privacy Report Offers Framework for Consumers, Businesses, and Policymakers, this news from Gallup: "U.S. Internet users would likely welcome a "Do Not Track" measure like the one the Federal Trade Commission is currently considering to keep advertisers from tracking their movements online. Gallup finds Internet users largely aware that advertisers use their online browsing history to target ads to their interests, but largely opposed to such tactics -- even if they help to keep websites free...The results, from a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted Dec. 10-12, 2010, come as the Federal Trade Commission considers a measure that would allow Internet users to essentially opt out of online tracking, as they do with the telemarketing "Do Not Call" list. AdWeek in a recent editorial said such a measure would amount to an "apocalypse" for online advertisers, particularly for the fast-growing $1.1 billion industry that relies on these tactics to target content to users."

    December 16, 2010
    * Pew: Generations 2010 - Rise in Email Use, Decline in Blogging

    Generations 2010, Kathryn Zickuhr, Web Coordinator, 12/16/2010

  • "There are still notable differences by generation in online activities, but the dominance of the Millennial generation that we documented in our first “Generations” report in 2009 has slipped in many activities. Milliennials, those ages 18-33, remain more likely to access the internet wirelessly with a laptop or mobile phone. In addition, they still clearly surpass their elders online when it comes to many communication- and entertainment-related activities, such as using social network sites and playing games online. However, internet users in Gen X (those ages 34-45) and older cohorts are more likely than Millennials to engage in several online activities, including visiting government websites and getting financial information online. Finally, the biggest online trend is that, while the very youngest and oldest cohorts may differ, certain key internet uses are becoming more uniformly popular across all age groups. These online activities include seeking health information, purchasing products, making travel reservations, and downloading podcasts."
  • December 14, 2010
    * Pew Internet Presentation: Dancing with megaphones - the New Rules, Realities and Hard Data Behind Consumer

    Presentation by Pete Blackshaw: CMO, NM Incite, a Nielsen-McKinsey Company and Lee Rainie: Director, Pew Internet Project

  • "The media ecology has changed so profoundly that the people formerly known as consumers are a new breed. They allocate their attention differently. They approach the product research differently. They move into a buying frame of mind differently. And they are prepared to discuss their buying experiences on a vastly different scale. These changes occur because people inhabit a variety of media spaces, depending on their circumstances and frame of mine. Their expectations about encountering brands are shaped by those media spaces and by their ability to influence the character of those spaces.
  • December 12, 2010
    * New on LLRX.com: ShoppingBots and Online Shopping Resources 2011

    LLRX.com - ShoppingBots and Online Shopping Resources 2011

  • Marcus P. Zillman's guide arrives in time for holiday shopping, and comprises a comprehensive listing of shoppingbot and online shopping resources and sites on the Internet. Comparison shopping for books, electronics, gadgets, clothing, green products, hotels? Looking for coupons, discounts, vouchers or last minute deals? Do you want to support local, regional or national products and services? Marcus' wide ranging listing highlights reliable, efficient sites and services to compare and contrast your shopping choices, and to make the experience more cost effective and satisfying, now and year round.
  • December 04, 2010
    * Facebook's plan - posed to be the web's virtual driver's licence

    FT.com: Facebook’s grand plan for the future: "This is a somewhat different Mark Zuckerberg to the one the public knew just a year ago. In recent months he has transformed from an awkward wunderkind with a preternatural ability to anticipate where the web is going, into an amicable executive unafraid of laying out his grand plan. It is not just that he is a bit more confident and articulate, though he is both; what is striking is that for the first time in my two years of interviewing him, Zuckerberg seems at ease. “The fear is behind him,” said a friend of Zuckerberg’s. “Until a year ago, he thought this might be the next Google, but he wasn’t sure. Now he’s sure. The fear is gone.”

    December 01, 2010
    * FTC Staff Issues Privacy Report Offers Framework for Consumers, Businesses, and Policymakers

    News release: "The Federal Trade Commission, the nation’s chief privacy policy and enforcement agency for 40 years, issued a preliminary staff report today that proposes a framework to balance the privacy interests of consumers with innovation that relies on consumer information to develop beneficial new products and services. The proposed report also suggests implementation of a “Do Not Track” mechanism – likely a persistent setting on consumers’ browsers – so consumers can choose whether to allow the collection of data regarding their online searching and browsing activities....The report states that industry efforts to address privacy through self-regulation “have been too slow, and up to now have failed to provide adequate and meaningful protection.” The framework outlined in the report is designed to reduce the burdens on consumers and businesses."

  • Federal Trade Commission (Bureau of Consumer Protection) A Preliminary FTC Staff Report on Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: A Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policymakers (December 1, 2010)
  • * EU Commission probes allegations of antitrust violations by Google

    News release: "The European Commission has decided to open an antitrust investigation into allegations that Google Inc. has abused a dominant position in online search, in violation of European Union rules (Article 102 TFEU). The opening of formal proceedings follows complaints by search service providers about unfavourable treatment of their services in Google's unpaid and sponsored search results coupled with an alleged preferential placement of Google's own services. This initiation of proceedings does not imply that the Commission has proof of any infringements. It only signifies that the Commission will conduct an in-depth investigation of the case as a matter of priority. Google's internet search engine provides for two types of results when people are searching for information. These are unpaid search results, which are sometimes also referred to as "natural", "organic" or "algorithmic" search results, and third party advertisements shown at the top and at the right hand side of Google's search results page (so-called paid search results or sponsored links). The Commission will investigate whether Google has abused a dominant market position in online search by allegedly lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competing services which are specialised in providing users with specific online content such as price comparisons (so-called vertical search services) and by according preferential placement to the results of its own vertical search services in order to shut out competing services. The Commission will also look into allegations that Google lowered the 'Quality Score' for sponsored links of competing vertical search services. The Quality Score is one of the factors that determine the price paid to Google by advertisers."

    November 28, 2010
    * Apple Leverages Amazing Success Amidst Economic Troubles

    MercuryNews.com: "As 2010 draws to a close, much of the tech world is struggling to regain its footing after a difficult recession. Then there's Apple. Never before has this venerable company, which at age 34 is a grizzled veteran by Silicon Valley standards, stood so firmly atop the high-tech industry. Earlier this year, Apple's market capitalization surpassed that of Microsoft, making it the most valuable property in the tech universe. And during its just-completed fiscal year, it broke four consecutive quarterly revenue and profit records. Amid the worst recession in decades, Apple hired thousands while others cut jobs. But what most distinguishes Apple is the way it has climbed these heights. While other tech titans spent 2010 cutting costs and acquiring new technology through mergers, this $65 billion company is innovating like a startup...Experts point to three key factors that drive Apple's relentless innovation: It invests heavily in R&D, is unafraid to cannibalize or kill its own products and is able to extend its core technology across a host of different products to create a dominant ecosystem of consumer gadgets."

    November 25, 2010
    * White Paper - Policing Content in the Quasi-Public Sphere

    Policing Content in the Quasi-Public Sphere, Jillian C. York, The OpenNet Initiative (ONI), November 2010

  • "Online conversations today exist primarily in the realm of social media and blogging platforms, most of which are owned by private companies. Such privately owned platforms now occupy a significant role in the public sphere, as places in which ideas and information are exchanged and debated by people from every corner of the world. Instead of an unregulated, decentralized Internet, we have centralized platforms serving as public spaces: a quasi-public sphere. This quasi-public sphere is subject to both public and private content controls spanning multiple jurisdictions and differing social mores...This paper will highlight the practices of fiveplatforms—Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Blogger—in regard to TOS and account deactivations. It will highlight each company’s user policies, as well as examples of each company’s procedures for policing content."

  • * Google - Promoting Free Trade for the Internet Economy

    Google: "..we’re releasing a white paper, Enabling Trade in the Era of Information Technologies: Breaking Down Barriers to the Free Flow of Information, that explores the ways that governments impose limits on the free flow of information online. It’s pretty wonky stuff, but the premise is simple: In addition to infringing human rights, governments that block the free flow of information on the Internet are also blocking trade and economic growth. Over the last two decades, the Internet has delivered tremendous economic and trade benefits. It has driven record increases in productivity, spurred innovation, created new economies, and fueled international trade. In part this is because the Internet makes geographically distant markets easy to reach. But this engine of economic growth is increasingly coming under attack. According to one study, more than forty governments now engage in broad-scale restriction of online information. Governments are blocking online services, imposing non-transparent regulation, and seeking to incorporate surveillance tools into their Internet infrastructure. These are the trade barriers of the 21st century economy...we urge policymakers in the United States, European Union and elsewhere to take steps to break down barriers to free trade and Internet commerce. These issues present challenges, but also an opportunity for governments to align 21st century trade policy with the 21st century economy."

    November 14, 2010
    * Study: Real Branding Implications of Digital Media

    Real Branding Implications of Digital Media – an SEM, SEO, & Online Display Advertising Study, iProspect | November 2010

  • "The key finding of this study is that online digital media assets have considerable branding influence, and that specific combinations can significantly impact a brand's success. In fact, Internet users exposed to mere impressions of organic search results, paid search results, and online display advertising -- and all combinations thereof -- experience both measureable improvements in their perceptions of those brands, as well as their anticipated interactions with them. In short, this study proves that digital media assets have the power to affect brand equity whether Internet users click on them or not. This finding has huge implications for companies that currently assess the value of their search engine marketing and online display advertising campaigns solely on their ability to produce ROI-based conversions - be they direct sales transactions, sales leads, etc. In fact, this study shows that search marketing and online display can now be viewed as viable branding channels worthy of their fair share of branding budgets, and requiring development of means by which to measure their impact on brand equity."
  • November 02, 2010
    * Ditigal Version of UK Times Gains 105,000 Readers

    NYT: "The News Corporation said on Tuesday that it had gained 105,000 paying customers for the digital versions of The Times and The Sunday Times of London since it started charging for access to their Web sites this summer. The company said about half of those additions were regular, active subscribers to the newspapers’ Web sites, iPad application or Amazon Kindle edition. The rest were occasional purchasers. Another 100,000 readers have activated free digital accounts that are included in print subscriptions to the papers, the News Corporation said. The company’s initiative has been closely watched among media analysts and advertisers because The Times and Sunday Times are among the first prominent general-interest newspapers to start charging for their digital content. Other newspapers are also moving to introduce paid services as online advertising falls short of publishers’ hopes that it might someday replace dwindling print ad revenue."

    October 17, 2010
    * WSJ: Facebook in Privacy Breach Top-Ranked Applications Transmit Personal IDs

    WSJ: "Many of the most popular applications, or "apps," on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook's strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook's rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users' activities secure. The problem has ties to the growing field of companies that build detailed databases on people in order to track them online—a practice the Journal has been examining in its What They Know series. It's unclear how long the breach was in place. On Sunday, a Facebook spokesman said it is taking steps to "dramatically limit" the exposure of users' personal information."

    October 12, 2010
    * Reps. Markey, Barton Release Responses From Websites on Tracking of Consumer Behavior

    Follow up to posting, WSJ Tracks how marketers are spying on Internet users, this news release: "Representatives Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), Co-Chairman of the House Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, released responses to the letters they had sent to companies identified in a Wall Street Journal investigation as reportedly installing intrusive consumer-tracking technologies to track and/or target consumers visiting these company Web sites. “The responses [links to which are included in this news release] raise a number of concerns, including whether consumers are able to effectively shield their personal Internet habits and private information from the prying eyes of online data gatherers,” Rep. Markey said. “Consumers may be unaware that the sites they visit, coordinating with a cadre of analytics firms, advertising networks and offline data companies, may be tracking their activities around the Internet. While the responses that Rep. Barton and I received cite privacy policies and opt-out choices to enable consumers to preserve their privacy, these policies can be complicated and laborious to navigate. For example, a single website may have business relationships with a dozen or more third-party data firms that display advertisements on its site. A consumer may have to visit each of these sites, consulting its privacy policy and clicking through to opt-out, if such an option is provided. In some cases, a list of all third party affiliates is not readily accessible, keeping consumers in the dark.”

    October 11, 2010
    * WSJ Tracks how marketers are spying on Internet users

    What They Know - interactive graphic: "Marketers are spying on Internet users -- observing and remembering people's clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests. The Wall Street Journal's What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of this Internet-tracking technology. The Journal analyzed the tracking files installed on people's computers by the 50 most popular U.S. websites, plus WSJ.com. The Journal also built an "exposure index" -- to determine the degree to which each site exposes visitors to monitoring -- by studying the tracking technologies they install and the privacy policies that guide their use."

    * Global 'Digital Life' research project reveals major changes in online behaviour

    News release: "The largest ever global research project into people’s online activities and behaviour - Digital Life - was launched today, ‘digital day’ by TNS, the world’s biggest custom research company. Covering nearly 90 per cent of the world’s online population through 50,000 interviews with consumers in 46 countries, the study reveals major changes in the world’s online behaviour. Core data from the study is being made publicly available via this interactive website...Among the key findings of the study are:

    • Globally, people who have on-line access have digital sources as their number one media channel. 61% of online users use the internet daily against 54% for TV, 36% for Radio and 32% for Newspapers.
    • Online consumers in rapid growth markets have overtaken mature markets in terms of engaging with digital activities. When looking at behaviour online, rapid growth markets such as Egypt (56%) and China (54%) have much higher levels of digital engagement than mature markets such as Japan (20%), Denmark (25%) or Finland (26%). This is despite mature markets usually having a more advanced internet infrastructure.
    • Activities such as blogging and social networking are gaining momentum at huge speed in rapid growth markets. The research shows four out of five online users in China (88%) and over half of those in Brazil (51%) have written their own blog or forum entry, compared to only 32% in the US. The Internet has also become the default option for photo sharing among online users in rapid growth markets, particularly in Asia."

    * Pew Survey - Online Product Research

    Report: Shopping, Search, Decision Making Online Product Research, by Jim Jansen, September 29, 2010

  • "The commercial use of the internet by American adults has grown since the mid-2000s, with 58% of Americans now reporting that they perform online research concerning the products and services that they are considering purchasing. That is an increase from 49% who said they conducted product or service research online in 2004. Moreover, the number of those who do research about products on any given day has jumped from 15% of adults in September 2007 to 21% in September 2010. From February 2004, the number of adults conducting research on any given day has more than doubled, up from 9%. Additionally, 24% of American adults say they have posted comments or reviews online about the product or services they buy, indicating a willingness to share their opinions about products and the buying experience with others.“Many Americans begin their purchasing experience by doing online research to compare prices, quality, and the reviews of other shoppers..."

  • October 10, 2010
    * WSJ: Former FTC Employee Files Complaint Over Google Privacy

    WSJ: "A former Federal Trade Commission employee has filed a complaint with the agency accusing Google Inc. of not adequately protecting the privacy of consumers’ search queries. The complaint was filed September 6 by Christopher Soghoian, who worked until August as a technologist with the FTC’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection. It calls on the agency to investigate Google and to “compel Google to take proactive steps to protect the privacy of individual users’ search terms.” The complaint alleges Google shares with third parties users’ search queries, including those that contain personal information. In an emailed statement, Google said its passing of search-query data to third parties “is a standard practice across all search engines” and that “webmasters use this to see what searches bring visitors to their websites.” The statement added, “Google does not pass any personal information about the source of the query to the destination website.”

  • Via Christopher Soghoian's blog posting: "The complaint centers around an obscure feature in web browsers, known as the HTTP referrer header. Danny Sullivan, a widely respected search engine industry analyst has written that the HTTP referrer header is "effectively the Caller ID of the internet. It allows web site owners and marketers to know where visitors came from." However, while practically everyone with a telephone knows about the existence of caller ID, as Danny also notes, the existence of the referrer header is "little known to most web surfers." This header reveals to the websites you visit the URL of the page you were viewing before you visited that site. When you visit a site after clicking on a link in a search engine results page, that site learns the terms you searched for (because Google and the other search engines include your search terms in the URL).
  • August 22, 2010
    * The Future of the Internet - FCC Public Hearing
    • 8/20/10 - Statement of FCCC ommissioner Clyburn at "The Future of the Internet" Public Hearing, Minneapolis, Minnesota: "an open Internet is indeed the great equalizer. It enables traditionally underrepresented groups—like minorities and women—to have an equal voice and an equal opportunity. It allows any connected individual to distribute their ideas to a global network or run their business right from their very own home.."
    • 8/19/10 - Statement of Commissioner Copps at "The Future of the Internet" Public Hearing Minneapolis, Minnesota: "What happened was that in less than a generation, a media landscape that should have been moving toward more diversity, more localism and more competition was transformed into a market controlled by a handful of players, too often providing little more than infotainment, canned music and program homogenization. Their newsrooms were shuttered, reporters were yanked off the beat and fired, and investigative journalism consigned to the endangered species list. The apologists told us this was the natural result of changes in technology and markets, and things would all work out fine in the world of new media if we just looked the other way a while longer. The facts told another story. The huge debts these mega-companies took on to curry favor with investors and hedge-fund operators overwhelmed broadcaster obligations to be good stewards of the people’s airwaves. The public’s right to know got lost in the frenzy of financial hyper-speculation.
    August 10, 2010
    * WSJ Graphic Examines Google's Widening Reach

    "Google, a company with vast pools of data about us, is moving into the world of highly targeted ads." See this graphic for details covering 1998 to present.

    August 01, 2010
    * WSJ Investigation - The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets

    The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets - A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series, by Julia Angwin: "The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.

    • The study found that the nation's 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.
    • Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to "cookie" files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.
    • These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months."

    July 29, 2010
    * National Cyber Security Alliance launches Web portal for 2010 National Cyber Security Awareness Month

    News release: "The National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), a public-private partnership focused on educating a digital citizenry to stay safe and secure online, today launched its National Cyber Security Awareness Month Web portal with information on events, activities, promotions and educational materials to be used in preparation for the online safety month to be held in October. Anyone – family, employers, consumers, teachers, and students – interested in online safety is encouraged to access the portal, and all materials are free to use."

    * House Financial Services Committee Approves Legislation to Legalize Internet Gaming

    News release: "July 28, 2010, the House Financial Services Committee passed legislation to enable Americans to bet online and put an end to an inappropriate interference with their personal freedom. H.R. 2267, the Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act of 2009 would establish a federal regulatory and enforcement framework under which Internet gambling operators could obtain licenses authorizing them to accept bets and wagers from individuals in the United States. The legislation comes in response to the enactment of Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), which restricted the use of the payments system for Americans who gamble online."

  • "The Internet Gambling Regulation Consumer Protection & Enforcement Act would establish a federal regulatory and enforcement framework under which Internet gambling operators could obtain licenses authorizing them to accept bets and wagers from individuals in the U.S., on the condition that they maintain effective protections against underage gambling, compulsive gambling, money laundering and fraud, and enforce prohibitions or restrictions on types of gambling prohibited by states, and Indian Tribes."
  • July 27, 2010
    * Consumer Federation of America: 2009 Consumer Complaint Survey Report

    Consumer Federation of America, National Association of Consumer Agency Administrators, North American Consumer Protection Investigators - 2009 Consumer Complaint Survey Report, July 27, 2010

  • "1. Auto: (1) Misrepresentations in advertising or sales of new and used cars; lemons; faulty repairs; leasing and towing disputes
  • 2. Credit/Debt: (3) Billing and fee disputes; mortgage-related fraud; credit repair; debt relief services; predatory lending; illegal or abusive debt collection tactics
  • 3. Home Improvement/Construction: (2) Shoddy work; failure to start or complete the job
  • 4. Utilities: (4) Service problems or billing disputes with phone, cable, satellite, Internet, electric and gas services
  • 5. Retail Sales: (5) False advertising and other deceptive practices; defective merchandise; problems with rebates, coupons, gift cards and gift certificates; failure to deliver
  • 6. Services: (6) Misrepresentations; shoddy work; failure to have required licenses; failure to perform
  • 7. Internet Sales: (9) Misrepresentations or other deceptive practice; failure to deliver online purchases
  • 8. Household Goods: (7) misrepresentations; failure to deliver; faulty repairs in connection with furniture or appliances
  • 9. (tie) Landlord/Tenant: (8) Unhealthy or unsafe conditions; failure to make repairs or provide promised amenities; deposit and rent disputes; illegal eviction tactics; Home Solicitations: (9) Misrepresentations or failure to deliver in door-to-door, telemarketing or mail solicitations; do-not-call violations
  • 10. Health Products/Services: (10) misleading claims; unlicensed practitioners; failure to deliver.
  • July 26, 2010
    * The Effect of Market Leadership in Business Process Innovation: The Case(s) of E-Business Adoption

    The Effect of Market Leadership in Business Process Innovation: The Case(s) of E-Business Adoption, Kristina Steffenson McElheran, Working Paper 10-104, Harvard Business School

  • "This paper empirically investigates how market leadership influences firm propensity to adopt new business process innovations. Using a unique data set spanning roughly 35,000 plants in 86 U.S. manufacturing industries, I study the adoption of frontier e-business practices during the early diffusion of the commercial internet. Theory predicts that firms with greater market share will be more likely to adopt innovations that build on their existing strengths, while they will resist more radical technological advances. While prior work primarily focuses on product innovation, I extend the logic into the business
    process setting to find that leaders were far more likely to adopt the incremental innovation of internetbased e-buying. However, they were commensurately less likely to adopt the more strategically sensitive and complex practice of e-selling. This pattern is remarkably robust, holding across a wide range of industries and controlling for factors such as productivity and related technological capabilities. The results are explicated by a framework I develop for understanding the drivers of this behavior and making it possible to classify business process innovations as radical or not. While greater market share promotes adoption of all types of business process innovations, this effect is outweighed by additional co-invention and coordination costs whenever a technological advance address strategically sensitive and complex
    business processes that must also span the firm boundary."
  • June 11, 2010
    * DOJ Reportedly Gives FTC Green Light to Investigate Apple

    Bloomberg reported, "The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is preparing to review allegations that Apple Inc. is engaging in anti-competitive tactics to restrict rivals in the mobile- advertising market, people familiar with the matter said. The FTC and U.S. Justice Department have been discussing which agency should conduct the investigation, one of the people said yesterday. Regulators decided earlier this week that the FTC would proceed, the person said."

