Google to pay $8.5m to settle Buzz lawsuit

Google has proposed paying $8.5m (£5.5m) to settle a lawsuit brought over its Buzz social network
6 September 2010

Launched in February, Buzz enrolled all Gmail users into a social network based around their contacts.

The service was criticised because users initially had relatively little control over who could see their network of contacts.

Several Gmail users took Google to court over Buzz saying the network violated personal privacy.

The lump sum is at the centre of Google's proposed settlement of the legal case, of which 30% will be used to pay legal fees, the seven Gmail users who brought the case will get $2,500 each and the remainder will be shared among organisations that promote online privacy.

The settlement also requires Google to do more to educate people about the privacy aspects of Buzz. The settlement has yet to win approval from the federal judge overseeing the case.

The initial rash of complaints about Buzz forced Google to bring in changes that made it an opt-in service and gave users control over who they maintain contact with.

In a separate development, Google is facing an investigation by the attorney general of Texas into how it manipulates search results.

The investigation started in July and aims to find out if the way Google treats search results violates the state's anti-trust laws.

Complaints by three firms - Foundem, SourceTool and MyTriggers - are thought to have kick-started investigation.

Don Harrison, deputy general counsel at Google, wrote on the company blog that the company was "looking forward" to working with the attorney general's office as it was "confident" it was acting in the best interests of users.

Mr Harrison also suggested that arch-rival Microsoft was providing help and financing to the search firms making complaints.

YouTube exposes your Gmail contacts

'Indicative of the media’s inclination to monetize every last bit of our information,' advocate says
By Allen McDuffee | Monday, June 28th, 2010

Before you call your spouse over to see the newest cute kitten video on YouTube, you had better check twice to make sure no indiscretions will be exposed on your YouTube homepage.

As part of an effort to make YouTube more like Facebook and other social networking sites, a re-design of YouTube’s homepage for registered users may reveal some of your deepest, darkest email secrets.

The new layout, rolled out over the course of the spring, while you’re logged in displays all of the individuals you’ve emailed with in a large text box front and center on the homepage, in the hope you will connect with them and expand the matrix of viewers of your (and their) videos. But the unsolicited suggestions to connect with exes, former employers or where adult purchases may have been made, isn’t a welcome intrusion for many particularly when it’s based on a history of online correspondence that was presumed to be private.

The apparent motivation for the change is to find new ways to encourage more page views and increase the likelihood of viewers clicking on Google’s advertising. Combining YouTube and Gmail—both Google, Inc. products—maximizes the audience potential (and therefore advertising revenue) exponentially. (Full disclosure: Raw Story uses and earns revenue from Google's AdSense service, a program which provides contextual advertising to pages like this one.)

Google did not respond to a request for comment about the change.

Jennifer L. Pozner, executive director of Women In Media & News and author of the forthcomingReality Bites Back, said that “While Youtube’s shift wont make as great of an impact as Facebook’s draconian privacy rules, it is still indicative of the media’s inclination to monetize every last bit of our information whether we feel comfortable with it or not and whether it’s useful to us or not.”

The new layout has been immensely unpopular among users, registering hundreds of negative comments on the YouTube blog and sparking some to take their protests to other social networking sites, including a Facebook group called The New YouTube Sucks!!, which encourages members to offer their testimony of the problems associated with the new homepage.

For many, the new version forces social networking on a site that many joined purely for the purpose of entertainment.

One user wrote this about the new version in a YouTube help forum:

“I have 380 friends on YouTube. I had no reason to deny friend requests until now, so I didn't see any harm in it. They had no major affect on my channel or homepage, and every now and then they might recommend a good video to me. Now, however, every single activity of all 380 people is flooding up my feed, and I have to scroll through everything just to see if my subscriptions have uploaded anything. Did Mega64 upload a new video? I'm not sure, because 20 people have favorited 20 different videos, none of which I actually care to watch.”

This annoying scenario can quickly turn into an embarrassing one for those who took advantage of the auto-connect feature, which would unwittingly dredge up videos of people in your past and place them in your stream on your homepage.

But no matter how many annoying or embarrassing occurrences there may be, it’s not likely that Google will face any sustained protests from users, according to Cato Institute research fellow, Julian Sanchez.

Sanchez, who works on technology, privacy, civil liberties, and new media issues, said, “What they ought to do, rather, is make very clear on each site that a user’s identity on one can be linked to the others, and give people an opportunity to think twice about which connections they may not want made.”

What’s problematic in all of this, according to Sanchez, is “the reminder that online identities a user might have conceived of as distinct are in fact linked. To create such links against a user’s expectations is a privacy violation, but here Google isn’t actually creating the link so much as drawing attention to one that already exists.”

Sanchez pointed out that all of this might serve as a helpful reminder that “someone who’s got your Gmail address can already find your YouTube videos—and if you don’t want that prospective employer seeing last week’s drunken karaoke session, maybe you should think about opening a separate account.”

He continued, “Even when the link is preexisting, there can be an effect on privacy in practice, insofar as it effectively announces the existence of an account that an email contact might not have bothered to search for manually.”

However unsettling this may be, it oddly may be a step in the right direction for Google, according to media technologist and social media consultant, Deanna Zandt.

“At least they're asking, that's a start,” says Zandt.

“One of the major failures of the release of Google's Buzz product was that it didn't do a whole lot of asking; thus you ended up with women inadvertently sharing things with abusive ex's because those ex's were their most contacted person