    June 06, 2010
    * CNET: households are now paying for data delivery at least three times over

    Demands for universal data plans grow louder - "Between multiple cell phones, high-speed Internet connections, and even digital TV subscriptions, most households are now paying for data delivery at least three times over, and frequently paying the same provider twice. This is ridiculous, and it's time for some major consolidation. It's time for a universal data plan. I want to pay once (maybe twice) for data, I want that data to be unlimited, and I want to be able to use it in any fashion I choose." [Molly Wood, CNET News]

    May 03, 2010
    * Study: Economic Impact of Privacy on Online Behavioral Advertising

    BusinessWire: "A new study of 90 organizations actively engaged in online marketing concludes that in spite of an acknowledged return on investment, hundreds of millions of dollars are being held back from online behavioral advertising (OBA) over concerns that a lack of consumer trust in the practice could damage brand reputation. The study, Economic Impact of Privacy on Online Behavioral Advertising, conducted independently by the Ponemon Institute, found that although 70 percent of companies agreed that behaviorally targeted advertising substantially increases marketing and sales performance, and in spite of an overall favorable return, most companies surveyed have limited their online advertising budgets over privacy concerns. In fact, extrapolated results suggest that budgets would be as much as four times higher if not for these concerns. Among the study’s noteworthy results:
    98 percent of companies surveyed said they have restricted OBA because of privacy concerns;

  • 63 percent of companies surveyed rated OBA as their most effective form of marketing; and,
  • Overall, companies surveyed reported under-spending on OBA budgets by 75 percent due to privacy concerns.
  • For the 90 companies benchmarked, the total amount not spent on OBA was $604.9 million."
  • April 25, 2010
    * Commerce Internet Policy Task Force Nexus Between Privacy Policy and Innovation in Internet Economy

    "The Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force is conducting a comprehensive review of the nexus between privacy policy and innovation in the Internet economy. The Department seeks public comment from all Internet stakeholders, including the commercial, academic and civil society sectors, on the impact of current privacy laws in the United States and around the world on the pace of innovation in the information economy..The Department has launched the Privacy and Innovation Initiative to identify policies that will enhance: (1) The clarity, transparency,
    scalability and flexibility needed to foster innovation in the information economy; (2) the public confidence necessary for full citizen participation with the Internet; and (3) uphold
    fundamental democratic values essential to the functioning of a free market and a free society."

    April 19, 2010
    * Gadgets Not Necessarily Embraced on College Campuses

    Kindle Failed Tests at Several Colleges. Will iPads Do Better?, By Jeff Young, Chronicle of Higher Education

  • "Reed College plans to do a formal experiment with iPads by loading the devices with class readings and giving them to students to see how they compare with traditional textbooks. Reed was one of seven campuses to run a similar experiment with Kindles in partnership with Amazon—and students largely gave that device a failing grade. Now some of the same campuses plan to try the test with Apple's iPad, and the tough question is whether this device passes."
  • April 06, 2010
    * Comcast Corporation v. FCC - Appeals Court Rules Against Net Neutraility

    EFF: "In a ruling that imposes important limits on the FCC's authority to regulate the Internet, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today overturned the FCC ruling against Comcast for interfering with the BitTorrent traffic of its subscribers. The court found that the Commission had overstepped the limits of its "ancillary authority" when it disciplined Comcast for its clandestine blocking behavior. The ruling is not likely to make much difference to Comcast subscribers—Comcast had already agreed to cease its BitTorrent interdiction before the FCC's ruling was issued. Instead, the court's ruling is important because it represents a blow to FCC Chairman Genachowski's proposed net neutrality regulations, which are premised on the same theory of "ancillary jurisdiction" that the FCC used against Comcast and that the court rejected today."

  • The Economist - Hey internet entrepreneurs, nuts to you
  • April 04, 2010
    * Audit Bureau of Circulations board revises definition of mag digital edition, approves new reports for U.S. newspapers

    News release: "The board of the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) modified its definition of a digital magazine in the U.S. and Canada to accommodate new reading devices such as the Apple iPad. The new standards state that a replica digital edition must include a print edition's full editorial content and advertising, but it no longer needs to be presented in a layout identical to the print version. Replica digital editions will continue to be included in a magazine's circulation guarantee, or rate base...ABC confirmed that Wired magazine was the first publication to seek review of its iPad version, which will qualify as a digital replica edition under the bureau's new guidelines. GQ has offered an ABC approved replica app for the iPhone and iPod Touch since December 2009."

    April 01, 2010
    * Amended Free Credit Reports Rule Helps Consumers Avoid 'Free' Offers That Cost Money

    News release: "Starting tomorrow, a new Federal Trade Commission rule will help consumers avoid confusing ads for “free credit reports” – which often require them to buy credit monitoring or other services – with the federally mandated no-strings-attached credit reports available at AnnualCreditReport.com, or 877-322-8228. Under the Federal Trade Commission’s amended Free Credit Reports Rule, ads for these “free” offers must have clear disclosures. For example, Web sites offering free credit reports must have a disclosure, across the top of each page that mentions free credit reports, with links to AnnualCreditReport.com and FTC.gov. The amended Rule also requires nationwide consumer reporting agencies – Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion – to delay advertising for products or services on AnnualCreditReport.com until after consumers get their free credit reports. The amended Rule is effective on April 2, 2010, except for the wording of disclosures for television and radio ads, which takes effect on September 1, 2010."

    March 31, 2010
    * Report - The One-Way-Mirror Society: Privacy Implications of the New Digital Signage Networks

    World Privacy Forum: "New forms of sophisticated digital signage networks are being deployed widely by retailers and others in both public and private spaces. From simple people-counting sensors mounted on doorways to sophisticated facial recognition cameras mounted in flat video screens and end-cap displays, digital signage technologies are gathering increasing amounts of detailed information about consumers, their behaviors, and their characteristics, like age, gender, and ethnicity. These technologies are quickly becoming ubiquitous in the offline world, and there is little if any disclosure to consumers that information about behavioral and personal characteristics is being collected and analyzed to create highly targeted advertisements, among other things. Few if any consumers expect that the video screen they are watching, the kiosk they are typing on, or the game billboard they are interacting with is watching them back while gathering images of them and behavioral information. This is creating a one-way-mirror society with no notice or opportunity for consumers to consent to being monitored in retail, public, and other spaces or to consent to having their behavior analyzed for marketing and profit. The privacy problems inherent in digital networks are profound, and to date these issues have not been adequately addressed by anyone. This report by the World Privacy Forum seeks to shed light in a dark area and to start a more robust public debate. In addition to the report, the WPF has released with a group of the nation's leading consumer groups a set of privacy principles to be used in digital signage networks."

  • The One-Way-Mirror Society, Privacy Implications of the new Digital Signage Networks, by Pam Dixon, January 27, 2010
  • March 07, 2010
    * New on LLRX.com: Cloud Computing for Lawyers

    LLRX.com: Cloud Computing for Lawyers - This is Nicole L. Black's primer for the legal profession on an emerging technology which is defined as a "type of computing that is comparable to grid computing, [and] relies on sharing computing resources rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications. The goal of cloud computing is to apply traditional supercomputing power (normally used by military and research facilities) to perform tens of trillions of computations per second.

    * Magazines and Their Web Sites A Columbia Journalism Review survey and report

    Magazines and Their Web Sites, A Columbia Journalism Review survey and report by Victor Navasky with Evan Lerner, March 2010

  • "Virtually every significant magazine in the United States—and increasingly abroad—either already has, or is in the process of establishing, a Web site. These interactive Internet offspring speak to a new generation of magazine readers, and often reach audiences well beyond those of their parent publications. But their rise has also created a vast set of ethical, culture, legal, and business issues. Although those involved with magazines and their Web sites have varying levels of knowledge and sophistication about their métier, it’s fair to say that the proprietors of these sites don’t, for the most part, know what one another is doing, that there are no generally accepted standards or practices, that each Web site is making it up as it goes along, that it is like the wild west out there."
  • February 12, 2010
    * Amazon Providing Free Gov Docs for Kindle

    News release: "Amazon.com today announced that the Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2011, and Economic Report of the President, will both be available beginning tomorrow as free wireless downloads in Amazon's Kindle Store..."Our customers have always been heavy readers of books about current events and economic issues," said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content. "Now they can download these important public government documents in under 60 seconds and read them in the easy and portable format that Kindle affords." These important documents can be read and synched between Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhones, iPod touches, PCs and soon, Mac computers and BlackBerry smartphones."

    January 19, 2010
    * Survey Says 44% Of Google News Visitors Scan Headlines, Don’t Click Through

    TechCrunch - Research firm Outsell has published its third annual News Users’ report [fee only], which is based on a survey about the online and offline news preferences of 2,787 US news consumers. The Outsell report unsurprisingly predicts ongoing, steep drops in US newspapers’ print circulation as consumers continue to head online for news consumption and sharing, forecasting 3.5 percent annual declines in both daily and Sunday circulation by 2012. Interestingly enough, the research also talks of what is referred to as the “dramatic effect” aggregators like Google and Yahoo have had on print and online readership...“Though Google is driving some traffic to newspapers, it’s also taking a significant share away. A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers’ individual sites.”

    January 03, 2010
    * Growth of Cloud Computing and Parallel Security Risks

    Security in the Ether - Information technology's next grand challenge will be to secure the cloud--and prove we can trust it. By David Talbot, Technology Review, January/February 2010 [Dan Mitchel]

  • "In 2006, when Amazon introduced the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it was a watershed event in the quest to transform computing into a ubiquitous utility, like electricity. Suddenly, anyone could scroll through an online menu, whip out a credit card, and hire as much computational horsepower as necessary, paying for it at a fixed rate...Those systems would run on "virtual machines" that could be created and configured in an instant, disappearing just as fast when no longer needed. As their needs grew, clients could simply put more quarters into the meters. Amazon would take care of hassles like maintaining the data center and network. The virtual machines would, of course, run inside real ones: the thousands of humming, blinking servers clustered in Amazon's data centers around the world. The cloud computing service was efficient, cheap, and equally accessible to individuals, companies, research labs, and government agencies. But it also posed a potential threat. EC2 brought to the masses something once confined mainly to corporate IT systems: engineering in which Oz-like programs called hypervisors create and control virtual processors, networks, and disk drives, many of which may operate on the same physical servers."
  • Related postings on cloud computing
  • December 27, 2009
    * Amazon Kindle is the Most Gifted Item Ever on Amazon.com

    News release: Amazon.com, Inc. today announced [December 26, 2009] that Kindle has become the most gifted item in Amazon's history. On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books. The Kindle Store now includes over 390,000 books and the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read, including New York Times Bestsellers and New Releases."

  • See also this new LLRX.com article: Understanding the Limitations - and Maximizing the Value of eBooks: The holiday season is here, and many signs suggest that thousands of people are finding themselves new owners of electronic book ("eBook") readers. Whether it's an Amazon Kindle, a Barnes & Noble Nook, a Sony Reader, or any of the less heavily advertised devices currently on the market, electronic book readers are being trumpeted as a product that has finally hit the mainstream after years on the bleeding-edge. eBook readers, in fact, do have the potential to radically reshape how books are read. Equally important, according to Conrad J. Jacoby, they are already reshaping how books are bought and owned.
  • December 26, 2009
    * Newsweek Interview with Jeff Bezos on E-Books and Success of Kindle

    The Customer Is Always Right - Since founding Amazon in 1994, he has revolutionized retailing. Now he's out to transform how we read. By Daniel Lyons | NEWSWEEK.

  • "There are two ways that companies can extend what they're doing. One is they can take an inventory of their skills and competencies, and then they can say, "OK, with this set of skills and competencies, what else can we do?" And that's a very useful technique that all companies should use. But there's a second method, which takes a longer-term orientation. It is to say, rather than ask what are we good at and what else can we do with that skill, you ask, who are our customers? What do they need? And then you say we're going to give that to them regardless of whether we currently have the skills to do so, and we will learn those skills no matter how long it takes."
  • December 25, 2009
    * TIME - 50 Best Websites 2009

    TIME - 50 Best Websites 2009: "50 offerings that are indispensable to navigating, enjoying yourself, shopping or just killing time on the Web."

    December 23, 2009
    * New on LLRX.com - Understanding the Limitations - and Maximizing the Value - of eBooks

    LLRX.com: Understanding the Limitations - and Maximizing the Value- of eBooks: The holiday season is here, and many signs suggest that thousands of people are finding themselves new owners of electronic book ("eBook") readers. Whether it's an Amazon Kindle, a Barnes & Noble Nook, a Sony Reader, or any of the less heavily advertised devices currently on the market, electronic book readers are being trumpeted as a product that has finally hit the mainstream after years on the bleeding-edge. eBook readers, in fact, do have the potential to radically reshape how books are read. Equally important, according to Conrad J. Jacoby, they are already reshaping how books are bought and owned.

    December 19, 2009
    * The eYouGuide now speaks 10 languages

    The eYouGuide, Europe's first online tool giving consumers practical advice on their "digital rights" under EU law is now available in 10 languages. "The eYouGuide was launched in Strasbourg on 5 May 2009 (see IP/09/702). The guide provides information on a number of issues related to online activities, such as shopping online, networking, uploading and downloading content and making online payments, just to mention a few. It is meant as a tool to improve consumers' awareness and confidence in the digital environment. The website will be updated and extended to more EU languages at the beginning of 2010."

    December 04, 2009
    * FTC Renews Call to Entertainment Industry to Curb Marketing of Violent Entertainment to Children

    News release: "Marketers of violent music, movies, and video games can do more to restrict the promotion of these products to children, according to the seventh in a series of Federal Trade Commission reports on marketing violent entertainment to children. The FTC’s report states that the music industry still has not adopted objective marketing standards limiting ad placement for explicit-content music. As a result, the industry still advertises music labeled with a Parental Advisory Label (PAL) on television shows viewed by a substantial number of children. Music retailers routinely sell labeled music to unaccompanied teens. The report also finds that movie studios intentionally market PG-13 movies to children under 13, and the movie industry does not have explicit standards in place to restrict this practice. The growing practice of releasing unrated DVDs undermines the rating system, and confuses parents."

  • Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children: A Sixth Follow-up Review of Industry Practices in the Motion Picture, Music Recording & Electronic Game Industries, December 2009
  • December 02, 2009
    * Publishers Can Now Opt Out of Google News Search Indexing

    Google News Blog: "There are more than 25,000 publishers from around the world in Google News today. [With] the new Google News web crawler publishers [can]...keep their content out of Google News and still remain in Google Search...if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don't even have to contact us - they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today. In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. They'll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead. Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel free...All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is Robots Exclusion Protocol (or REP)."

    November 25, 2009
    * New York Review of Books: Google and the New Digital Future

    Follow up to previous postings on Google Book Search (GBS), Google and the New Digital Future, Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard

  • "...The digitizing, open-access distribution, and preservation of orphan works could be done by a nonprofit organization such as the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group that was built as a digital library of texts, images, and archived Web pages. In order to avoid conflict with interests in the current commercial market, the database would include only books in the public domain and orphan works. Its time span would increase as copyrights expired, and it could include an opt-in provision for rightsholders of books that are in copyright but out of print. The work need not be done in haste. At the rate of a million books a year, we would have a great library, free and accessible to everyone, within a decade. And the job would be done right, with none of the missing pages, botched images, faulty editions, omitted artwork, censoring, and misconceived cataloging that mar Google's enterprise. Bibliographers—who appear to play little or no part in Google's enterprise—would direct operations along with computer engineers. Librarians would cooperate with both in order to assure the preservation of the books, another weak point in GBS, because Google is not committed to maintaining its corpus, and digitized texts easily degrade or become inaccessible."
  • November 23, 2009
    * Google Product Search - for stuff to buy

    Official Google Blog: "Google Product Search can help you find what you're looking for at a great price. You can compare products and prices from merchants across the web, from popular retailers like Amazon and Best Buy to places to buy unique gifts like eBay and Etsy."

    October 20, 2009
    * BookServer is an open system to find, buy, or borrow e- books

    Internet Archive BookServer: "The widespread success of digital reading devices has proven that the world is ready to read books on screens. As the audience for digital books grows, we can evolve from an environment of single devices connected to single sources into a distributed system where readers can find books from sources across the Web to read on whatever device they have. Publishers are creating digital versions of their popular books, and the library community is creating digital archives of their printed collections. BookServer is an open system to find, buy, or borrow these books, just like we use an open system to find Web sites. The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model allows a wide network of publishers, booksellers, libraries, and even authors to make their catalogs of books available directly to readers through their laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. BookServer facilitates pay transactions, borrowing books from libraries, and downloading free, publicly accessible books."

  • See also cnet: "...the Wall Street Journal reported details on Barnes & Noble's $259 e-reader called the Nook, which will compete with Amazon's Kindle and Sony's E-Reader, a move which heats up the market. More interesting may be Google's announcement last week of its "Google Editions" store, an initiative aimed at offering digital editions of books from publishers with which it already has distribution deals. Google said that should mean about a half-million books would be available initially, either through Google itself, or through sites like Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble."
  • October 09, 2009
    * NYT Op Ed - A Library to Last Forever

    Follow up to previous postings on the Google Book Settlement, this New York Times Op-Ed today: A Library to Last Forever, by Sergey Brin/Google: "Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting. The next year we were sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over the project. While we have had disagreements, we have a common goal — to unlock the wisdom held in the enormous number of out-of-print books, while fairly compensating the rights holders. As a result, we were able to work together to devise a settlement that accomplishes our shared vision. While this settlement is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are the readers who will now have access to a greatly expanded world of books.

    September 29, 2009
    * Survey: Two-Thirds of Americans Object to Online Tracking

    New York Times: "About two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley."

  • Contrary to what marketers say, Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and the activities that enable it. Joseph Turow, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, et al.September 2009.
  • September 28, 2009
    * Deloitte: Cloud computing - A collection of working papers

    Deloitte: Cloud computing - A collection of working papers, released September 17, 2009 and published on July 31, 2009.

  • "Cloud Computing frequently is taken to be a term that simply renames common technologies and techniques that we have come to know in IT. It may be interpreted to mean data center hosting and then subsequently dismissed without catching the improvements to hosting called utility computing that permit near realtime, policy-based control of computing resources. Or it may be interpreted to mean only data center hosting rather than understood to be the significant shift in Internet application architecture that it is...Cloud computing represents a different way to architect and remotely manage computing resources. One has only to establish an account with Microsoft or Amazon or Google to begin building and deploying application systems into a cloud. These systems can be, but certainly are not restricted to being, simplistic. They can be web applications that require only http services. They might require a relational database. They might require web service infrastructure and message queues. There might be need to interoperate with CRM or e-commerce application services, necessitating construction of a custom technology stack to deploy into the cloud if these services are not already provided there."
  • September 20, 2009
    * IBM Patent Application - 'Platform for Capturing Knowledge'

    IBM Patent Application: Platform for Capturing Knowledge, September 10, 2009: "A platform used for capturing knowledge. More specifically, a framework configured to capture expert knowledge (e.g., of trained and/or skilled workers) for future instructional purposes (e.g., training of a younger, or less experienced, workforce). The platform comprises a knowledge recorder, instructional design tool, standardized XML, and gaming engine. The knowledge recorder is configured to capture knowledge of a user, which is transferable using a standardized XML format. The instructional design tool is configured to visually model a gaming scenario in order to expose and define logical situations based on the captured knowledge."

  • Via Slashdot to Cringley on Technology: "IBM’s proposed Platform for Capturing Knowledge describes how to use an imersive gaming environment to transfer expert knowledge held by employees “aged 50 and older” to 18-25 year-old trainees who find manuals “difficult to read and understand. IBM also discusses how its invention could be made available for customers’ use in return for “payment from the customer(s) under a subscription and/or fee agreement.”
  • September 16, 2009
    * Paying for Digital Goods: Google Checkout

    Google proposal: "The Newspaper Association of America's Request for Information "seeks to gather information about the products and services available from qualified providers with expertise in helping local online publishers additionally monetize digital content, either through transactions (pay for content) and/or through collection of user data for enhanced advertising targeting or other 'access to content programs." This document identifies Google's capabilities in these areas, highlights our planned and existing tools, lays out our vision for what this ecosystem might look like, and hopefully opens the door to more detailed discussions with the NAA and individual publishers. Google believes that an open web benefits all users and publishers. However, "open" need not mean free. We believe that content on the Internet can thrive supported by multiple business models -- including content available only via subscription. While we believe that advertising will likely remain the main source of revenue for most news content, a paid model can serve as an important source of additional revenue. In addition, a successful paid content model can enhance advertising opportunities, rather than replace them." [Nieman Journalism Lab]

  • Economist.com: Google's mad scientists reanimate news industry
  • September 03, 2009
    * Google Explains Email Outage and Comments Fly

    Official Gmail Blog: "Gmail's web interface had a widespread outage [September 1, 2009], lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I'd like to apologize to all of you — today's outage was a Big Deal, and we're treating it as such. We've already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we're currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation."

  • Google Gaffe: Gmail Outage Shows Pitfalls of Online Services: "Google’s Gmail system was down for 2.5 hours earlier this week, the sixth such outage in the past eight months. It isn’t unusual that an e-mail system crashes, but most such occurrences are limited to one organization. When Gmail, a service Google touts to businesses as more reliable and easier to use than Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino, goes down, it makes headlines – as well it should."
  • September 01, 2009
    * Online Behavioral Tracking and Targeting, Legislative Primer September 2009

    Online Behavioral Tracking and Targeting Concerns and Solutions, Legislative Primer September 2009 - from the Perspective of: Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Consumer Watchdog, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy Lives, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Privacy Times, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, The World Privacy Forum.

  • News release: "EFF and a coalition of other consumer and privacy groups called on Congress today to protect Americans' privacy from invasive online behavioral tracking and targeting. In letters sent to the House Energy and Commerce Committee and two subcommittees, the groups delivered a legislative primer:
    "Tracking people’s every move online is an invasion of privacy. It’s like being followed by an invisible stalker – individuals aren’t aware that it’s happening, who is tracking them, and how the information will be used. They’re not asked for their consent and have no meaningful control over the collection and use of their information, often by third-parties with which they have no relationships."
  • August 19, 2009
    * Group Identifies the Worst Proposed Internet Laws in America

    "Launched in June, iAWFUL identifies America's 10 worst legislative and regulatory proposals targeted at the Internet. The iAWFUL Web site urges Internet users to join the fight to fix or fight against bills that threaten the future of online commerce and communication. The list is regularly updated to reflect the most immediate dangers, based on regulatory severity and likelihood of passage."

    August 18, 2009
    * American Customer Satisfaction Index Annual E-Business Report

    American Customer Satisfaction Index - Annual E-Business Report, August 18, 2009, by Larry Freed
    President and CEO, ForeSee Results

  • "In 2009, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) score for the e-business sector rises to an all-time high of 81.5 on the ACSI’s 100-point scale, a 29% increase in customer satisfaction since the industry was first measured in 2000. The aggregate e-business score is comprised of an average of many individual portals, search engines, and news websites, all of which were also rated on the ACSI’s 100-point scale and are discussed later in the report. The ACSI e-business sector is made up of two major industries and measures the players with the greatest market share in each industry: search engines and portals (AOL, Ask, Google, MSN, and Yahoo) and news and information sites (ABCNews.com, CNN.com, MSNBC.com, NYTimes.com, and USAToday.com)"
  • August 12, 2009
    * EPIC Forces Disclosure of Government Contracts with Social Media Companies, Privacy Terms Missing

    "In response to an EPIC Freedom of Information Act Request, the Government Services Administration released several contracts between the federal government and web 2.0 companies, including agreements with Blip.tv, Blist, Google (YouTube), Yahoo (Flickr), and MySpace. EPIC also obtained amendments to agreements with Facebook, Slideshare.net, Vimeo.com, and AddThis.com. The contracts do not address the privacy obligations of social media companies. The GSA letter to EPIC explained that “no specific Web 2.0 guidance currently exists,” but provided EPIC with Training Slides that raise privacy issues. The GSA Agreement with Google actually states that, “to the extent any rules or guidelines exist prohibiting the use of persistent cookies in connection with Provider Content applies to Google, Provider expressly waives those rules or guidelines as they may apply to Google.” Some of the agreements also permit companies to track users of government web sites for advertising purposes."

    August 08, 2009
    * Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society

    Fuchs, Christian. 2009. Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society. A Critical Case Study of the Usage of studiVZ, Facebook, and MySpace by Students in Salzburg in the Context of Electronic Surveillance. Salzburg/Vienna: Research Group UTI. ISBN 978-3-200-01428-2.

  • "674 students from Salzburg participated in the study that was conducted by the eTheory Research Group (University of Salzburg, ICT&S Center). 88.3% of the respondents use studiVZ, 39.5% Facebook, 15.9% MySpace, 9.0% Xing, 7.4% Lokalisten. Each of 61 other social networking sites (SNS) is used by less than 1%. Study author associate professor Christian Fuchs: "There are indications for a strong economic concentration in the area of social networking sites. On the one hand concerning usage, but as a consequence on the other hand also in relation to profits that are made by advertising".
    59.1% of the respondents see the maintenance of social contacts as the biggest advantage of SNS, 55.7% say that economic and political surveillance is the greatest risk. Fuchs: "Students are very aware of the massive collection of personal data on these platforms, they use them nonetheless because of the expected communicative advantages. This does not mean that they are incautious, but that there is a structural lack of alternative platforms. Non-commercial, non-profit SNS do not have to evaluate data for personalized advertisements, therefore the probability of surveillance and data abuse decreases. But such platforms are currently hardly existent or completely unknown, therefore young people − the main usage group of social networking sites − have to rely on commercial service providers that collect, store, and evaluate personal data in order to accumulate profits by targeted advertising"."
  • July 29, 2009
    * New on LLRX.com - After Hours: Fancy Foods Are Alive and Well

    After Hours: Fancy Foods Are Alive and Well - Kathy Biehl returns, sharing the highlights of the 2009 Summer Fancy Food Show, which ran June 28-30 in New York City.

    July 26, 2009
    * Twitter 101 for Business - A Special Guide

    Twitter 101 for Business: "Every day, millions of people use Twitter to create, discover and share ideas with others. Now, people are turning to Twitter as an effective way to reach out to businesses, too. From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter."

    July 17, 2009
    * Financial Times Editor Predicts End of Free News Organization Content

    Guardian UK: "The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that "almost all" news organisations will be charging for online content within a year. Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the key challenges facing news organisations."

    July 14, 2009
    * Filesharing music amongst UK teens down by a third

    "UK Music fans are turning their backs on regular file-sharing in favour of streaming and other ways of sharing music, especially amongst teens, according to the latest survey by The Leading Question, the specialist media and technology research agency. Following the recent Digital Britain Report which set out the UK Government’s stance on how to curb file-sharing, the annual survey of more than 1000 music fans from The Leading Question, in conjunction with Music Ally, shows that the nature of the file-sharing threat is already changing."

    July 13, 2009
    * International publishers demand new intellectual property rights protection to safeguard the future of journalism

    News release, July 9, 2009: "On the day that Commissioner Viviane Reding unveils her strategy for a Digital Europe during the Lisbon Council, and as the European Commission's consultation on the Content Online Report draws to a close this week, senior members of the publishing world are presenting to Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding and Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, a landmark declaration adopted on intellectual property rights in the digital world in a bid to ensure that opportunities for a diverse, free press and quality journalism thrive online into the future."

  • Hamburg Declaration on Intellectual Property Rights - signatures (09 July 2009)
  • July 12, 2009
    * Cornell Research Study: Optimizing Web Traffic via the Media Scheduling Problem

    Optimizing Web Traffic via the Media Scheduling Problem. Lars Backstrom, Jon Kleinbergy, Ravi Kumar, 15th ACM SIGKDD Intl. Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2009: "Website traffic varies through time in consistent and predictable ways, with highest traffic in the middle of the day. When providing media content to visitors, it is important to present repeat visitors with new content so that they keep coming back. In this paper we present an algorithm to balance the need to keep a website fresh with new content with the desire to present the best content to the most visitors at times of peak traffic. We formulate this as the media scheduling problem, where we attempt to maximize total clicks, given the overall traffic pattern and the time varying clickthrough rates of available media content. We present an efficient algorithm to perform this scheduling under certain conditions and apply this algorithm to real data obtained from server logs, showing evidence of significant improvements in traffic from our algorithmic schedules. Finally, we analyze the click data, presenting models for why and how the clickthrough rate for new content declines as it ages."

  • New York Times: Study Measures the Chatter of the News Cycle - "For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign." See also Picturing the News Cycle Graphic
  • July 06, 2009
    * Cross-industry Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising

    News release: "A group of the nation's largest media and marketing trade associations...released self-regulatory principles to protect consumer privacy in ad-supported interactive media that will require advertisers and Web sites to clearly inform consumers about data collection practices and enable them to exercise control over that information...This cross-industry self-regulatory task force represents the first time that representatives of the entire advertising ecosystem have come together to develop principles for the use and collection of data in this important area to the economy."

  • Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising, July 2009
  • New York Times: Four Privacy Protections the Online Ad Industry Left Out
  • * Predicting Social Security numbers from public data

    Predicting Social Security numbers from public data, Alessandro Acquisti1 and Ralph Gross, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, May 5, 2009 (received for review January 18, 2009)

  • "Information about an individual's place and date of birth can be exploited to predict his or her Social Security number (SSN). Using only publicly available information, we observed a correlation between individuals' SSNs and their birth data and found that for younger cohorts the correlation allows statistical inference of private SSNs. The inferences are made possible by the public availability of the Social Security Administration's Death Master File and the widespread accessibility of personal information from multiple sources, such as data brokers or profiles on social networking sites. Our results highlight the unexpected privacy consequences of the complex interactions among multiple data sources in modern information economies and quantify privacy risks associated with information revelation in public forums."
  • July 01, 2009
    * FTC Cracks Down on Scammers Trying to Take Advantage of the Economic Downturn

    News release: "The Federal Trade Commission today announced a law enforcement crackdown on scammers trying to take advantage of the economic downturn to bilk vulnerable consumers through a variety of schemes, such as promising non-existent jobs; promoting overhyped get-rich-quick plans, bogus government grants, and phony debt-reduction services; or putting unauthorized charges on consumers’ credit or debit cards. Dubbed “Operation Short Change,” the law enforcement sweep announced today includes 15 FTC cases, 44 law enforcement actions by the Department of Justice, and actions by at least 13 states and the District of Columbia."

  • Related postings on financial system
  • June 28, 2009
    * Is Google Really in a Competitive Space?

    New York Times: "Google handles roughly two-thirds of all Internet searches. It owns the largest online video site, YouTube, which is more than 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor. And last year, Google sold nearly $22 billion in advertising, more than any media company in the world."

  • See also via ZDNet and ConsumerWatchdog.org: "With Justice Department scrutiny over the Google Books Settlement only the the leading edge of antitrust regulators’ attention to Google, the company has launched a dog-and-pony show dedicated to combating the impression that more control is needed. In a presentation (PDF) acquired by Consumer Watchdog, Google public affairs lead Adam Kovacevich argued that Google is anything but anti-competitive. Its success comes from “learning by doing,” the presentation says."
  • June 21, 2009
    * FTC Proposed Guidelines to Monitor Blogs For Commerical Claims and Payments

    Federal Trade Commission, 16 C.F.R. Part 255 Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising..."In order to limit its potential liability, the advertiser should ensure that the advertising service provides guidance and training to its bloggers concerning the need to ensure that statements they make are truthful and substantiated. The advertiser should also monitor bloggers who are being paid to promote its products and take steps necessary to halt the continued publication of deceptive representations when they are discovered..."

  • See also related Forrester report, March 2, 2009 - Add Sponsored Conversations To Your Toolbox - Why You Should Pay Bloggers To Talk About Your Brand, by Sean Corcoran with Josh Bernoff, Jeremiah Owyang, Tom Cummings, and Jennifer Wise: "Kmart gave some bloggers a free shopping spree in exchange for a blog post about the experience — a practice we call sponsored conversation. With appropriate protections for disclosure and authenticity, this practice will take its place alongside public relations and advertising activities in the blogosphere. Marketers should take advantage of sponsored conversation as an entrée into the online conversation. To succeed, you should get to know the bloggers you plan to work with and set expectations across your organization."
  • * Google Book Search Settlement Continues to Generate Controversy

    TIME: "In a complex settlement agreement, which took three years to hammer out and spans 135 pages excluding attachments, Google will be allowed to show up to 20% of the books' text online at no charge to Web surfers. But the part of the settlement that deals with so-called orphan books — which refers to out-of-print books whose authors and publishers are unknown — is what's ruffling the most feathers in the literary henhouse. The deal gives Google an exclusive license to publish and profit from these orphans, which means it won't face legal action if an author or owner comes forward later. This, critics contend, gives it a competitive edge over any rival that wants to set up a competing digital library. And without competition, opponents fear Google will start charging exorbitant fees to academic libraries and others who want full access to its digital library. "It will make Google virtually invulnerable to competition," says Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system."

    June 19, 2009
    * FTC Staff Report: February 2009 Self-Regulatory Principles For Online Behavioral Advertising

    News release: "The Federal Trade Commission today sent a copy of a recent staff report, Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising, to two subcommittees of the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce that are holding a joint hearing on behavioral advertising. A letter on behalf of the Commission that accompanied the report states that the FTC “has actively encouraged industry to embrace new measures relating to behavioral advertising to inform and empower consumers and is monitoring developments” so that consumers’ privacy is protected. The letter and report were sent to the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, and the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection."

    June 07, 2009
    * EFF Launches 'Terms of Service' Tracker for Facebook, Google, eBay, and More

    News release: "Terms of Service" policies on websites define how Internet businesses interact with you and use your personal information. But most web users don't read these policies -- or understand that the terms are constantly changing. To track these ever-evolving documents, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is launching "TOSBack": a "terms of service" tracker for Facebook, Google, eBay, and other major websites...At www.TOSBack.org, you can see a real-time feed of changes and updates to more than three dozen polices from the Internet's most popular online services. Clicking on an update brings you to a side-by-side before-and-after comparison, highlighting what has been removed from the policy and what has been added."

    May 31, 2009
    * Impact of URL Shorteners - Food for Thought

    URL shorteners, such as TinyURL, bit.ly and notlong.com allow users to share and post links in a quicker manner with less likelihood of misdirection. They also add an intermediary between the reader and the site of origin, and the risk of countless dead links if and when the business model of the respective services ceases to sustain a viable return.

  • See also 11 Ways to Shorten and Lengthen a Tweet
  • May 25, 2009
    * U.S. Government Agencies and Internet Retailers Receive Failing Grade in

    News release: " The Online Trust Alliance (OTA) gave leading government agencies and online retailers a failing grade in preventing deceptive email and phishing scams based on its newly released analysis of email authentication adoption. While adoption has grown over the past year, OTA found approximately 56 percent of the top .gov sites – including Whitehouse.gov, FBI.gov, Treasury.gov and DHS.gov – still are not protecting U.S. citizens through the use of email authentication. At the same time, progress has been made by other government agencies including the Census Bureau, CIA, FDIC, VA and FTC."

    May 10, 2009
    * Mainstream Media Under Increasing Pressure

    Follow up to April 26, 2009 posting - WSJ Interactive Map - Adverse events at top 100 newspapers, 2006-2009, this New York Times op-ed by Frank Rich - The American Press on Suicide Watch: "Newspaper circulations and revenues are in free fall. Legendary brands from The Los Angeles Times to The Philadelphia Inquirer are teetering. The New York Times Company threatened to close The Boston Globe if its employees didn’t make substantial sacrifices in salaries and benefits. Other papers have died. The reporting ranks on network and local news alike are shriveling. You know it’s bad when the Senate is moved, as it was last week, to weigh in with hearings on The Future of Journalism."

  • See also Financial Times: WSJ plans micro-fees for online articles - "News Corp plans to introduce micro-payments for individual articles and premium subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal's website this year in a milestone in the news industry's race to find better online business models."
  • May 09, 2009
    * The World Internet Project Report 2009

    News release: "Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg with 13 Partner Countries Release First World Internet Project Report - Pioneering Report Finds Remarkable Similarities and Significant Differences Globally - Online Purchasing Not Yet Part of the Global Internet Experience; A Majority of Users Believe Only Half of the Information they Find Online is Reliable."

    April 23, 2009
    * House Hearing on Communications Networks and Consumer Privacy

    The Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet held a hearing titled, Communications Networks and Consumer Privacy: Recent Developments on April 23, 2009. The hearing focused on technologies that network operators utilize to monitor consumer usage and how those technologies intersect with consumer privacy. The hearing explored three ways to monitor consumer usage on broadband and wireless networks: deep packet inspection (DPI); new uses for digital set-top boxes; and wireless Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking."
    Testimony and Statement for the Record of Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director, EPIC Adjunct Professor, Georgetown University Law Center: "we believe it is becoming clear that unregulated collection of consumer data is posing an increasing danger to online privacy and maybe even to the economic model itself. A small number of companies and large advertising networks are obtaining an extraordinarily detailed profile of the interests, activities and personal characteristics of Internet users. Users have little idea how much information is gathered, who has access to it, or how it is used. This last point is critical because in the absence of legal rules, companies that are gathering this data will be free to use it for whatever purpose they wish – the data for a targeted ad today could become a detailed personal profile sold to a prospective employer or a government agency tomorrow."

    February 15, 2009
    * FTC Staff Revises Online Behavioral Advertising Principles

    News release: "Federal Trade Commission staff...issued a report describing its ongoing examination of online behavioral advertising and setting forth revisions to proposed principles to govern self-regulatory efforts in this area. The key issue concerns how online advertisers can best protect consumers’ privacy while collecting information about their online activities...The report discusses the potential benefits of behavioral advertising to consumers, including the free online content that advertising generally supports and personalization that many consumers appear to value. It also discusses the privacy concerns that the practice raises, including the invisibility of the data collection to consumers and the risk that the information collected – including sensitive information regarding health, finances, or children – could fall into the wrong hands or be used for unanticipated purposes. Consistent with the FTC’s overall approach to consumer privacy, the report seeks to balance the potential benefits of behavioral advertising against the privacy concerns it raises, and to encourage privacy protections while maintaining a competitive marketplace."

  • Federal Trade Commission Staff Report - Self-Regulatory Principles For Online Behavioral Advertising: Tracking, Targeting, and Technology (February 2009)
  • Related: "CDT sees the release of the guidelines, which set a higher standard than existing industry principles, as a signal that companies are running out of time to step up their self-regulatory efforts. Although the FTC report raises the bar for self-regulation, the guidelines don't address all of CDT's concerns with online advertising and privacy. CDT looks forward to working with the agency and Congress on legislation that could address online behavioral advertising and general consumer privacy."
  • February 01, 2009
    * New Tool Will Help Online Advertisers Develop Stronger Privacy Practices

    "Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) released a new assessment tool to help online advertising companies develop strong, appropriate privacy protections for the users they serve. Released to coincide with Data Privacy Day 2009, the Threshold Analysis for Online Advertising Practices, is the result of extensive consultation among CDT, Internet companies and public interest advocates. It notes a series of simple tests companies can use to determine whether online advertising activities may trigger the need for additional privacy protections. The document also provides suggestions on how companies can begin putting those protections in place."

    January 28, 2009
    * Pew Survey: Generations Online in 2009

    News release: "Over half of the adult internet population is between 18 and 44 years old. But larger percentages of older generations are online now than in the past, and they are doing more activities online, according to surveys taken from 2006-2008. Contrary to the image of Generation Y as the "Net Generation," internet users in their 20s do not dominate every aspect of online life. Generation X is the most likely group to bank, shop, and look for health information online. Boomers are just as likely as Generation Y to make travel reservations online. And even Silent Generation internet users are competitive when it comes to email (although teens might point out that this is proof that email is for old people)."

  • Generations Online in 2009 and related PowerPoint Presentation
  • December 28, 2008
    * Gartner Says 2008 Should Be the Last Christmas for Retail CDs

    News release: "The music industry must move away from the retail CD as its primary revenue generator before Christmas 2009, according to Gartner. Gartner said that reliance on revenue from the sale of prerecorded CDs is hindering the music industry from fully embracing online distribution opportunities...Enabling the transition away from retail music CDs toward online distribution is now in sight, given that 77 percent of U.S. households (a total of 96 million connections) will have broadband connections by 2012. Beyond these consumers, the alternative distribution afforded by Wi-Fi-enabled notebooks and rapidly improving media-enabled mobile phones pose opportunities that provide multiple paths for marketing, promotion and distribution outside the consumer’s home."

    December 20, 2008
    * Coalition Letter to President-elect Obama on the Future of Privacy

    "Thirty privacy, consumer, and civil liberties organizations sent a letter to President-elect Barack Obama on the importance of protecting privacy in the next administration. The organizations support the incoming president’s expressed on privacy, consumer rights, and civil liberties. President-elect Obama stated support for strengthening of privacy protection by harnessing the power of technology to hold government and businesses accountable for violations of personal privacy. The coalition said that “[t]here is a clear need to address the spiraling problems of identity theft, security breaches, and the commercialization of personal information.” For more information visit EPIC’s A-Z Privacy Page."

    December 17, 2008
    * Yahoo! Announces New Data Retention Policy

    Press release: "Today, Yahoo! Inc. announced a new global data retention policy that sets an industry-leading approach to user data privacy. This new policy strengthens Yahoo!'s relationship of trust with its 500 million users world-wide and enhances its longtime leadership on privacy. Under the new policy, Yahoo! will anonymize user log data within 90 days with limited exceptions for fraud, security and legal obligations. Yahoo! will also expand the policy to apply not only to search log data but also page views, page clicks, ad views and ad clicks."

    * The Network Advertising Initiative's Self-Regulatory Code of Conduct 2008

    2008 Network Advertising Initiative Principles: "Through the present 2008 revision to the NAI’s Self-Regulatory Code of Conduct, NAI members continue their commitment to respect appropriate fair information practices adapted for this medium and to their business models, maintaining self-regulation with respect to notice, choice, use limitation, access, reliability and security."

  • New York Times: "The trade group [NAI], which represents two dozen companies including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, wants to show that the Internet advertising industry can address privacy concerns through self regulation, to head off potential legislation on the topic. The incoming Obama administration and some in Congress have been interested in exploring new privacy rules. The group also wants to help its members preserve their advertising revenue. And drug ads aimed at people with diseases have become a quite lucrative business."
  • December 15, 2008
    * Most Trusted Companies for Privacy Survey Results Announced

    News release: "Privacy and information security research company Ponemon Institute along with TRUSTe, the most widely recognized Internet privacy trustmark, today announced the results of the Ponemon Institute’s fifth annual survey of Most Trusted Companies for Privacy. The study asked 6,486 adult-aged U.S. consumers which companies they thought were most trustworthy and which did the best job safeguarding personal information. A total of 706 companies were named by consumers; 211 made the final list of most trusted companies. American Express ranked as the Most Trusted Company for 2008 for Privacy, retaining its place from last year despite the current financial climate. eBay earned a ranking as the second most trusted company, while IBM, Amazon, and Johnson & Johnson rounded out the top five. While the financial services sector slipped amid industry-wide woes, the technology sector showed marked improvement as eBay Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, and HP all bettered previous rankings. Also of note, Facebook moved into the top 20 for the first time, signifying an increased trust in social networking as a mainstream communications tool."

  • Google off list of 20 most trusted companies
  • November 29, 2008
    * New York Times Op-Ed: How to Publish Without Perishing

    How to Publish Without Perishing, by James Gleick: "As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars...Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it."

  • May I add what so many of us have known throughout the span of our respective careers - librarians will never be obsolete - either.
  • November 24, 2008
    * EU - ICT Research The policy perspective: e-Government and e-Participation

    "In this report, e-Government and e-Participation, produced for the publication series ICT Research: The Policy Perspective, we examine how information and communications technology, or ICT, is revolutionising the way citizens, businesses and public administrations interact. The EU is investing heavily in e-government to help boost growth while delivering on the benefi ts of the information society, including greater cross-border collaboration, less fragmented research effort, and access to ICT anywhere, any time and by any one."

    November 19, 2008
    * Searchers Led Away From Branded Websites According to New Survey

    Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - US: "This week we are publishing a report on online brand protection. This issue is huge for marketers with our research showing that more than 1 in 10 US Internet searches for leading brands is led away from the brand owner's website. When you search for a brand in the phone book, you don't find that brand's competitors listed. But when you search online, that brand's fiercest competitors often appear in the sponsored listings. Online businesses need to be aware of the extent of the problem and to understand the best ways to deal with threats."

    November 18, 2008
    * The Future of Privacy Forum Launched

    The Future of Privacy Forum Agenda for Consumers and Businesses [See also: About the Forum]

    • "FPF will seek to bring transparency to online data practices. Our plan is to document practices, produce multi-media educational materials, and commission reports and studies that provide consumers and policy makers the real story about how their data is used.
    • FPF will seek to bring true transparency and user control to behavioral targeting and will broaden the discussion of the ethics of what the online norms can be with regard to use of web browsing.
    • FPF will seek to ensure that considerations around data retention, limitation, and deletion are a significant part of the consumer privacy debate.
    • FPF will seek to drive practices that enhance consumer controls - ensuring that data use is obvious, useful, intuitive and used and for a benefit he values and controls - no matter the type of technology used..."

    November 10, 2008
    * Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion

    Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion, October 2008 - Chris Kanich, Christian Kreibich, Kirill Levchenko, Brandon Enright, Geoffrey M. Voelker, Vern Paxson† Stefan Savage

  • "The “conversion rate” of spam — the probability that an unsolicited e-mail will ultimately elicit a “sale” — underlies the entire spam value proposition. However, our understanding of this critical behavior is quite limited, and the literature lacks any quantitative study concerning its true value. In this paper we present a methodology for measuring the conversion rate of spam. Using a parasitic infiltration of an existing botnet’s infrastructure, we analyze two spam campaigns: one designed to propagate a malware Trojan, the other marketing on-line pharmaceuticals. For nearly a half billion spam e-mails we identify the number that are successfully delivered, the number that pass through popular anti-spam filters, the number that elicit user visits to the advertised sites, and the number of “sales” and “infections” produced.
  • October 30, 2008
    * FTC Launches New Web Site for Kids

    "The Federal Trade Commission today launched a new Web site to introduce kids to key consumer and business concepts. Set in a shopping mall, http://www.ftc.gov/YouAreHere takes kids on an experiential journey that presents the FTC’s mission and its important role in American commerce. Kids under 12 are reported to spend billions of dollars on goods and services every year."

    September 27, 2008
    * Senate Commerce Committee Hearing: Broadband Providers and Consumer Privacy

    Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation - Hearing on: Broadband Providers and Consumer Privacy, September 25, 2008

  • Testimony of Gigi B. Sohn, President, Public Knowledge: "Today's hearing on consumer privacy comes in the wake of two high-profile online consumer privacy violations, both of which involved the use of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology on an Internet Service Provider's (ISP) network. The first instance came to light in October 2007, when an Associated Press report revealed that Comcast was interfering with its customers' BitTorrent traffic. The report confirmed earlier tests conducted by independent network researcher Robb Topolski, who found that Comcast was analyzing its users' web traffic in order to determine the types of applications and protocols being used. The company then used a technique called "packet spoofing" to delay, degrade and in some cases, block traffic that was identified as being used for BitTorrent, a popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol...
    The second instance surfaced in May 2008, when it was revealed that various regional ISPs had contracted with NebuAd, a company that provided highly targeted behavioral advertising solutions using DPI equipment. In test deployments of this technology, all of the traffic traveling over an ISP's network was routed through a DPI appliance which collected data on specific users, including web sites visited, terms searched for and services and applications used. This data was then sent to NebuAd, which in turn, used the data to create detailed user profiles. These profiles were used to display highly targeted advertisements, which were dynamically displayed to the user as he or she surfed the Web."
  • September 16, 2008
    * FTC Challenges Reed Elsevier’s Proposed $4.1 Billion Acquisition of ChoicePoint, Inc.

    News release: "The Federal Trade Commission today issued a complaint charging that Reed Elsevier Inc.’s (Reed Elsevier) proposed $4.1 billion acquisition of ChoicePoint Inc. (ChoicePoint) would be anticompetitive and in violation of the antitrust laws, as it would combine the two largest providers of electronic public record services to U.S. law enforcement customers.

    To eliminate the anticompetitive effects of the proposed acquisition, the FTC will require Reed Elsevier to divest assets related to ChoicePoint’s AutoTrackXP and Consolidated Lead Evaluation and Reporting (CLEAR) electronic public records services to Thomson Reuters Legal Inc., within 15 days after the proposed acquisition is consummated.

    Through its LexisNexis division, Reed Elsevier provides electronic public records services to law enforcement customers in direct competition with ChoicePoint’s AutoTrackXP and recently, ChoicePoint’s CLEAR, a new and advanced electronic public records service. Together, the two firms account for over 80 percent of the approximately $60 million U.S. market for the sale of electronic public records services to law enforcement customers."

    August 19, 2008
    * ACSI: Apple, Google Surge in Customer Satisfaction

    News release: "Customer satisfaction continues on a bumpy path without momentum or trend in the second quarter, according to the American
    Customer Satisfaction Index. After a small uptick last quarter, ACSI slips 0.1% to 75.1 on a 100-point scale. The ACSI second quarter report, released today from the University of Michigan’s National Quality Research Center, forecasts consumer spending will remain weak with growth of no more than 2.3% in the third quarter...Customer satisfaction with the e-business category of websites surges 6% to an all-time high of 79.3, largely on the remarkable improvement of Google. After slipping behind Yahoo! for the first time last year, Google surged an unparalleled 10% to leave all rivals in its wake. Google’s score of 86 sets a new standard for e-businesses and creates a formidable nine-point gap between its nearest competitor, Yahoo!, which fell 3% to 77."

    August 12, 2008
    * Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing: Targeting Children and Youth in the Digital Age

    "The Proliferation of the media in children's lives has created a new "marketing ecosystem" that encompasses cell phones, mobile music devices, instant messaging, videogames, and virtual three-dimensional worlds. This report by Jeff Chester from the Center for Digital Democracy and Kathryn Montgomery from American University describes new marketing practices that are fundamentally transforming how food and beverage companies do business with young people in the twenty-first century.[download 8 page brief pdf] [download 98 page full report pdf] [see examples, news coverage, and statements from Marion Nestle, Kelly Brownell, the Strategic Alliance, Senator Tom Harkin, and Congressman Edward J. Markey at [digitalads.org]"

  • "Children in the U.S. are facing a growing health crisis due in part to poor nutrition. Youth who are significantly overweight are at much greater risk for experiencing a variety of serious medical conditions, including digestive disorders, heart and circulatory illnesses, respiratory problems, and Type 2 diabetes, a disease that used to strike only adults. They are also more prone to suffer from depression and other mental illnesses. An estimated 30 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls born in the United States are at risk for being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives. Minority youth populations have been disproportionately affected. For example, African American and Mexican American adolescents between the ages of 12 and 19 are more likely to be overweight (at 21 percent and 23 percent, respectively) than are non-Hispanic White children in the same age group (14 percent). The Institute of Medicine has called on all sectors of society—industry, government, health professionals, communities, schools, and families—to address this health crisis."
  • August 05, 2008
    * DOJ: Retail Hacking Ring Charged for Stealing More Than 40 Million Credit and Debit Card Numbers from Major U.S. Retailers

    News release: "Eleven perpetrators allegedly involved in the hacking of nine major U.S. retailers and the theft and sale of more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers have been charged with numerous crimes, including conspiracy, computer intrusion, fraud and identity theft, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Michael J. Sullivan, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California Karen P. Hewitt, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Benton J. Campbell and U.S. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan announced today. The scheme is believed to constitute the largest hacking and identity theft case ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice."

  • Related: Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey at the Identity Theft Press Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, Tuesday, August 5, 2008
  • August 04, 2008
    * Commission Approves Final Consent Order in Matters of The TJX Companies, Inc., Reed Elsevier, Inc. and Seisint, Inc.

    Follow up to March 27, 2008 posting, FTC Announces Settlement of Action Against Data Brokers Reed Elsevier and Seisint for Failing to Provide Adequate Security for Consumers' Data, this August 1, 2008 FTC news release: "Following a public comment period, the Commission has approved the issuance of a final consent order and authorized the staff to respond to the commenters of record In The Matter of The TJX Companies, Inc...[and] In The Matter of Reed Elsevier Inc. and Seisint, Inc."

    Related from EPIC: "The settlements arose from data breaches, which exposed the sensitive personal information of over 500,000 consumers and resulted in millions of dollars in financial fraud. Earlier this year, EPIC filed comments with the FTC urging the Commission to include civil penalties in the settlements. EPIC wrote that civil penalties are necessary to provide incentives for companies to safeguard personal data. EPIC also noted that the FTC imposed $10 million in civil penalties in the Choicepoint case. The final agreements impose security and audit responsibilities, but no financial penalties."

    July 29, 2008
    July 08, 2008
    * National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse Report on Internet Activity Related to Controlled Prescription Drugs

    News release: "Despite a decline in the number of Web sites advertising or selling controlled prescription drugs, like OxyContin and Valium, Xanax and Vicodin, and Ritalin and Adderall, in the past year, 85 percent of Web sites selling such drugs do not require a prescription, according to You’ve Got Drugs! V: Prescription Drug Pushers on the Internet, the fifth annual White Paper on this subject released by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University."

    * Report: ISP, Ad Networking Scheme May Violate Federal and State Wiretap Laws

    News release: "The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) today released an analysis questioning the legal standing of a new approach to online advertising being considered by Internet Service Providers and Internet advertising networks. Under the new scheme, an ISP allows an advertising network to copy the contents of the individual Web traffic streams of the ISP's subscribers. The advertising network creates a record of each individual's online behavior, which is used to target ads to the consumer. CDT concludes that the use of Internet traffic content from ISPs may run afoul of federal and state wiretap laws unless performed with the prior, express consent of the subscriber. Some state laws may pose higher burdens."

  • An Overview of the Federal Wiretap Act, Electronic
    Communications Privacy Act, and State Two-Party Consent Laws
    of Relevance to the NebuAd System and Other Uses of Internet
    Traffic Content from ISPs for Behavioral Advertising, July 8, 2008
  • June 27, 2008
    * Biggest Expansion to Internet in Forty Years Approved for Implementation

    News release, June 26, 2008: "The Board of ICANN today approved recommendation that could see a whole range of new names introduced to the Internet's addressing system. "The Board today accepted a recommendation from its global stakeholders that it is possible to implement many new names to the Internet, paving the way for an expansion of domain name choice and opportunity" said Dr Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN. A final version of the implementation plan must be approved by the ICANN Board before the new process is launched. It is intended that the final version will be published in early 2009.

    "The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net," said Dr Twomey. "It's a massive increase in the 'real estate' of the Internet."

    Presently, users have a limited range of 21 top level domains to choose from — names that we are all familiar with like .com, .org, .info.

    This proposal allows applicants for new names to self-select their domain name so that choices are most appropriate for their customers or potentially the most marketable. It is expected that applicants will apply for targeted community strings such as (the existing) .travel for the travel industry and .cat for the Catalan community (as well as generic strings like .brandname or .yournamehere). There are already interested consortiums wanting to establish city-based top level domain, like .nyc (for New York City), .berlin and .paris.

    May 29, 2008
    * CDT Issues Privacy Principles for Digital Watermarking

    News release: "CDT today released a paper offering a set of principles for addressing potential privacy considerations when deploying digital watermarking technology. This technology embeds information within the content of digital media files in a form that is machine readable but often imperceptible to humans. Digital watermarking has a variety of applications and is increasingly being considered as a tool for deterring copyright infringement. CDT's paper is intended to provide guidance for companies that plan to use the technology to communicate information that is specific to individual consumers."

  • Privacy Principles for Digital Watermarking [PDF] May 29, 2008
  • May 18, 2008
    * UK Times: Shops secretly track customers via mobile phone

    Times Online: "Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones. The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around."

  • Related, also from Slashdot: "Path Intelligence has developed a proprietary, patent-pending, new technlogy that is able to accurately locate mobile phones whilst indoors."
  • * Pew Study on Internet and Consumer Choice

    News release: "The internet plays an important role in how people conduct research for purchases, but it is just one among a variety of sources people use and usually not the key factor in final purchasing decisions. A new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project tracks the decision-making processes for buying music, purchasing a cell phone, and buying or renting a home."

  • The Internet and Consumer Choice, May 18, 2008
  • May 16, 2008
    * Secure web browsing with the OP web browser

    Secure web browsing with the OP web browser, Chris Grier, Shuo Tang, and Samuel T. King, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  • "Current web browsers are plagued with vulnerabilities,
    providing hackers with easy access to computer systems
    via browser-based attacks. Browser security efforts that retrofit
    existing browsers have had limited success because the design of
    modern browsers is fundamentally flawed. To enable more secure
    web browsing, we design and implement a new browser, called
    the OP web browser, that attempts to improve the state-of-the-art
    in browser security. Our overall design approach is to combine
    operating system design principles with formal methods to design
    a more secure web browser by drawing on the expertise of both
    communities. Our overall design philosophy is to partition the
    browser into smaller subsystems and make all communication
    between subsystems simple and explicit. At the core of our design
    is a small browser kernel that manages the browser subsystems
    and interposes on all communications between them to enforce
    our new browser security features."
  • April 11, 2008
    * New GAO Reports: Media Ownership, Millennium Challenge Corporation, Force Structure, Internet Sales

  • Media Ownership: Economic Factors Influence the Number of Media Outlets in Local Markets, While Ownership by Minorities and Women Appears Limited and Is Difficult to Assess, GAO-08-383, March 12, 2008

  • Millennium Challenge Corporation: Analysis of Compact Development and Future Obligations and Current Disbursements of Compact Assistance, GAO-08-577R, April 11, 2008

  • Defense Acquisitions: 2009 Review of Future Combat System Is Critical to Program's Direction, GAO-08-638T, April 10, 2008

  • Fiscal Year 2009 Budget Request: U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-08-616T, April 10, 2008

  • Force Structure: Restructuring and Rebuilding the Army Will Cost Billions of Dollars for Equipment but the Total Cost Is Uncertain, GAO-08-669T, April 10, 2008

  • Internet Sales: Undercover Purchases on eBay and Craigslist Reveal a Market for Sensitive and Stolen U.S. Military Items, GAO-08-644T, April 10, 2008
  • April 02, 2008
    * First Ever Congressional Hearing Simulcast in an Internet-based Virtual World

    Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars in a User-Generated Medium, Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet
    Tuesday, April 1, 2008. Witness List & Prepared Testimony.

  • News release: "Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, conducted the first ever Congressional hearing simulcast in an Internet-based virtual world [April 1, 2008]. The hearing addressed the evolution, culture and future of virtual worlds such as Second Life, Zwinky and There which are part of a new form of communication that has exploded over the last few years..."Virtual worlds are at the cutting edge of so-called "Web 2.0" applications and services, which enable users to generate the content of the realm, such as with YouTube and Flickr and Facebook. Virtual worlds can also support business operations and commercial applications - from real estate sales, to business conferences, product marketing, music sales, and the general buying of goods and services."
  • March 30, 2008
    * YouTube reveals video analytics tool for all users

    News release: "...we're releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. (You can see this...announcement on the Google blog and on the YouTube blog...) This tool will help anyone who uploads videos to YouTube better understand and serve their audiences. For example, users might use Insight to tailor upload strategies to increase their videos' view counts and improve their popularity on the site. And partners who increase their videos' popularity also increase the number of monetizable views their videos get, and as a result, generate more revenue."

    March 28, 2008
    * FTC Staff Report, Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade

    News release: "The Commission has issued a staff report highlighting the challenges of consumer protection in the face of emerging and evolving technologies in the next ten years. The report summarizes the proceedings of the FTC’s three-day public hearings, “Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade,” and which will inform its consumer protection efforts in the next decade. TThe report explains the FTC will work to prevent Internet fraud by using its new powers under the U.S. SAFE WEB Act to coordinate and cooperate more closely with foreign consumer protection officials, ensure that consumer-producers who engage in activities to market and advertise products for consideration do so within the confines of laws prohibiting unfair or deceptive acts or practices in trade, and develop new strategies and to harness the power of technology to deliver timely and effective consumer education messages."

  • Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade: A Report by the Staff of the Federal Trade Commission, March 2008 (50 pages, PDF)
  • March 18, 2008
    * Google for Non-Profits

    Official Google Blog: "Today, we're excited to launch Google For Non-Profits, a one-stop shop for tools to help advance your organization's mission in a smart, cost-efficient way. This site features ideas and tutorials for how you can use Google tools to promote your work, raise money and operate more efficiently. And to get inspired, you'll also find examples of innovative ways other non-profits are using our products to further their causes."

    March 15, 2008
    * IDC's Worldwide Software Pricing and Licensing Taxonomy and Report Guide, 2008

    IDC's Worldwide Software Pricing and Licensing Taxonomy and Report Guide, 2008, Mar 2008, Doc #210950: "This IDC study defines the classification scheme, or taxonomy, used by IDC's Global Software Business Strategies group to analyze the software licensing strategies of vendors and requirements of end-user organizations. IDC's software pricing and licensing taxonomy represents a fundamental view of the way software is created, priced, sold, and supported."

    March 11, 2008
    * Google Finalizes Acquisition of DoubleClick

    Follow up to previous postings on the Google-DoubleClick merger, this announcement today from Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman and CEO: "I'm pleased to share the news that we completed our acquisition of DoubleClick today. Although it's been nearly a year since we announced our intention to acquire DoubleClick last April, we are no less excited today about the benefits that the combination of our two companies will bring to the online advertising market."

  • Related news today: "The European Commission has cleared under the EU Merger Regulation the proposed acquisition of the online advertising technology company DoubleClick by Google, both of the US. The Commission’s in-depth investigation, opened in November 2007 (see IP/07/1688), concluded that the transaction would be unlikely to have harmful effects on consumers, either in ad serving or in intermediation in online advertising markets. The Commission has therefore concluded that the transaction would not significantly impede effective competition within the European Economic Area (EEA) or a significant part of it."
  • * Tail Report - Survey of Web Revenue

    "Tail Report has launched with the goal to map out how money is made in the blogosphere. Tail Report works by asking users to anonymously submit information about their site's traffic, rank and monthly revenue. In return, the user receives a custom report detailing what other websites are making and how their revenue compares based a number of factors, such as traffic, rank, number of RSS subscribers, age, number of employees, content, and ad networks."

    February 17, 2008
    * PBS: Your Guide to Online Privacy

    Your Guide to Online Privacy, by Mark Glaser

  • "As we share more information online via myriad site registrations, online social networking profiles, e-commerce sites and search engines, the desire by companies and governments to mine that information is increasingly at odds with the desire of users to protect it. While online businesses can create their own privacy policies, average folks often can’t comprehend them — or opt out from data collection without leaving the site entirely. And government agencies and law enforcement increasingly are watching what people do online to fight crime and terrorism."
  • February 14, 2008
    * Pew Internet Releases Online Shopping Report

    Press release: "Most online Americans view online shopping as a way to save time and a convenient way to buy products. At the same time, most internet users express discomfort over a key step in online shopping – sending personal or credit card information over the internet. According to the Pew Internet Project’s September 2007 survey...The report, entitled Online Shopping: Internet users like the convenience but worry about the security of their financial information, finds that two-thirds (66%) of online Americans have at one time bought a product online. If online Americans did not have such high levels of concern about sending personal or credit card information over the internet, the report estimates that the share of internet users buying products online could be as much as 3 percentage points higher, or 69%."

    February 10, 2008
    * Update on Microsoft Bid For Yahoo

    Follow up to February 2, 2008 posting Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share, this news:

  • Microsoft Lawyers Map Out the Bid for Yahoo - Company lines up its case for a new antitrust fight, by Nathan Carlile, Legal Times, February 11, 2008. "By making its offer for Yahoo, antitrust lawyers say, Microsoft is wagering that past rebukes by the feds will not play a role this time. The company is still operating under a consent decree negotiated as part of its settlement with the Justice Department as part of the epic antitrust case against the company. The decree was recently extended until 2009, and a three-member team at Justice is continuing to monitor Microsoft's moves."

  • WSJ - Yahoo Board to Reject Microsoft Bid: "Yahoo Inc.'s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited $44.6 billion offer to acquire the Web giant, a person familiar with the situation says. After a series of meetings over the past week, Yahoo's board determined that the $31 per share offer "massively undervalues" Yahoo, the person said. It also doesn't account for the risks Yahoo would be taking by entering into an agreement that might be overturned by regulators. The board plans to send a letter to Microsoft Monday, spelling out its position."
  • * One person in eight in the EU27 avoids e-shopping because of security concerns

    Press release: "In connection with the 5th Safer Internet Day1 on 12 February 2008, Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities, presents a selection of statistics concerning internet activities, security concerns and virus attacks. The Safer Internet Day is part of a global drive to promote a safer Internet for all users, in particular younger people, and is organised by Insafe, a European internet safety network co-funded by the European Commission...In the EU27 in 2007, nearly a quarter of internet users had had a computer virus in the preceding 12 months, which resulted in a loss of information or time. Virus attacks were most frequent in Lithuania (41% of users), Slovenia (35%) and Malta (34%) and least common in the Czech Republic (7%), Estonia (15%) and Sweden (16%)."

    * Connecticut Farmers Selling Dairy Fiber Pot Containers

    Audubon Naturalist Society: "Gardeners have long wanted pots made of biogradable and renewable materials. And now, at least for seedling pots, this alternative exists: CowPots™, invented by two Connecticut dairy farmers, are durable fiber pots made of cow poo. So far, though, these odorless pots are only available to us online."

    January 26, 2008
    * Media Myths and Realities: A Public of One

    Press release, December 10, 2007 - "The way communicators dispense information is out of sync with the way consumers use media, according to Media, Myths & Realities, a comprehensive survey of media usage among consumers and communications professionals conducted by global public relations firm Ketchum and the University of Southern California Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center. Advice from family and friends is the No. 1 source that consumers turn to when making a variety of decisions – ranging from purchasing consumer electronics to planning a vacation – and advice from an expert rates highest when making medical decisions and purchases based on a product’s environmental impact. Despite the strong evidence that friends, family and experts play a key role in influencing decisions, only 24 percent of communicators report having a word-of-mouth program in place."

    January 05, 2008
    * New Study on Copyright and Creativity from the Center for Social Media

    New Study on Copyright and Creativity from the Center for Social Media, Posted by Hugh DAndrade: "Free video hosting sites like YouTube, Yahoo! Video, and Daily Motion are enabling creators to share video instantly with millions of viewers around the world. A new report from the Center for Social Media takes a close look at these user generated sites, and finds that there is much more at stake than the SNL and Daily Show clips often referenced in the usual Viacom v. YouTube debates on copyright infringement. Recut, Reframe, Recycle shows that far from simply uploading content, more and more users are remixing prior works to create new (and often surprising) works of transformative creativity. Users are borrowing from film, television, and pop culture at large to create parodies and satires, commentaries, pastiche, quotations, as well as archives of important work that cannot be shown due to copyright restriction. By illustrating each category with some of the best examples of user-generated content from the past few years, the study attempts to clarify "the difference between quoting for new cultural creation and simple piracy."

    January 01, 2008
    * gethuman 500 database

    "The gethuman™ movement has been created from the voices of millions of consumers who want to be treated with dignity when they contact a company for customer support." The gethuman 500 database, regularly updated, includes telephone numbers for customer service contacts in the following sectors, located in the United States: automotive, credit, finance, government, hardware, insurance, internet, mobile, pharmacy, products, shipping, software, telco, travel, TV/satellite, and utilities.

    December 30, 2007
    * State of the Media Democracy Survey

    The State of the Media Democracy: Are You Ready for the Future of Media?: "To shed light on how different generations are “consuming” media — and what their future media preferences are likely to be — Deloitte & Touche USA LLP’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) practice commissioned an extensive survey on the evolving role of media in America. This State of the Media Democracy survey offers a generational reality check on the usage of current media platforms/devices and what the future may hold. Fielded by Harrison Group (an independent research services firm) from February 23 through March 6, 2007, the survey used an online methodology to collect information from 2,200 U.S. consumers between the ages of 13 and 75."

    December 26, 2007
    * CDT Posts Music Download "Warning List"

    "CDT has created a list to alert consumers about music download Web sites that charge fees and claim a large selection, but do not appear to have obtained licenses to ensure that users' downloads from the site are legal. Consumers looking to download music lawfully for the new computers and MP3 players they receive this holiday season may want to check CDT's list before paying money to unfamiliar but legitimate-looking music services. CDT hopes that warning consumers about these sites can help avoid confusion and promote the continued growth of the lawful online music market."

  • Music Download Warning List, December 26, 2007
  • * 2007 Annual Study: U.S. Cost of a Data Breach

    Ponemon 2007 Annual Study: U.S. Cost of a Data Breach - Understanding Financial Impact, Customer Turnover, and Preventitive Solutions: This study "was derived from a detailed analysis of 35 data breach incidents. According to the study, the cost per compromised customer record increased in 2007, compared to 2006. Lost business opportunity, including losses associated with customer churn and acquisition, represented the most significant component of the cost increase. Companies analyzed were from 16 different industries, including communications, consumer goods, education, entertainment, financial services, gaming, health care, hospitality, internet, manufacturing, marketing, media, retail, services, technology, and transportation."

    December 20, 2007
    * FTC Closes Google/DoubleClick Investigation

    Press release: "The Federal Trade Commission today announced that it will not seek to block Google Inc.’s proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of Internet advertising server DoubleClick Inc. In a 4-1 vote to close its eight-month investigation of the transaction, the Commission wrote in its majority statement that "after carefully reviewing the evidence, we have concluded that Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick is unlikely to substantially lessen competition."

    December 18, 2007
    * Digital Economy Fact Book 2007

    "The Ninth Edition of The Progress & Freedom Foundation's Digital Economy Fact Book (188 pages, PDF) was released [December 14, 2007]...The resource guide features an expanded section on international data, reflecting the global importance of the digital economy."

    November 23, 2007
    * Census Issues Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales

    Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales 3rd Quarter 2007: "The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce announced today that the estimate of U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the third quarter of 2007, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, was $34.7 billion, an increase of 3.6 percent (±0.8%) from the second quarter of 2007. Total retail sales for the third quarter of 2007 were estimated at $1,020.4 billion, an increase of 0.8 percent (±0.2%) from the second quarter of 2007. The third quarter 2007 e commerce estimate increased 19.3 percent (±2.6%) from the third quarter of 2006 while total retail sales increased 3.8 percent (±0.5%) in the same period. E-commerce sales in the third quarter of 2007 accounted for 3.4 percent of total sales."

    November 20, 2007
    * The Internet Singularity, Delayed: Why Limits in Internet Capacity Will Stifle Innovation on the Web

    The Internet Singularity, Delayed: Why Limits in Internet Capacity Will Stifle Innovation on the Web - "In this research study, Nemertes performed an independent in-depth analysis of Internet and IP infrastructure (which we call capacity) and current and projected traffic (which we call demand) with the goal of understanding how each has changed over time, and determining if there will ever be a point at which demand exceeds capacity....findings indicate that although core fiber and switching/routing resources will scale nicely to support virtually any conceivable user demand, Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years. We estimate the financial investment required by access providers to bridge the gap between demand and capacity ranges from $42 billion to $55 billion, or roughly 60%-70% more than service providers currently plan to invest. It’s important to stress that failing to make that investment will not cause the Internet to collapse. Instead, the primary impact of the lack of investment will be to throttle innovation” both the technical innovation that leads to increasingly newer and better applications, and the business innovation that relies on those technical innovations and applications to generate value. The next Google, YouTube, or Amazon might not arise, not because of a lack of demand, but due to an inability to fulfill that demand."

  • See also Trend Micro™ Internet Confidence and Safety Survey Reveals Consumer Confidence in the Internet is on the Rise in U.S. and Japan, November 19, 2007
  • November 18, 2007
    * Newsweek Review of Amazon's New E-Book Reader

    The Future of Reading, by Steven Levy, Newsweek, November 17, 2007: "...the Kindle...has the dimensions of a paperback, with a tapering of its width that emulates the bulge toward a book's binding. It weighs but 10.3 ounces, and unlike a laptop computer it does not run hot or make intrusive beeps....with the use of E Ink, a breakthrough technology of several years ago that mimes the clarity of a printed book, the Kindle's six-inch screen posts readable pages... (The Kindle gets as many as 30 hours of reading on a charge, and recharges in two hours.)...E-book devices like the Kindle allow you to change the font size: aging baby boomers will appreciate that every book can instantly be a large-type edition. The handheld device can also hold several shelves' worth of books: 200 of them onboard, hundreds more on a memory card and a limitless amount in virtual library stacks maintained by Amazon. Also, the Kindle [costs $399] allows you to search within the book for a phrase or name...Some of those features have been available on previous e-book devices, notably the Sony Reader. The Kindle's real breakthrough springs from a feature that its predecessors never offered: wireless connectivity, via a system called Whispernet. (It's based on the EVDO broadband service offered by cell-phone carriers, allowing it to work anywhere, not just Wi-Fi hotspots.)"

  • PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY, WSJ: "Amazon's Kindle makes buying e-books easy, but its hardware design and its software user interface are marred by annoying flaws, Walt Mossberg says."
  • November 04, 2007
    * 2007 Digital Future Report

    "The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School is pleased to present the results of the sixth year of our project, "Surveying the Digital Future." The six years of longitudinal research comprise an absolutely unique data base that completely captures broadband at home, the wireless Internet, on-line media, user-generated content and, now, social networking. This year's report contains a large module looking at on-line communities and social networking in great detail. Readers can compare the social networking data and correlate it to six years of attitudes and behaviors on-line. As usual, the report continues to track off-line media use, purchasing both off-line and through e-commerce, social and political activity and a wealth of other data."

  • The highlights of the report

  • The full report is available for purchase
  • November 02, 2007
    * EIA: Supplement to Energy Market and Economic Impacts of S. 280

    Supplement to: Energy Market and Economic Impacts of S. 280, the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2007 (11/01/2007)

  • "This paper responds to a September 18, 2007, letter from Senators Barrasso, Inhofe, and Voinovich, seeking further energy and economic analysis to supplement information presented in the Energy Information Administrations (EIA) recent analysis of S. 280, the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2007."
  • October 31, 2007
    * Key Privacy Groups Propose Do Not Track List

    Press release: "CDT joined with a coalition of privacy advocates on Wednesday to recommend an ambitious set of proposals intended to give consumers greater control over their personal data and to offset the impact of pervasive behavioral tracking. Included in the recommendations is a call to create a national "Do Not Track List" that would provide consumers with a simple tool for opting out of behavioral tracking. CDT joined with Consumer Action, the Consumer Federation of America, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy Activism, Public Information Research, Privacy Journal, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and the World Privacy Forum in crafting the proposal, which is timed to coincide with the start Thursday of a two-day Federal Trade Commission workshop on behavioral targeting."

  • Consumer Rights and Protections in the Behavioral Advertising Sector [PDF] October 31, 2007

  • Illustration of Do Not Track List [PDF] October 31, 2007
  • October 29, 2007
    * New Report - Inadvertent Filesharing Sharing Revisited: Assessing LimeWire's Responses to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

    Press release: "Today, the Progress and Freedom Foundation released a new report on inadvertent filesharing by the authors of Filesharing Programs and "Technological Features to Induce Users to Share," a groundbreaking analysis published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in March of 2007. This new report, Inadvertent Filesharing Sharing Revisited: Assessing LimeWire's Responses to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, seeks to enhance understanding of the causes of inadvertent sharing by analyzing (1) recently released data that the distributors of the program LimeWire gave to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform before its July 24, 2007 hearing on inadvertent sharing, and (2) the efficacy of efforts to improve the LimeWire program since the Committee's hearing. The authors conclude that law enforcement should investigate whether filesharing programs deliberately perpetuate inadvertent filesharing."

    * Websites from Government and E-Commerce Sectors Offer Services for Disabled

  • "DisabilityInfo.gov [celebrating 5th anniversary] is the federal government's one-stop Web site for people with disabilities, their families, employers, veterans and service members, workforce professionals and many others. A collaborative effort among twenty-two federal agencies, DisabilityInfo.gov connects people with disabilities to the information and resources they need to a.ctively participate in the workforce and in their communities."

  • New York Times: "Although 50 million people in the United States have some form of physical or mental disability, they spend money just as easily as others. But there are few efficient ways for advertisers to reach them, and that’s what a new Web site, Disaboom.com, hopes to change."
  • October 24, 2007
    * House Budget Cmte. Hearing: The Growing Budgetary Costs of the Iraq War

    House Budget Committee hearing: The Growing Budgetary Costs of the Iraq War, Wednesday, October 24, 2007. Witness statements as follows:

  • Dr. Peter Orszag, Director, Congressional Budget Office: Testimony on Estimated Costs of U.S. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Other Activities Related to the War on Terrorism

  • Testimony of Amy Belasco, Congressional Research Service: "...CRS estimates that Congress has provided about $651 billion to date for Iraq, Afghanistan and enhanced security at defense bases..."

  • Testimony of Professor Linda Bilmes, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University: "...the monthly total for the conflict [in Iraq and Afghanistan is]...an average of $14 billion...Department of Defense and accounting and reporting systems make it very difficult to know exactly where the money is being spent..."
  • September 30, 2007
    * Report - Rising Journal Costs Limit Scholarly Access

    Rising Journal Costs Limit Scholarly Access, Emory University:
    "Are publishers getting rich publishing your research? A Bear-Stearns evaluation of Reed-Elsevier (one of the world's largest publishers of scholarly journals) recently rated the company, which earns profits of almost 40% annually, "a stockholder's dream." Should private publishers be getting rich selling information generated by research that is funded by academic institutions and the public? What's happening and how does it affect scholars? This article looks at one university’s experience."

    September 27, 2007
    * Hearing on Google-DoubleClick Merger

    9/27/2007 Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, An Examination of the Google-DoubleClick Merger and the Online Advertising Industry: What Are the Risks for Competition and Privacy?

  • Link to hearing witness statements

  • Related postings on Google-DoubleClick Merger

  • Hahn, Robert W. and Singer, Hal J., An Antitrust Analysis of Google's Proposed Acquisition of DoubleClick (September 2007). AEI-Brookings Joint Center Related Publication No. 07-24, via SSRN
  • September 19, 2007
    * Senate Plans Hearing on Google-Doubleclick Merger

    EPIC: "The United States Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing entitled An Examination of the Google-Doubleclick Merger and the Online Advertising Industry: What Are the Risks for Competition and Privacy on Thursday, September 27. Dave Drummond of Google, Brad Smith of Microsoft, Scott Cleland of Precursor, Tom Lenard of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, and Marc Rotenberg of EPIC are expected to testify. See EPIC's page on the proposed Google-Doubleclick merger."

  • Related postings on Google/DoubleClick Merger
  • September 09, 2007
    * Reading Books in the Digital Age Subsequent to Amazon, Google and the Long Tail

    Reading Books in the Digital Age subsequent to Amazon, Google and the long tail by Terje Hillesund, Associate Professor at the University of Stavanger, Norway. First Monday, volume 12, number 9 (September 2007),

  • "In the last decades, the book industry has changed and is now characterised by two (or three) opposite tendencies: Many publishing firms are united in large multinational corporations, commercialisation has increased and bookstores are concentrated in large chains, marketing the popular. At the same time, the Internet has come to constitute an immense book market, and recently Google Book Search has demonstrated the power of the Web in book content discovery and display. Search engines and online bookstores disclose and make available books no longer in stock in ordinary bookstore chains; as a result, niche markets flourish and the total sales of obscure books have grown considerably. As a binary underflow, the electronic book slowly seems to be gathering new strength. In this article, I will present literature that analyses current transformations, and I will critically examine John B. Thompson’s analysis of the digitalisation of the book as presented in Books in the Digital Age from 2005. Only two years have passed, yet events already confirm my view that Thompson got most of it wrong."
  • September 06, 2007
    * Consumer Reports Poll: 89 Percent of Americans Want Lawmakers to Restrict the Use of Social Security Numbers

    "As Congress and federal regulators consider proposals aimed at reducing the risk of identity theft, a national poll by the Consumer Reports National Research Center reveals that an overwhelming majority of Americans want lawmakers to restrict the use and availability of Social Security numbers by businesses and government agencies. According to the poll, 89 percent of Americans agree that state and federal lawmakers should pass laws restricting the use of Social Security numbers. Social Security numbers are particularly sensitive information because they can provide the key to unlocking a consumer’s financial identity...Consumers Union released the poll results in comments filed with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is studying the collection and use of Social Security numbers by the private sector. Several pending congressional proposals would restrict the sale, purchase, and display of Social Security numbers. Consumers Union recommends that the sale and purchase of the numbers be tightly restricted and that solicitation be prohibited except where required by law or where needed for credit, employment, tax compliance, or investment purposes."

  • Summary of Social Security Number Privacy Legislation Under Active Consideration in House and the Senate, as of September 5, 2007 and the full text of H.R. 3046
  • September 05, 2007
    * FTC Approves Issuance of Federal Register Notice Announcing Review of Mail Order Rule

    Press release: "The Commission has approved the issuance of a Federal Register notice announcing the start of its decennial review of the FTC’s Mail or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule, 16 CFR Part 435 (Mail Order Rule). As detailed in the notice, the Commission is seeking comment on whether to retain the Rule. To guide discussion of this issue, the Commission is seeking information on the Rule’s costs and benefits. Assuming, based on the public response to the notice, the Commission decides to retain the Rule, it also seeks to determine whether it should make three changes to the Rule in response to changes in technology and marketing practices that have occurred since the Rule was last updated in 1993."

  • Text of the Federal Register Notice: 16 CFR Part 435 - Mail Or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule: Request For Public Comment On the Overall Costs, Benefits, and Regulatory and Economic Impact of the Rule.
  • August 18, 2007
    * Google's New Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center

    "About the Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center - The relationship between Google and AdWords advertisers is built on trust. Advertisers rely on the relevance of our ad placement, our reporting statistics, and the quality of the clicks their ads receive. We take this trust seriously, and we know that AdWords couldn't exist without it."

    August 14, 2007
    * Yahoo Tops Search Engine Satisfaction Survey

    American Customer Satisfaction Index, Scores By Industry, Internet Portals/Search Engines, 2007, Commentary by Professor Claes Fornell, The Donald C. Cook Professor of Business Administration, Director, National Quality Research Center, Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan: "Yahoo! has also improved. It has always had more users than Google and now it leads in customer satisfaction as well. Yahoo! has been there before. As its customer satisfaction rose to a high of 80 in 2005, Yahoo! did well financially. With falling customer satisfaction in 2006, Yahoo! also saw stock price and profits falling sharply. The company has also suffered from recent well-publicized management and business strategy issues. But this year's improvement in ACSI restores almost all of the 2006 loss in customer satisfaction..."

    August 13, 2007
    * ABA Launches New Consumer E-Commerce Site

    "Safeselling.org offers a resource for business people launching ecommerce enterprises and for businesses venturing into online sales. First-time entrepreneurs and established small to medium-sized business expanding their horizons should find helpful information on this site about selling goods and services online...Safeselling.org is a companion to safeshopping.org, an earlier project of the Cyberspace Law Committee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Business Law, which answers questions for consumers about shopping on the web."

    * Team of University of California Researchers Identify "Spamscatter" Technique

    PC World: Study Finds Spam's Achilles Heel - "Researchers say they've discovered a critical weakness in the spam infrastructure."

  • Spamscatter: Characterizing Internet Scam Hosting Infrastructure, David S. Anderson, Chris Fleizach, Stefan Savage, and Geoffrey M. Voelker, Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, Boston, MA, August 2007.

  • See also The New Yorker, Damn Spam, The losing war on junk e-mail,
    by Michael Specter, August 6, 2007: "Nearly two million e-mails are dispatched every second, a hundred and seventy-one billion messages a day. Most of those messages have something to sell...Spam’s growth has been metastatic, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of all mail. In 2001, spam accounted for about five per cent of the traffic on the Internet; by 2004, that figure had risen to more than seventy per cent. This year, in some regions, it has edged above ninety per cent—more than a hundred billion unsolicited messages clogging the arterial passages of the world’s computer networks every day."
  • * New Research Promotes the Value of Banks Developing Social Media Presence

    Press release: "One of the latest reports from Javelin Strategy & Research shows why financial institutions must engage in blogging now, and provides specific steps for assessing this powerful new brand-building and customer-connection capability into 2008-10 strategic plans. According to the study of over 3,500 consumers, one in five online consumers read blogs, yet blogs are offered by less than 1% of financial institutions. Result: banks are largely losing control of discussion about themselves in the ‘blogosphere’. Old-line bankers will find that none of the long-standing customer interaction rules apply to blogging, yet the new capability offers crucial, low-cost marketing benefits available through no other method."

    August 09, 2007
    * Report Highlights Surge in Net Traffic Driven By Demand for Video Content

    Press release: "New Millennium Research Council Analysis report finds growing Internet traffic, driven by online video, requires ongoing investment in new capacity and intelligent networks."

  • The Never Ending Rush Hour - Internet Traffic Growth Requires Continual Investment in Capacity and Innovation in Network Management, August 9, 2007 (21 pages, PDF)
  • August 04, 2007
    * Growing Interest in People Finding Generates New Web Sites and Less Privacy

    Online Snooping Gets Creepy, By Anita Hamilton: "...An estimated 30% of all Web searches are aimed at finding people, according to industry statistics, and upstarts like PeekYou, Pipl, Spock, and Wink are vying for a piece of this potentially huge market. These free sites work by scouring the Web for any virtual footprints you might have on MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Yahoo!, Flickr and elsewhere, and then creating a fresh profile that organizes all that information on one page."

    July 23, 2007
    * Microsoft Announces Enhanced Privacy Protections for Customers

    Press release: "Expanding on its ongoing work to help protect customer privacy, Microsoft Corp. today announced an enhanced set of privacy principles for Live Search and online advertising data collection, use and protection. The principles outline new, enhanced steps to help protect the privacy of Microsoft® Windows Live™ users, including making search query data anonymous after 18 months by permanently removing cookie IDs, the entire IP address and other identifiers from search terms. Microsoft will also work to give customers more control over what information it uses to personalize their online search experience."

  • Microsoft Privacy Web site

  • BusinessWeek.com: Microsoft: Privacy Champion? "The tech giant and others are getting serious about giving Web surfers more control over how information from their online behavior is used."
  • July 13, 2007
    * Pew Research Report on China's Online Population Explosion

    Press release: "The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a new report on China's internet user population. There are now an estimated 137 million internet users in China, second in number only to the United States, where estimates of the current internet population range from 165 million to 210 million. The growth rate of China's internet user population has been outpacing that of the U.S., and China is projected to overtake the U.S. in the total number of users within a few years. The influx of tens of millions of new online participants each year can be expected to have far-reaching consequences for the Chinese population, for China itself and for the larger world. At the very least, the internet will offer ever greater numbers of Chinese a much more sophisticated information and communications world than the one they currently inhabit. And because the Chinese share a single written language, despite the multiplicity of spoken tongues, it could have a unifying effect on the country's widely dispersed citizenry. An expanding internet population might also increase domestic tensions that could spill over into China's relations with the U.S. and other countries while the difference between Chinese and Western approaches to the internet could create additional sore points over human rights and problems with restrictions on non-Chinese companies."

  • China's Online Population Explosion
  • July 03, 2007
    * Largest Single Personal Data Breach to Date Involves Info on 2.3 Million Customers

    Press release: "Fidelity National Information Services, Inc. announced today that its subsidiary, Certegy Check Services, Inc., a service provider to U.S. retail merchants, based in St. Petersburg, Fla., was victimized by a former employee who misappropriated and sold consumer information to a data broker who, in turn, sold a subset of that data to a limited number of direct marketing organizations...The misappropriated information included names, addresses and telephone numbers as well as, in many cases, dates of birth and bank account or credit card information. Approximately 2.3 million records are believed to be at issue, with approximately 2.2 million containing bank account information and 99,000 containing credit card information. The company is still investigating the time period over which the misappropriations occurred."

    June 27, 2007
    * Democratic Candidates' Site Traffic Market Share and Rankings

    "In a custom report created for ClickZ News, Hitwise measured traffic market share of the candidate sites. The measurement firm found traffic to Democratic candidate sites was top heavy, favoring Clinton's, Obama's and Edwards's sites. HillaryClinton.com garnered nearly a third of visits among Democratic candidate sites in May. BarackObama.com attracted almost 28 percent, and JohnEdwards.com drew 23 percent of visitors to Dem campaign sites last month."

    * FTC Issues Staff Report on Broadband Connectivity Competition Policy

    Press release: "The Federal Trade Commission’s Internet Access Task Force today issued a report, “Broadband Connectivity Competition Policy,” which summarizes the Task Force’s findings in the area of broadband Internet connectivity and, in particular, so-called network neutrality regulation. Based on these findings, and FTC staff’s experience with the operation of myriad markets throughout the economy, the report identifies guiding principles that policy makers should consider in evaluating proposed regulations or legislation relating to broadband Internet access and network neutrality."

  • Broadband Connectivity Competition Policy: A Federal Trade Commission Staff Report, June 2007 (170 pages, PDF)
  • June 24, 2007
    * Special Report Examines Role of Info Industry Big Three in Web Security

    NEWS.COM Special Report: Wardens of the WebTalkBack: Global security challenge falls to an elite corps, June 25, 2007

  • "The job of policing the Web has been left to the corporate world by default. The burden weighs heavily on a trio of companies in particular: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft--the three firms with the most traffic on the Web. Their work, alone or in concert, will likely define what kind of security can be expected for e-mail, purchases, bill payment, other financial transactions and practically anything else involving personal information of the most sensitive nature."
  • * PWC Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2007-2011

    PricewaterhouseCoopers, PWC Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2007-2011: "The leading entertainment and media industry forecast. Covering the US, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Canada. In-depth global analyses and 5-year growth projections for 14 industry segments." fee, but free industry segments' summaries are available.

    * Parents, Children and Media: A Kaiser Family Foundation Survey

    "Parents, Children & Media: A Kaiser Family Foundation Survey, is a national survey of 1,008 parents of children ages 2-17, along with a series of six focus groups held with parents across the country. The survey explores such issues as media content, media ratings and the V-Chip, media monitoring, educational media, advertising, and the Internet."

  • Press release

  • Report - Parents, Children & Media: A Kaiser Family Foundation Survey (42 pages, PDF)
  • June 21, 2007
    * Surveys Examine the Impact of the Growing Cell-Only Population

    Follow up to May 14, 2007 posting, Nearly 16% of U.S. Homes Have No Landline Phone, see also these related studies:

  • The Landline-less Are Different and Their Numbers Are Growing Fast, by Scott Keeter, Director, Survey Research, Pew Research Center, June 20, 2007

  • What's Missing from National RDD Surveys? The Impact of the Growing Cell-Only Population, by Scott Keeter (Pew Research Center), Courtney Kennedy (University of Michigan and Pew Research Center), April Clark (Pew Research Center), Trevor Tompson (The Associated Press), and Mike Mokrzycki (The Associated Press).
  • June 20, 2007
    * Pew Survey of American Adults and Use of Gadgets

    Pew Internet and American Life Project: "Fully 85% of American adults use the internet or cell phones – and most use both. Many also have broadband connections, digital cameras and video game systems. Yet the proportion of adults who exploit the connectivity, the capacity for self expression, and the interactivity of modern information technology is a modest 8%."

  • A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users (65 pages, PDF)


  • See also two charts from Business Week's look at Web Strategies That Cater To Customers which track demographics on the use of social media and online tool and applications:
  • Chart - Social Media Usage: Small, But Growing Fast…But Very Few Users Create Content

  • Chart: Who Participates And What People Are Doing Online
  • June 10, 2007
    * Privacy Ranking Report of Internet Service Companies

    Source: "Privacy International (PI) is a human rights group formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance by governments and corporations. PI is based in London, and has an office in Washington, D.C. Together with members in 40 countries, PI has conducted campaigns throughout the world on issues ranging from wiretapping and national security activities, to ID cards, video surveillance, data matching, police information systems, and medical privacy, and works with a wide range of parliamentary and inter-governmental organisations such as the European Parliament, the House of Lords and UNESCO."

  • Background report from Privacy International - "A Consultation report: This report has been prepared by Privacy International following a six-month investigation into the privacy practices of key Internet based companies. The ranking lists the best and the worst performers both in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 across the full spectrum of search, email, e-commerce and social networking sites.
    The analysis employs a methodology comprising around twenty core parameters. We rank the major Internet players but we also discuss examples of best and worst privacy practice among smaller companies. The report was compiled using data derived from public sources (newspaper articles, blog entries, submissions to government inquiries, privacy policies etc), information provided by present and former company staff, technical analysis and interviews with company representatives. Because the 2007 rankings are a precedent, Privacy International will regard the current report as a consultation report and will establish a broad outreach for two months to ensure that any new and relevant information is taken into account before publishing a full report in September."

  • Interim results are available here in PDF format, 6 pages

  • Related: An Open Letter from Privacy International to Google, 10/06/2007
  • June 04, 2007
    * McAfee Report on State of Search Engine Safety

    The State of Search Engine Safety, June 4, 2007 - Ben Edelman, Advisor to McAfee SiteAdvisor and Hannah Rosenbaum - Research Analyst, McAfee SiteAdvisor

  • "In this study, we compare the safety of leading search engines, using McAfee SiteAdvisor’s automated Web site ratings...Since May 2006, search engine results have become safer, primarily due to improved safety of sponsored results on Google, AOL, and Ask. Despite this improvement, dangerous sites are found in search results of all of the top five search engines, and sponsored results continue to be significantly less safe than search engines’ organic results."

  • Key Findings; Introduction; Methodology; Analysis; Discussion; Resources
  • May 29, 2007
    * TriCipher Consumer Online Banking Study

    Press release: "...a recent TriCipher Consumer Online Banking Study, conducted by Javelin Strategy and Research, reveals that consumers would take advantage of more online banking services if banks provided stronger identity protection. The TriCipher Consumer Online Banking Study included 3,349 respondents from a random-sample panel that was representative of the U.S. population. Surprising findings uncovered that nearly 1 in 5 - estimated at 26 million - adult consumers have been victims of identity theft or fraud in their lives. And, according to survey results, over 88 million online banking customers would switch banks, or reduce online banking usage, if news reports exposed their individual institution as compromised."

    May 28, 2007
    * FTC Will Review Google/DoubleClick Merger

    Follow up to April 20, 2007 posting, Google DoubleClick Merger In the News, additional documents and news.

  • Proposed Google/DoubleClick Deal: "On April 20, 2007, EPIC filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), requesting that the Commission open an investigation into the proposed acquisition, specifically with regard to the ability of Google to record, analyze, track, and profile the activities of Internet users with data that is both personally identifiable and data that is not personally identifiable. EPIC further urged the FTC to require Google to publicly present a plan to comply with well-established government and industry privacy standards such as the OECD Privacy Guidelines. Pending the resolution of these and other issues, EPIC encouraged the FTC to halt the acquisition."

  • May 29, 2007: FTC begins antitrust investigation into proposed $3.1 billion Google-DoubleClick deal
  • May 23, 2007
    * Pew Research Survey on Spam 2007

    Press release: "The volume of spam is growing in Americans' personal and workplace emailaccounts, but email users are less bothered by it.
    Spam continues to plague the internet as more Americans than ever say they are getting more spam than in the past. But while American internet users report increasing volumes of spam, they also indicate that they are less bothered by it than before. Users have become more sophisticated about dealing with spam; fully 71% of email users use filters offered by their email provider or employer to block spam... Spam has not become a significant deterrent to the use of email, as some observers speculated it might when unsolicited email first began flooding users' inboxes several years ago. But it continues to degrade the integrity of email. Some 55% of email users say they have lost trust in email because of spam."

  • Here is a link to the complete report.
  • May 14, 2007
    * Restricted Access to Internet Entertainment Sites Across DoD Networks

    B.B. Bell, General, US Army, Commander: Restricted Access to Internet Entertainment Sites Across DoD Networks, May 11, 2007 - "The DoD will block worldwide access to the following internet sites, on or about 14 May 2007: youtube.com, 1.fm, pandora.com, photobucket.com, myspace.com, live365.com, hi5.com, metacafe.com, mtv.com, ifilm.com, blackplanet.com, stupidvideos.com and filecabi.com"

  • Stars and Stripes: DOD blocking YouTube, others - To save bandwidth, officials say several sites to be off-limits at work
  • May 08, 2007
    * Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age

    Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age, James Waldo, Herbert S. Lin, and Lynette I. Millett, editors, 456 pages, May 4, 2007 - This books is available in its pre-publication version from the National Academies Press.

  • "Privacy is a growing concern in the United States and around the world. The spread of the Internet and the seemingly unbounded options for collecting, saving, sharing, and comparing information trigger consumer worries; online practices of businesses and government agencies present new ways to compromise privacy; and e-commerce and technologies that permit individuals to find personal information about each other only begin to hint at the possibilities...The report provides ways to think about privacy, its relationship to other values, and related tradeoffs and provides an in-depth look at ongoing information technology trends as related to privacy concerns. By doing so, the report is intended to contribute to a better understanding of the many issues that play a part in privacy and contribute to the analysis of issues involving privacy. Perhaps most importantly, the report seeks to raise awareness of the web of connectedness among the actions we take, the policies we pass, and the expectations we change."

  • May 06, 2007
    * Forbes Special Report on CEO Compensation

    Special Report - CEO Compensation: "The chief executives of America's 500 biggest companies got a collective 38% pay raise last year, to $7.5 billion. That's an average $15.2 million apiece. Exercised stock options again account for the main component of pay, 48%. The average stock gain was $7.3 million. The highest-paid boss of the 500 companies we tracked: Apple chief Steve Jobs. He drew a nominal $1 salary but realized $647 million from vested restricted stock last year."

    Sort By:
    Rank | Name | Company | Total Compensation | 5-Year Compensation | Shares Owned | Age | Efficiency

    May 04, 2007
    * Policy Center's Study Shows Flaws in News Media's Use of RSS

    From the Center for Media and the Public Agenda at University of Maryland, College Park:

  • International News and Problems with the News Media's RSS Feeds: "This study was constructed to determine which news outlets use RSS well—which outlets give users the range of information that most closely approximates what can be found on the outlets' websites...This study looked at 19 of the top global news online sites to see which ones gave the users of their RSS feeds the same number of stories, the same range of news sources, in as timely a fashion as could be gotten if those users went to the individual website."
  • Study Conclusions

  • Understanding Results

  • What is RSS?

  • Study Methodology

  • Authors
  • May 01, 2007
    * Google Responds to Viacom's Complaint

    Google's response [via Google Watch] to Viacom's copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube.

    April 22, 2007
    * Content Managment Technology Used for Online Video Copyright Infringement

    WSJ free feature: Policing Web Video With 'Fingerprints' - Sharing Sites Say Technology Could Help Them Identify, Remove Unauthorized Clips: "Proponents of fingerprinting technology say it can help spot TV shows and films that are posted on video-sharing sites such as Google Inc.'s YouTube without their owners' permission, so the sites can remove them or share advertising revenue."

    April 20, 2007
    * Google DoubleClick Merger In the News

    Press release, April 13, 2007: "Google to Acquire DoubleClick - Combination Will Significantly Expand Opportunities for Advertisers, Agencies and Publishers and Improve Users' Online Experience."

  • Google Form 8-K, filed on April 18, 2007: Item 1.01 Entry Into a Material Definitive Agreement - "On April 13, 2007, Google Inc. ("Google" or the "Company"), a Delaware corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Google ("Sub"), and Click Holding Corp. ("DoubleClick"), a Delaware corporation, entered into an Agreement and Plan of Merger (the "Merger Agreement"). Pursuant to the terms and subject to the conditions set forth in the Merger Agreement, Google will acquire DoubleClick by means of a merger of DoubleClick with and into Sub (the "Merger"), with DoubleClick continuing as the surviving corporation after the Merger."

  • "EPIC, CDD and US PIRG today filed a complaint (pdf) with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), urging the Commission to open an investigation into the proposed acquisition. The groups urged the FTC to assess the ability of Google to record, analyze, track, and profile the activities of Internet users with data that is both personally identifiable and data that is not personally identifiable. The groups further urged the FTC to require Google to publicly present a plan to comply with well-established government and industry privacy standards such as the OECD Privacy Guidelines. Pending the resolution of these and other issues, EPIC encouraged the FTC to halt the acquisition. See EPIC's FTC Google Complaint

  • Doubleclick Statement Regarding Data Ownership, New York, 4/20/2007 - DoubleClick Inc., the premier provider of digital marketing and technology services, issued the following statement regarding data ownership. Since the announcement of Google’s intention to acquire DoubleClick, several media reports have incorrectly suggested that data collected by the company’s online display advertising technology could be used by Google, or combined with information owned by Google. This is simply not the case.Information collected by DoubleClick DART® ad serving technology belongs to DoubleClick’s clients and not to DoubleClick. Any and all information collected by DoubleClick is, and will remain, the property of the company’s clients. Ownership rights, like the other terms of DoubleClick's client contracts, will be unaffected by any acquisition. Further, Google would not be able to match its search data to the data collected by DoubleClick, as DoubleClick does not have the right to use its clients' data for such purposes. By contract, DoubleClick has only the limited rights to use data for its aggregate reporting and to disclose data, if so required, to government authorities."
  • * UK Consumers Not Risk Averse When Using Online Services According to New Report

    Press release: "UK consumers are not as risk-averse when it comes to using online services as previously thought, according to recent research conducted by BT. Despite daily warnings about security threats and cyber-criminals, people are willing to take risks online, as long as they feel informed, and it is clear how consequences will be addressed. According to the findings from the Trustguide report, which was a collaborative research project by BT with support from the DTI, people use specific online services not because they trust them, but because they believe the benefits outweigh the risks. Government and private industry must therefore take responsibility for educating and reassuring the public that safeguards are in place, if they are to succeed with e-Government and e-Commerce initiatives..Based on the research, the Trustguide report outlines a set of guidelines to inform policy making and service development for ICT delivered services. In addition to enabling better-informed decision-making through education, and advising users of restitution and guarantee measures should something go wrong, the report highlights the need for greater honesty and transparency of data usage by service providers.

  • Trustguide Final Report, October 2006, by Hazel Lacohée, principal researcher at BT Group’s Chief Technology Office, and Andy Phippen, lecturer in socio-technical studies, University of Plymouth. (101 pages, PDF)
  • April 12, 2007
    * FTC Issues Report on Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children

    Press release: "The Federal Trade Commission gave a mixed review of the movie, music, and video-game industries’ self-regulatory programs and their marketing of violent entertainment products to children in its latest report to Congress. This fifth follow-up report, the most comprehensive study since 2000, found that all three industries generally comply with their own voluntary standards regarding the display of ratings and labels. However, entertainment industries continue to market some R-rated movies, M-rated video games, and explicit-content recordings on television shows and Web sites with substantial teen audiences. In addition, the FTC found that while video game retailers have made significant progress in limiting sales of M-rated games to children, movie and music retailers have made only modest progress limiting sales."

  • Marketing Violent Entertainment to Children: A Fifth Follow-Up Review of Industry Practices in the Motion Picture, Music Recording & Electronic Game Industries: A Federal Trade Commission Report to Congress (April 2007)
  • April 11, 2007
    * Survey Highlights Public View of Industry Sectors

    Press release: "The pharmaceutical sector is suffering from a poor reputation among Americans, according to new research by marketing research firm Ipsos. The second edition of I-Rep, Ipsos’ biannual survey on perceptions of large companies, shows that nearly as many Americans hold an “unfavorable” opinion of the pharmaceutical sector (32%) as have a “favorable” opinion (35%), while 33% are neither favorable nor unfavorable. Among other sectors measured, only the oil and gas, chemicals, and tobacco industries fare worse than the pharmaceutical sector. Sectors enjoying the highest favorability scores include the information technology, electronic goods, and food and beverage industries."

    April 02, 2007
    * DHS Releases Comprehensive Regulations for Securing High Risk Chemical Facilities

    Press release: "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security today released an interim final rule that imposes for the first time comprehensive federal security regulations for high risk chemical facilities. The department sought and reviewed comments from state and local partners, Congress, private industry, and the public to develop consistent guidelines using a risk-based approach. The new rule gives the department authority to seek compliance through the imposition of civil penalties, of up to $25,000 per day, and the ability to shut non-compliant facilities down."

  • Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Interim Final Rule
  • March 29, 2007
    * U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Releases Strategic Plan 2007-2012

    USPTO press release from Jon Dudas: "I am pleased to release the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Strategic Plan for fiscal years 2007 through 2012. This plan builds upon the record-breaking progress the USPTO made during fiscal year 2006 in the areas of quality,production, electronic filing and processing, teleworking, and hiring."

  • Strategic Plan 2007-2012 [PDF]

  • Strategic Plan 2007-2012 Summary [PDF]

  • COMING SOON: E-Mail with Direct Link to Issued Trademark Office Action to Replace E-Mailed Office Actions - Beginning in late spring, the USPTO will notify applicants who have authorized e-mail communication with the USPTO of each issued Trademark Office action by an e-mail message containing a direct link to the Office action in Trademark Document Retrieval (TDR). The USPTO will not send a separate e-mail with the Office action attached.
  • March 28, 2007
    * New FDA Website Warns Against Buying Accutane and Generic Versions Online

    Press release: "FDA put together this Web site to alert you to the risks of buying Accutane (isotretinoin) over the Internet. This Web site is for educational purposes only."

  • "The FDA is launching a special web page to warn consumers about the dangers of buying isotretinoin (Accutane) online. Isotretinoin is a drug approved for the treatment of severe acne that does not respond to antibiotic. Improperly used, Isotretinoin can cause severe side effects, including birth defects. Serious mental health problems have also been reported with isotretinoin use. The web page, will be positioned as a search result on Google and other search engines when a consumer initiates an online search for the drug under any one its four names...The web pages warns that the drug "should be taken under the close supervision" of a physician or a pharmacist, and provides links to helpful information, including ways to check that drugs are purchased online come from legitimate pharmacies."
  • March 27, 2007
    * Reseachers Focus on Fighting Web Spam

    Hao Chen, Assistant Professor, UC Davis in collaboration with In collaboration with Microsoft Researchers Yi-Min Wang and Ming Ma, pub lished Spam Double-Funnel: Connecting Web Spammers with Advertisers. [Darlene Fichter]

  • Overview: "Web spamming is a prevalent problem on the Web. Publishing and contributing to the web is increasingly easy. Spammers, motivated by money, want to attract users to their sites. High visibility in search results facilitates and lends a false air of legitimacy to the spammer's page. To get to this point, spammers create many doorway pages hosted by free services. They publicize the URLs to these doorway pages through comment spam. Their goal in doing so is not to trick people, but rather to defeat search engine ranking algorithms."

  • See also their website, Strider Search Ranger: War on Search Spam: Shifting the Battleground by “Following the Money”. Created: January 2007. Last Updated: March 20, 2007
  • March 22, 2007
    * Usability Issues Assist Online Editors Seeking Better Connection With Readers

    Eyetracking points the way to effective news article design:

  • "Featured finding #1: Rewrite + reformat = remember

  • Featured finding #2: Precise and relevant editing = successful design

  • Featured finding #3: Photos edited for relevance = photos viewed"
  • [via Darlene Fichter]

    * Symantec's 11th Internet Security Threat Report

    "The Symantec Internet Security Threat Report offers analysis and discussion of threat activity over a six-month period. It covers Internet attacks, vulnerabilities, malicious code, phishing, spam and security risks as well as future trends. The eleventh version of the report, released March 19, 2007, is now available."

  • Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, Volume XI: March 2007 (Trends for July - Dec 06 (104 pages, PDF)

  • Key Findings of the Internet Security Threat Report, Volume XI: March 2007 (22 pages, PDF
  • March 09, 2007
    * House Hearing on Combating Pretexting

    Combating Pretexting: H.R. 936, Prevention of Fraudulent Access to Phone Records Act, Committee on Energy and Commerce, Friday, March 9, 2007

  • Witness List and Prepared Testimony

  • EPIC: "In testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg expressed support for H.R. 936, the Prevention of Fraudulent Access to Phone Records Act. The Act would increase privacy protections for phone records. In August 2005, EPIC petitioned the FCC to establish stronger security standaard for telephone records. The FCC endorsed EPIC's petition in February 2006, but more than a year later, there are still no clear standards for telephone record privacy."

  • Related postings on pre-texting
  • March 04, 2007
    * RSS Service Tracks Price Changes on Amazon Products

    "RSStalker.com provides RSS feeds to track price changes of Amazon.com products. Generate a feed for a single product or for an entire wishlist. Add it to your favorite aggregator and you will be automatically notified when the price changes. Simply unsubscribe to the feed when you are done...Amazon.com doesn't advertise it, but they have a 30 day price drop policy. If you bought something from them and they lower the price within 30 days, just fill out a form and they'll refund you the difference. See the FAQ for details."

    * Random House and HarperCollins Launch Services for Browsing and Searching Book Pages

  • "Browse and search is a new way of browsing and searching pages from books in a Web browser using a "widget." Thousands of titles are available for browsing and searching and are denoted as such with the "Browse and Search" icon. To get started right away, you can search the Random House catalog for any of the thousands of titles now available in the program." [See also the FAQ page for more details]

  • "Browse Inside is the digital experience of flipping through the pages of a book to get a sense of it. Ultimately, each book in the HarperCollins catalog will have the Browse Inside link. Until then, this page will present noteworthy books as they become available with Browse Inside digital pages for you."

  • Publishers try to stave off Google, Amazon with book search
  • March 02, 2007
    * Upcoming GAO Report Details Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE) Program

  • Washington Post, February 28, 2007: New Profiling Program Raises Privacy Concerns: "The Department of Homeland Security is testing a data-mining program that would attempt to spot terrorists by combing vast amounts of information about average Americans, such as flight and hotel reservations."

  • Christian Science Monitor, February 9, 2006: US plans massive data sweep - Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far?


  • Related government documents:
    House Report 109-699 - Making Appropriations for The Department of Homeland Security for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2007: "The ADVISE program is designed to extract relationships and correlations from large amounts of data to produce actionable intelligence on terrorists. A prototype is currently available to analysts in Intelligence and Analysis using departmental and other data, including some on U.S. citizens. The conferees understand up to $40,000,000 has been obligated for ADVISE. The ADVISE program plan, total costs and privacy impacts are unclear and therefore the conferees direct the Inspector General to conduct a comprehensive program review and report within nine months of enactment of this Act."

    February 28, 2007
    * RIAA Launches New Initiatives Targeting Campus Music Theft

    RIAA press release: "The recording industry today launched a new and strengthened campus anti-piracy initiative that significantly expands the scope and volume of its deterrent efforts while offering a new process that gives students the opportunity to avoid a formal lawsuit by settling prior to a litigation being filed. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), on behalf of the major record companies, today sent 400 pre-litigation settlement letters to 13 different universities. Each letter informs the school of a forthcoming copyright infringement lawsuit against one of its students or personnel. The RIAA will request that universities forward those letters to the appropriate network user. Under this new approach, a student (or other network user) can settle the record company claims against him or her at a discounted rate before a lawsuit is ever filed."

    February 27, 2007
    * Commentary on Our Increasingly Digitized Lives

    Envisioning the Whole Digital Person, by Jonathan Follett, Published February 20, 2007: "Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized—from the ways we communicate, to our entertainment media, to our e-commerce transactions, to our online research. As storage becomes cheaper and data pipes become faster, we are doing more and more online—and in the process, saving a record of our digital lives, whether we like it or not." [via Darlene Fichter]

    February 24, 2007
    * Web Capacity Encounters Limits With Increased Global Demand for Rich Media

    Deloitte Telecommunications Predictions 2007 (TMT Trends 2007) - "This study examines 10 emerging developments sure to make 2007 another eventful year for the telecommunications industry":


    1. "Reaching the limits of cyberspace—growth in video traffic on the "superhighway" means the Internet is approaching gridlock.
    2. The net neutrality debate needs resolution—the Internet, fundamental freedom for all or a tiered, toll-based enterprise?
    3. The broadband appliance unlocks the Internet for everyone—sidestepping the PC via new, small devices will promote future growth in Internet penetration.
    4. Long live mobile video (just forget the television)—moving video content from the phone and onto bigger screens is far more likely to reap profits than trying to squeeze television onto mobile phones.
    5. It’s mobile, but not as we knew it—network operators need to shake things up as mobile moves indoors.
    6. The case for innovation, not imitation, in IPTV—IPTV needs to develop an original offer of television, not be a pale imitation of what currently exists.
    7. The kilobyte is the killer application—bigger is not always better, as kilobyte-sized applications show.
    8. The double-edged sword of triple play—failure to deliver a consistent quality of service across all their bundled offerings could cost operators dearly.
    9. The connectivity chasms deepen—in the expanding digital divide, if you do not have voice, you may not have a voice.
    10. The rising cost of free telecommunications—the "free lunch" in telecommunications may cause indigestion for some."

    February 12, 2007
    * Implications of Service Offshoring for Metropolitan Economies

    The Brookings Institution, The Implications of Service Offshoring for Metropolitan Economies, by Robert Atkinson and Howard Wial, February 2007. [Full Report in PDF]

  • "An examination of service offshoring—the movement of service jobs overseas—forecasts higher than average job losses in twenty-eight U.S. metropolitan areas between 2004 and 2015. Information technology jobs, and the metropolitan areas where they are concentrated, will be hardest hit. To cushion the service offshoring blow, the paper urges federal, state, and local leaders to together pursue policies that boost productivity and innovation, assist workers who are harmed by offshoring, and modernize approaches to economic and workforce development."
  • February 11, 2007
    * Former NASA Engineer Leads Google Book Search Project

    Google's Moon Shot, by JEFFREY TOOBIN - The quest for the universal library. New Yorker, Posted 2007-01-29

  • "Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. At the University of Michigan, Google’s original partner in Google Book Search, tens of thousands of books are processed each week on the company’s custom-made scanning equipment...The chief engineer of Google’s system for scanning books in the library collections is Dan Clancy, who joined the company after eight years at NASA, where he supervised teams of Ph.D.s. working on problems related to artificial intelligence."

  • Related postings on the Google Library Project
  • February 09, 2007
    * China's Impact on the Semiconductor Industry: 2006 Update

    China's Impact on the Semiconductor Industry: 2006 Update: "PricewaterhouseCoopers began the study series China’s Impact on the Semiconductor Industry in 2004 in response to our clients’ interest in the rapid growth of the semiconductor industry in China. Specifically, clients wanted to find out whether China’s production volumes would contribute to worldwide overcapacity and a subsequent downturn. At the time, multinational integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) were closing down their fabs in North America, and foundries such as Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, Hua Hong NEC, and SMIC were adding capacity. Some multinationals were transferring to joint ventures in China certain equipment and production activities focused on selected products. Many industry participants talked of significant future investments in wafer fabs."

    * Zillow Releases Quarterly Home Value Reports

    Fourth Quarter: October-December 2006: Our statisticians look at zillions of data points each and every day, and are able to spot housing trends based on that information. Read our press release to learn about the trends we saw across the nation in Q4."

    February 08, 2007
    * Election Assistance Commission Prepares to Launch Voting System Test Lab Program

    "The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) today heard testimony during a public meeting about the launch of its accreditation program for laboratories that test voting systems, including discussion about the first two labs that will be considered for accreditation. The Commission also voted to stop accepting applications or additional information related to pending applications to its interim test laboratory accreditation program, effective March 5, 2007, citing the onset of the full accreditation program... After the EAC review, the Commission will vote regarding full accreditation. For more information about the NIST/NVLAP accreditation process and to view related documents, visit www.vote.nist.gov."

  • Related postings on e-voting

  • See also the E-Poll Book Improvement Act of 2007 (Introduced in House), January 31, 2007
  • February 05, 2007
    * Web Search Queries Used to Drive E-Commerce

    WSJ free feature, The New Benefits of Web-Search Queries - Companies Use Research To Develop Products, Trail Consumer Interests: "...companies...are figuring that what users type into search boxes offers insight into what people are actually interested in buying."

    * National Consumer Protection Week: A Time to Read Up and Reach Out

    "The Federal Trade Commission has launched the ninth annual National Consumer Protection Week, February 4-10, 2007, in cooperation with federal, state, and local agencies and national advocacy organizations committed to consumer protection and education. This year’s theme, “Read Up and Reach Out. Be an Informed Consumer,” encourages consumers to arm themselves with knowledge. By gathering information – and sharing it with their friends and families – consumers can become more confident, savvy, and safe in the marketplace."

    * Study on Website Authentication Shows Users Often Disregard Security Measures

    The Emperor's New Security Indicators, An evaluation of website authentication and the effect of role playing on usability studies, working draft released February 4, 2007. Authors: Stuart E. Schechter (MIT), Rachna Dhamija (Harvard), Andy Ozmet (MIT), Ian Fischer (Harvard).

    February 01, 2007
    * Consumer Payment Study - AARP Research Report

    Consumer Payment Study - AARP Research Report, February 1, 2007 (31 pages, PDF): "To what extent do age 25+ individuals with bill-paying responsibility for their households use newer electronic payment methods, such as automatic bill payment and online transactions, as well as more traditional payment methods, such as cash, checks and credit cards? This national survey addresses that question and explores the degree to which use of these newer technologies varies by age."

    January 31, 2007
    * 2007 Consumer Action Handbook

    Federal Citizen Information Center: 2007 Consumer Action Handbook (178 pages, PDF): "This everyday guide to being a smart shopper is chocked full of helpful tips about buying a car or home, preventing identity theft, understanding credit, resolving problems after a purchase, and much more.

  • Consumer Topics: This .pdf includes all of the Consumer Topics (63 pages)

  • Sample Complaint Letter: This .pdf is the sample compaint letter included in the Consumer Action Handbook. It is a quick 1-page download that you can use as a template to write a complaint letter.

  • Consumer Assistance Directory: This 106 page .pdf includes all of the Consumer Assistance Directory contact information including corporate, car manufacturers, state offices, federal agencies, better business bureaus, national consumer organizations, and trade associations.

  • Corporate Consumer Offices: This .pdf includes contact information for all of the corporations listed in the Handbook.(37 pages)

  • Car Manufacturers and Resolution Programs: This .pdf includes contact information for all of the automobile manufacturers listed in the Handbook. (4 pages)

  • State Offices: This .pdf includes contact information for all of the state and local offices listed in the Handbook. (36 pages)

  • Federal Agencies: This .pdf includes contact information for all of the Federal agencies listed in the Handbook. (15 pages)

  • BBBs: This .pdf includes contact information for all of the Better Business Bureaus listed in the Handbook. (5 pages)

  • Consumer Organizations: This .pdf includes contact information for all of the National Consumer Organizations listed in the Handbook. (5 pages)

  • Trade Associations: This .pdf includes contact information for all of the Trade and Professional Associations listed in the Handbook." (6 pages)
  • January 08, 2007
    January 02, 2007
    December 26, 2006
    * Zillow Launches Real Estate Wiki

    Open to registered users, Zillow's Real Estate Wiki "is devoted to all aspects of real estate" and allows "everyone to share their knowledge and experience, whether they are professionals, sellers, buyers, or just plain people who are passionate about real estate."

    * Survey Shows Majority of Online Adults Use E-mail for E-Commerce Transactions

    Press release: A "survey, conducted by Harris Interactive®, found that about three in four online adults (74 percent) view e-mail communications from a company they frequently patronize to be valuable or very valuable. In addition, 30 percent of online adults have purchased a particular good or service as a result of receiving such e-mails, and of these, 85 percent have done so within the past year."

    December 25, 2006
    * Growth in Outsourced Legal Services to Companies in India Reported

    Follow-up to a November 12, 2006 article on LLRX.com, Developments in Legal Outsourcing and Offshoring, Moushumi Anand, Medill News Service, posted this article that highlights the growth in contracts for outsourced legal work undertaken by several companies in India.

    December 19, 2006
    * Topical Blogs Offer Last Minute Shopping Ideas

    WSJ free feature: Blogs for Shoppers, From Fashion to Food, Sites, Track Deals and Offer Ideas For Stumped Gift Givers

  • See also Kathy Biehl's After Hours columns on LLRX.com, which include her 2006 Holiday Gift Guide
  • December 13, 2006
    * Internet Users Increasingly Turn to Online House Hunting

    Pew Internet & American Life Project: "For Americans on the move, the Internet is becoming an increasingly important resource for researching housing options. The number of online house hunters has increased by two thirds since March 2000. On average, more than three million Internet users are online on any given day searching for a new place to live."

  • Looking for Information About a Place to Live, December 13, 2006
  • * Gartner Releases 10 IT Predictions for 2007 and Beyond

    Press release: Among the predicitions, is the following - "Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007. Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007."

    December 01, 2006
    * Special Report on Books From Forbes

    The 12-1-2006 issue of Forbes includes a Special Report, simply titled, Books. The report includes a series of articles on endurance of books, and the role technology has and will play, in their evolving future role.

  • Custom-Built Libraries, By Brandy Slagle

  • Publish And Perish, By Elisabeth Eaves. "Books crumble. Discs degrade. Is the age-old quest to preserve human knowledge just a pipedream?"

  • How The Internet Saved Literacy, By Maureen Farrell. "Reading skills are not eroding; they are just becoming more social--and more closely tied to writing."

  • The Secret Life Of An Online Book Reviewer, By Helen Coster. "Donald Mitchell has written 2,923 book reviews for Amazon.com--and made $20,000 doing it."

  • We Stole This Headline, By R. M. Schneiderman. "Universities are increasingly employing software to nab plagiarists. When will the media and publishing houses catch up?"

  • 2008's Hottest Book?, By David A. Andelman. "HarperCollins is betting big on an American author writing in French about a Gestapo agent."

  • My Author, My Life, By Hannah Clark. "How far will Robert Jordan's fans go to keep their favorite write alive?"

  • Video: The Future Of Publishing. "Why the web has been a boon for the literary world."
  • November 30, 2006
    * 2007 Digital Future Report

    "The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School has been tracking a representative sample of the American population for over six years watching as people move on-line and then move from modems to broadband."

  • Highlights of the 2007 Digital Future Report

  • "This year's report contains a large module looking at on-line communities and social networking in great detail. Readers can compare the social networking data and correlate it to six years of attitudes and behaviors on-line. As usual, the report continues to track off-line media use, purchasing both off-line and through e-commerce, social and political activity and a wealth of other data." [The report is available for purchase here.]
  • November 27, 2006
    November 23, 2006
    * E-Gov Sites Offer Suggestions for Holiday Shopping

    E-government websites offer useful holiday shopping advice to consumers via the following:

  • FTC Consumer Alert - Holiday Shopping? How To Be On Guard When You’re Online

  • and Consumer Action Buying tips: "Before you head out to the mall or shop online for that perfect present, take a few moments to read these tips to help you have a less stressful holiday season.
    -- Decide in advance exactly what you want and what you can
    afford.
    -- Read sale ads carefully. Some may say "quantities
    limited," "no rain checks," or "not available at all
    stores."
    -- Don't buy on impulse or under pressure. This includes
    donating to charity. Do your research.
    -- Get a written copy of guarantees and warranties.
    -- Get the seller's refund, return and cancellation
    policies."
  • * Presentations Available from FTC Public Hearings on Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade

    Federal Trade Commission Public Hearings on Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-ade, November 6 - 8, 2006.

  • Links to presentations (in formats that include html, PDF, and video), on the following topics: Key Changes Predicted in the Next Tech-ade; The Changing Internet; How Will We Communicate in the Next Tech-ade?; Social Networking - Trends and Implications for the Futur; User-generated Content - What Does it Mean for Consumers and Marketers?; Benefits to Consumers of Living in an Instant Information Culture; Marketing and Advertising in the Next Tech-ade; Computing Power and How it Will be Used in the Marketplace of the Next Tech-ade; RFID Technology in the Next Tech-ade; Convergence and What it Means for the Coming Tech-ade; Changes in Payment Devices and Systems; New Products - New Challenges; Communicating with Consumers in the Next Tech-ade - The Impact of Demographics and Shifting Consumer Attitudes; How to Make Sense of it All - Consumers' Perspective
  • * Commentary on the Advertising Power of YouTube

    From Wired Magazine: "TV advertising is broken, putting $67 billion up for grabs. Which explains why google spent a billion and change on an online video startup."

    November 02, 2006
    * YouTube Faces Rapidly Escalating Copyright Challenges

  • Wall Street Journal free feature: YouTube Finds Signing Rights Deals Complex, Frustrating

  • Financial Times: Google in bid to halt YouTube legal threat


  • Related news: eWeek.com Google Watch blog: "Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corporation, an industrial manufacturing and sales firm, filed suit this week against YouTube in Ohio federal district court, arguing they've incurred dramatic Web support costs and lost business because surfers looking for YouTube (youtube.com) accidentally visit Universal Tube's site (utube.com) instead."

    November 01, 2006
    * Complaint Filed With FTC Calling for Investigation of Online Consumer Tracking and Data Collection Practices

    Press release, November 1, 2006: "The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), two of the leading public-interest advocacy groups working on behalf of a more diverse and competitive online environment, filed a complaint today with the Federal Trade Commission, calling on the commission to undertake an immediate, formal investigation of online advertising practices. As the groups make clear in their 50-page filing (PDF), the data collection and interactive marketing system that is shaping the entire U.S. electronic marketplace is being built to aggressively track Internet users wherever they go, creating data profiles used in ever-more sophisticated and personalized "one-to-one" targeting schemes."

    October 30, 2006
    * National Community Reinvestment Coalition Files FTC Complaint Against Zillow.com

    October 26, 2006 press release: - "Today, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) filed a consumer protection complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging Internet financial services and real estate provider Zillow.com is misleading consumers, real estate professionals and financial service providers in on-line home valuations."

  • Zillow's response to the complaint, posted on the Zillow Blog, October 27, 2006, including in part as follows: "We try really hard to be approachable and open about what we're doing, and take all feedback seriously. So we were surprised (and disappointed) that the group that sent the letter, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, did not contact us first, and instead sent it directly to the press at the same time it was sent to the FTC. Zillow is about empowering consumers with information and tools which they have not had access to before. Our Zestimates are designed as a starting point..."
  • October 13, 2006
    * Federal Prosecution of Human Trafficking, 2001-2005

    Federal Prosecution of Human Trafficking, 2001-2005, 10/06. "Presents Federal criminal case processing statistics on peonage and slavery statutes in the U.S. criminal code with a focus on human trafficking offenses created by Congress in the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. NCJ 215248"

  • Acrobat file | ASCII file| Spreadsheets (zip format 3K)
  • October 12, 2006
    * CMO Council Survey on ID Theft Tracks Growing Consumer Concern

    Press release, October 4, 2006: "As information security concerns among consumers and other customer constituencies rise, just 29 percent of marketers say that their firm has a crisis containment plan in case of a security breach, according to findings of a major research initiative by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council. Without such a plan and other security strategies in place, companies are at risk of losing hundreds of million of dollars in market value and loss of reputation and brand trust, according to the study's findings."

  • The CMO Council's full report is available for purchase, and an 18 page PDF version as follows: Secure the Trust of Your Brand - Assessing the Mindset of Consumers, 2006.
  • October 05, 2006
    * Telephone Record Seller Settles FTC Charges

    Press release: "An Internet business that advertised and sold consumers' phone records and records of credit card accounts to third parties has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it violated federal law. The settlement bars the defendants from obtaining or selling consumers' confidential phone and credit account records unless authorized by law or court order’ and requires that they give up the money they made selling phone records in the past."

  • Federal Trade Commission, Plaintiff, v. Integrity Security & Investigation Services, Inc., Edmund L. Edmister, Tracey Edmister, and F. Lynn Moseley, Defendants; United States District Court Eastern District of Virginia Newport News Division
  • September 12, 2006
    * Large Companies Collecting More Personal Information

    Press release, September 11, 2006: "The Customer Respect Group, an international research and consulting firm that focuses on how corporations treat their online customers, today released findings from its Annual Review of the Largest 100 US Companies... as defined by Fortune Magazine in April 2006. The average rating for the companies was 5.7 on a 10-point scale, in line with the average rating assessed across all website evaluations in 2006. In 2005, the largest 100 companies slightly exceeded the overall average rating...The largest 100 US companies appear to be gathering more personally identifiable information. The use of that information is also changing. Fewer companies are sharing personal data with outside organizations, but more than half continue to send unsolicited marketing emails to those that supply personal information for other reasons." A list of top scoring companies is included in this release, and access to the full Scorecard of the Largest 100 US Companies requires registration.

    September 08, 2006
    * Proposed Framework For Evaluating Digital Rights Management

    CDT press release: "Evaluating DRM: Building a Marketplace for the Convergent World" tackles the complicated subject of copyright protection technology, offering a clear set of metrics for consumers and product reviewers to consider when evaluating DRM-protected devices and services. The goal of the paper is to educate users about what questions to ask to determine how various DRM applications may affect their ability to use movies, music, games and other media."

  • DRM Metrics Quick Reference Chart

  • Evaluating DRM: Building a Marketplace for the Convergent World, September 2006 (25 pages, PDF)
  • August 28, 2006
    * Comparison and Evaluation of 10 Major Internet Bookshops

    Hirwade, Mangala and Hirwade, Anil and Bherwani, Mohini (2006) Evaluative study of major Internet bookshops. ILA Bulletin XLII(1):pp. 32-43.

  • "Internet Bookshops are the online bookshops that allow the user to search the items of his interest, navigate, make a query, communicate, place an order, bargain and negotiate. At its simplest the Internet Bookshop or online bookshop list the products for sale or the services offered and invite the customer to phone, fax or e-mail their order. The present paper evaluates major ten Internet bookshops by using the evaluation criteria like Authority, variety of collection, help menu, shopping procedures, payment acceptance, special facilities for online purchase, user search support, product details, navigation facilities and discounts on the products. A 100 marks scoring system has been adopted to assign the scores to each Internet bookshop under study. Based on the marks obtained these bookshops are graded into five categories viz. Excellent, Very Good, Good, Average and Poor. Amazon.com, USA and Amazom, UK fall uder excellent category while the Internet bookshops from India viz D.K.Agencies and Khemraj fall under good and average category respectively."

  • August 24, 2006
    * Google Book Search Contract to Digitize UC Collection Released

    The Chronicle of Higher Education obtained a copy of the 13 page agreement between Google, Inc. and the Regents of the University of California that details the scope of the digitization project, as well as copyright and ownership issues.

  • Related postings on the Google Book Search Project
  • August 22, 2006
    * Point - Counterpoint on Google Book Search Project

  • Washington Post Op-ed today: The Books Google Could Open, by Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges.

  • eWeek.com: Publishers Fight Back Against Google with New Book Search Service: "Publisher HarperCollins and Austin, Texas-based LibreDigital announced today a hosted service called LibreDigital Warehouse that will give publishers and booksellers the ability to deliver searchable book content on their own Web sites." See also the August 3, 2006 HarperCollins press release: "HarperCollins Publishers is proud to announce a series of digital initiatives, including the beta launch of "Browse Inside," a new application allowing consumers to sample pages of HarperCollins titles online. The implementation of expanded digital technologies signals the latest development in the HarperCollins global digital warehouse initiative and emphasizes the company's commitment to reach consumers on the Web by providing robust content in a wide variety of digital formats."
  • August 21, 2006
    * FTC Chairman Addresses Issue of “Net Neutrality”

    Press release: "Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras today told a meeting of the Progress & Freedom Foundation that she has formed an Internet Access Task Force to examine issues being raised by converging technologies and regulatory developments, and to educate and inform the enforcement, advocacy and education initiatives of the Commission. "I also have asked the Internet Access Task Force to address what is likely the most hotly debated issue in communications, so-called ‘network neutrality,’" she said."

  • The Federal Trade Commission in the Online World: Promoting Competition and Protecting Consumers (21 pages, PDF)-- Deborah Platt Majoras, Remarks to The Progress & Freedom Foundation’s Aspen Summit, August 21, 2006
  • * AOL CTO Resigns Amid Continuing Fallout from Data Breach

    Repercussions continue from AOL release of user data -- from News.com: Three workers depart AOL after privacy uproar and commentary by Anita Ramastry, Privacy and Search Engine Data: A Recent AOL Research Project Has Perilous Consequences for Subscribers.

    August 09, 2006
    * New Report Tracks the Origin and Path of Unwanted Internet Ads

    Press release: "More than half of the pop-up ads served by nuisance "adware" programs are placed knowingly by advertisers, according to a study released today by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT)."

  • Following the Money II: The Role of Intermediaries in Adware Advertising (28 pages, PDF)

  • July 26, 2006
    * GAO: Key Federal Privacy Laws Do Not Require Information Resellers to Safeguard All Sensitive Data

    Personal Information: Key Federal Privacy Laws Do Not Require Information Resellers to Safeguard All Sensitive Data, Full text GAO-06-674, and Highlights, June 26, 2006.

  • "The growth of information resellers--companies that collect and resell publicly available and private information on individuals--has raised privacy and security concerns about this industry. These companies collectively maintain large amounts of detailed personal information on nearly all American consumers, and some have experienced security breaches...GAO found that the applicability of the primary federal privacy and data security laws--the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA)--to information resellers is limited."
  • July 24, 2006
    * Improving Criminal History Records for Background Checks, 2005

    Bureau of Justice Statistics - Improving Criminal History Records for Background Checks, 2005: "Describes the achievements of the National Criminal History Improvement Program (NCHIP), its authorizing legislation, and program history. This program report summarizes NCHIP-funded criminal record improvement efforts, including improved accessibility of records, full participation in the Interstate Identification Index, the automation of records and fingerprint data, and improvements in the National Instant Criminal Background Check, National Sex Offender Registry, and domestic violence and protection order systems. The report provides examples of projects aimed at enhancing the involvement of the courts and system integration in improving disposition reporting. The report also discusses the Bureau of Justice Statistics' efforts to improve performance measurement including the development and use of a Records Quality Index." [July 6, 2006]

    July 20, 2006
    * Amnesty International Releases Report on Search Engine Censorship in China

    Press release: "Amnesty International (AI) today released a new report, "Undermining Freedom of Expression in China," (32 pages, PDF) exposing how Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google have violated their stated corporate values and policies in pursuit of the potentially lucrative Chinese market. In sync with the report release, the organization unveiled irrepressible.info, a new campaign for free speech online that continues Amnesty International's work combating Internet censorship."

    July 11, 2006
    * House Passes Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act

    Today the House passed HR 4411, the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act. The bill passed by roll call vote #363, 317 yeas to 93 nays.


  • See also:
  • House Approves Boucher-Goodlatte Legislation to Combat Illegal Gambling (July 11, 2006)

  • House votes yes on Net-gambling crackdown

  • July 10, 2006
    June 29, 2006
    * Google Launches Online Secure Purchase Service

    Press release: "Google Inc. today announced the launch of Google Checkout, a checkout process that makes online shopping faster, more convenient and more secure for Google users. Google Checkout offers an easy and trusted checkout option that enables shoppers to purchase from participating stores with a single Google login." More information on this Official Google Blog posting.

    June 28, 2006
    * Senate Defeats Net Neutrality

    In an 11-11 vote today, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation defeated the Communications, Consumers' Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006 (otherwise known as Net Neutrality).

  • Senate Panel Narrowly Rejects Net Neutrality - Broadband equality proposal may be dead for this congressional year.

  • Related postings on net neutrality
  • June 20, 2006
    * Industry Leaders Call For Federal Privacy Legislation

    The Consumer Privacy Legislative Forum (whose members include Google, Microsoft, Oracle, EBay Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Symantec Corp.) issued a statement supporting "a serious process to consider comprehensive harmonized federal privacy legislation to create a simplified, uniform but flexible legal framework."

  • Google Official Blog: "On an Internet beset with spyware, malware, phishing, identity-theft, and other privacy threats, enforcement of privacy protections has become an industry-wide challenge, and highlights the lack of a coherent regulatory structure. Google strongly supports the adoption of a federal consumer privacy law. It would be good for our users, and would contribute to consumer trust on the Internet as a platform for communication, expression, e-commerce, and so forth."
  • * The Battle for Search Engine Dominance Continues

    The un-Google, June 15, 2006, from The Economist print edition (free online, if you view an advert first): "Google dominates the lucrative market for web-search, but its rivals [Microsoft, Ask, Yahoo] are setting out to change that."

  • Most Microsoft Workers Search With Google - Do employees at Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google use their own search engines? Apparently, some do and some don't.
  • June 16, 2006
    * Online Banking 2006: Surfing to the Bank

    Pew Internet, Online Banking 2006: "Online banking is holding steady as a mainstream internet activity, growing along with internet use generally, though not accelerating as have some other forms of online activities. Fully 43% of internet users, or about 63 million American adults, bank online."

  • Online Banking 2006: Surfing to the Bank (3 pages, PDF)
  • June 14, 2006
    * Hearing on Broadband Internet Access, Competition and Consumer Protection

    Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Reconsidering Our Communications Laws: Ensuring Competition and Innovation, June 14, 2006.

  • Links to member statements and testimony [HTML]

  • FTC press release on testimony: "The Federal Trade Commission today told the Senate Judiciary Committee that as the Committee considers legislation to amend the Communications Act, it should preserve the FTC's existing authority to protect consumers and maintain competition in the broadband services industry."
  • * Consumer Efforts to Ward Off Span and Spyware Still Fall Short

    WSJ free feature: Seeking a Safer Internet - New Tools Flag Sites With Spyware, Spam - But the Technology Is Far From Perfect

    June 09, 2006
    * Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus 2006 Watch List

    Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus 2006 Watch List: "...the Caucus announced they will focus on China and Russia as high priority countries, due to the scope and depth of their piracy problems. The Caucus will also closely monitor the serious problems of copyright piracy in the following countries: Mexico, Canada, India and Malaysia."

    June 08, 2006
    * Internet Caucus Advisory Committee Hosts Discussion and Posts Issue Papers on Net Neutrality

    June 8, 2006: "The Internet Caucus Advisory Committee (ICAC) hosted a discussion focusing on the legislative proposals percolating in Congress on so-called Network Neutrality. No fewer than six House and Senate bills are circulating in Congress that in some way address this amorphous policy question." [Link]

  • "...the ICAC has requested of all its 200 member organizations one pager issue briefs on the topic of Legislating Network Neutrality – Necessary? The position papers herein reflect only the perspective of the organization that submitted it."

  • Google founder lobbies for net neutrality
  • May 20, 2006
    * Offshoring of Web Content Maintenance and Support Increasingly Common

    BusinessWeek.com: Life On The Web's Factory Floor - Who do you think turns all those words into an easy click?

  • "Behind the seemingly magical offerings of the Internet are thousands of human beings madly inputting data around the clock...The number of third-party, offshore companies that will perform contract work has more than doubled since 2002, according to Wharton's Aron. With Internet connectivity pushing farther into rural areas of China and India, the cost of such work will fall even lower."
  • May 19, 2006
    * Pros and Cons On Net Neutrality Legislation

  • 5/18/2006 - Press release: Sensenbrenner, Conyers Introduce Bipartisan Net Neutrality Legislation [H.R. 5417: Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006]


  • Related documents and links:
  • The Economics of Net Neutrality, Robert W. Hahn, Scott Wallsten. Related Publication 06-13. Apr 2006. "This essay examines the economics of 'net neutrality' and broadband Internet access. We argue that mandating net neutrality would be likely to reduce economic welfare. Instead, the government should focus on creating competition in the broadband market by liberalizing more spectrum and reducing entry barriers created by certain local regulations. In cases where a broadband provider can exercise market power the government should use its antitrust enforcement authority to police anticompetitive behavior."

  • Related postings on net neutrality

  • May 17, 2006
    * Call for Regs to Limit Sale of Social Security Data On Net

    Social Security Numbers: Internet Resellers Provide Few Full SSNs, but Congress Should Consider Enacting Standards for Truncating SSNs, Full-text report GAO-06-495, and Highlights, May 17, 2006.

  • "According to experts we spoke to, there are few federal laws and no specific industry standards on whether to display the first five or last four digits of the SSN, and SSA officials told us the agency does not have the authority to regulate how other public or private entities use SSNs, including how they are truncated. We could not determine if federal privacy laws were applicable to the Internet resellers because such laws depend on the type of entity and the source of information, and most of the resellers' Web sites did not include this information. However, these laws could apply to resellers; 4 of the resellers we examined had Web sites identifying the type of entity they were. About one-half of the resellers cited adherence to one or more federal privacy laws and a few referenced state laws."
  • May 15, 2006
    * Comparison of Major Search Engines Ranks Their Safety

    The Safety of Internet Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask), May 12, 2006, by Ben Edelman and Hannah Rosenbaum.

  • "Abstract: We compare safety of leading search engines, using SiteAdvisor's automated Web site ratings. We find most leading search engines similar in the safety of the sites they link to, though MSN is the safest and Ask lags noticeably behind. Across search engines, we find sponsored results significantly less safe than search engines' organic results."


  • May 01, 2006
    * Factors That Contribute to Successful Banking Websites

    The Three Factors for a Successful Online Banking Site

    * Net Neutrality Proposal Defeated by House

  • Toll Lane Ahead for Internet Traffic?

  • Tech Giants' Internet Battles: "Web titans like Google and Yahoo! are battling some of the smartest lobbyists in the business. And they've just lost a big one on Capitol Hill."

  • Related postings on net neutrality
  • April 21, 2006
    * NY County First in Nation to Require Business Wireless Security

    ComputerWorld reports that Westchester County in New York is the first county in the nation to require all businesses with wireless networks that collect consumer related data to use "minimun security measures."

    April 17, 2006
    * Image Based Searching Using Cell Phone Photos

    From Microsoft Research, Photo2Search: Explore the Real World via Camera Phone

  • "Seeking information about something seen, a user takes a photo of the object and sends the photo, via e-mail or Multimedia Messaging Service, to a Web-based server, which searches an image database for matches. The server then delivers database information—whether it be a Web page featuring the object in the photo or information associated with the object—to the user, who can act on the information received: read a menu, enter a gallery, book a hotel room, make a purchase."

  • Menglei Jia, Xin Fan, Xing Xie, Mingjing Li, Wei-Ying Ma, Photo-to-Search: Using Camera Phones to Inquire of the Surrounding World, demo, The 7th International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM'06), Nara, Japan, May, 2006 (text not yet available).
  • April 09, 2006
    * House Cmte. Issued Subpoenas to Companies Selling Cell Phone Records

    As noted in a series of previous postings on the sale of cell phone records and associated privacy issues, it was reported on April 7, 2006 that the House Engery and Commerce Committee's demand for the business records of companies engaged in this commerce has not yielded reponses. Therefore, the committee issued subpoenas to 12 of the targeted companies, including those that manage the following sites: Anderson-pi.com, phonebust.com,reliatrace.com and reliablelitigation.com, efindoutthetruth.com, advsearch.com, csiofamerica.com, abika.com, sherlockinvestigations.com, datafind.org, locatecell.com, celltolls.com, and peoplesearchamerica.com sites, usaskiptrace.com, and telcosecrets.com.

    April 04, 2006
    * Data Brokers Supplying Gov't Don't Consistently Protect Privacy of Citizen Info

    Personal Information: Agencies and Resellers Vary in Providing Privacy Protections, Full-text GAO-06-609T, April 4, 2006. Highlights.

  • "In fiscal year 2005, the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and State and the Social Security Administration reported that they used personal information obtained from resellers for a variety of purposes, including performing criminal investigations, locating witnesses and fugitives, researching assets held by individuals of interest, and detecting prescription drug fraud. The agencies spent approximately $30 million on contractual arrangements with resellers that enabled the acquisition and use of such information...The major information resellers that do business with the federal agencies GAO reviewed have practices in place to protect privacy, but these measures are not fully consistent with the Fair Information Practices.


  • Personal Information: Agency and Reseller Adherence to Key Privacy Principles, Full-text GAO-06-421, April 4, 2006. Highlights.
  • "...resellers generally limit the extent to which individuals can gain access to personal information held about themselves, as well as the extent to which inaccurate information contained in their databases can be corrected or deleted. Agency practices for handling personal information acquired from information resellers did not always fully reflect the Fair Information Practices. That is, some of these principles were mirrored in agency practices, but for others, agency practices were uneven. For example, although agencies issued public notices on information collections, these did not always notify the public that information resellers were among the sources to be used."
  • March 29, 2006
    * Data Accountability and Trust Act Unanimously Approved by House Cmte.

    Press release: "The House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously approved new data security laws Wednesday that will ensure consumers' personal information is closely guarded and consumers are notified when they are at risk...The bill places new requirements on specific companies that specialize in collecting personal data. These "data brokers" will be required to implement effective security safeguards. If there is a reasonable risk of identity theft to the individual to whom the personal information relates, fraud or other unlawful conduct, these data brokers must notify consumers. Additionally, data brokers will be prohibited from falsely representing themselves to obtain personal data...H.R. 4127, the Data Accountability and Trust Act, passed 41-0. The bill "sends a clear message: 'If you can't protect it, don't collect it,'" said U.S. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., the committee's ranking member."

  • Related postings on data breaches
  • * BBB Offers Toolkit to Help Manage Privacy and Security

    "The Better Business Bureau (BBB) has partnered with nationally-recognized security and privacy experts to create a new toolkit to help small business owners manage security and privacy challenges. We call it Security & Privacy - Made Simpler (TM). The objective is to demystify the complexities of data security and give small businesses a non-technical roadmap to securing their customer data, and their employees' data, too."

  • Download Security & Privacy - Made Simpler
  • March 28, 2006
    * UK Study Notes Increased Use of Net By Women for E-Commerce

    A new study (4 pages, PDF) by the European Interactive Advertising Association indicates that although men continue to spend more time on the Internet than women, the gap is rapidly closing.

    March 26, 2006
    March 24, 2006
    * FEC Issues Draft Final Rules on Use of Internet In Connection with Federal Elections

    Following up on several related postings on bloggers and campaign speech, today the FEC issued a 96 page document (PDF) promulgating its final rules that impact the publication of campaign related information. Declan McCullagh has more details and commentary.

  • March 22, 2006 - The Commission Has Published Interim Final Rules on Definitions of Federal Election Activity in Today's Federal Register

  • March 23, 2006
    * Report Finds Significant Restrictions to Formulary Drug Access for Seniors

    Press release: "Rep. Waxman releases a new report finding that 97% of plans restrict access to important drugs on their formularies through the use of prior authorization, step-therapy, and quantity limits. A telephone survey of the plans finds that they fail to adequately inform seniors of these restrictions, often providing information that is conflicting or erroneous."

  • Case Studies: The Impact of Restrictions on Seniors

  • Report: Restrictions on Access to Formulary Drugs
  • March 22, 2006
    * CDT Report Identifies Large Corporate Adware Funders

    Press release: "Large well-respected companies are helping to fund the virulent spread of unwanted and potentially harmful "adware" by paying for advertisements generated by those programs, a new report by CDT finds. In "Following the Money: How Advertising Dollars Encourage Nuisance and Harmful Adware and What Can be Done to Reverse the Trend," (10 pages, PDF) CDT details how -- through a complicated network of intermediaries -- major advertisers pay to have their products and services advertised though pop-ups and other ads generated by unwanted advertising software or "adware." The report dissects the financial relationships behind those arrangements and identifies a number of mainstream companies that advertise through one particularly unscrupulous adware distributor."

    March 17, 2006
    * Google Claims Victory in Fight With DOJ Over Search Records

    From the Official Google Blog: Judge tells DoJ "No" on search queries, Posted by Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel: "Google will not have to hand over any user's search queries to the government. That's what a federal judge ruled today when he decided to drastically limit a subpoena issued to Google by the Department of Justice. [Today's ruling, 21 pages (PDF) and the government's original subpoena.)

  • Related postings on DOJ's legal efforts to obtain specific Google database search records
  • * Copyright Case Against Google Dismissed

    WSJ free feature - Google Wins Copyright Battle; Archiving Issue Is Still Unclear: "A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit accusing Google Inc. of wrongful conduct, including copyright infringement and defamation, providing the latest court opinion to weigh in on the contentious area of search engines and copyright."

    March 09, 2006
    * Most Website Search Engines Fail Users

    March 1, 2006, It's Time To Update Site Search Functionality, by Iris Cremers with Jaap Favier, Kerry Bodine

  • Summary: "Forrester reviewed 179 Web sites with its updated Web Site Review methodology. One of the criteria looks at the site's search engine and search interface — and more than half of the sites we reviewed failed. As online consumers are accustomed to using effective search engines like Google in their daily lives and are more likely to search an unfamiliar site than browse it, site owners have to make an effort to live up to their customers' search engine expectations."
  • March 03, 2006
    * Some State Online UCC Filings Include Social Security Numbers

    Press release: "Attorney General Jim Petro said today he believes Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has a legal duty to take immediate steps to protect the privacy of citizens whose Social Security numbers have been made public on routine business forms posted on his office’s Web site....The confidentiality of citizens’ Social Security numbers is guarded as well under many public offices’ individual policies, including the Kentucky Secretary of State’s office, which redacts the numbers from forms they display or provide to the public, Petro said."

  • Link to Attorney General Opinion 2005-047

  • Link to Kentucky Secretary of State Business Services Web Page

  • Link to Ohio Supreme Court decision

  • USATODAY.com: "It is common for the websites of the USA's secretaries of state to contain personal information, including Social Security numbers (SSNs) and home addresses, in business statements. Besides Ohio, the data is available in New York, Florida and at least seven other states, say privacy experts who provided USA TODAY with links to public websites."
  • * Lawsuit Against Craigslist Alleges Discriminatory Housing Ads

    Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Inc. v. Craigslist, Inc. Case 1:06-cv-00657, Filed 02/03/2006, 20 pages, PDF.

  • The Fair Housing Act
  • March 02, 2006
    * Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006 Introduced Today

    Press release: "U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) today unveiled ground-breaking new legislation that would ensure "net neutrality," or equal delivery of content on the internet, for consumers and business interests. Under Wyden's bill, the Internet Nondiscrimination Act of 2006, network operators would be prohibited from charging companies for faster delivery of their content to consumers over the internet or favoring certain content over others."

    Related news and postings on net neutrality:

  • Consumer Federation of America, Survey: Consumers Want Congress to Protect Right to Access Information, Services on Internet, 01/18/06

  • Technology Review: The Net Effect of Neutrality - Web surfing has been, from its beginning, an open digital road. However, Congress may soon build roadblocks to some content, February 10, 2006.

  • Common Cause Factsheet on Net Neutrality

  • Tech Groups: Keep Net Neutrality, March 2, 2006

  • Related postings on net neutrality

  • * Increased Penalties for Sale of Cell Phone Records Passed by House and Senate Cmtes.

    H.R. 4709: Law Enforcement and Phone Privacy Protection Act of 2006, and S. 2178: Consumer Telephone Records Protection Act of 2006, both passed committee by voice vote.

  • Related postings on sale of cell phone records
  • February 27, 2006
    * Phishing, Pharming, Key Logging, DDOS Attacks Require Net Users to Remain Vigilant

    New York Times: Cyberthieves Silently Copy Your Passwords as You Type

  • USA Today, Increasing Web attacks disrupt commerce

  • Related postings on cybercrime
  • February 26, 2006
    * Open Access To Internet Subject of Growing Debate

    Following up on one, two, three recent posting related to increasing focus on issues related to net neutrality, open access, and e-commerce, see an article today from AP: Future of the Internet Highway Debated. It includes a discussion of the commercial, technical and socio-political issues associated with Internet traffic management (packet prioritization - ) the ability to specify different priority levels for different applications).

    February 21, 2006
    * Advocacy Group Targets Attorneys in Controversy Over Purchase of Cell Phone Records

    EPIC: "In a letter sent to state ethical and professional responsibility boards, EPIC warned that there is mounting evidence that attorneys are major purchases of "pretexting" services. Pretexting is the practice of using false pretenses to trick a company into releasing personal information. EPIC urged state boards to evaluate pretexting under ethics rules, and t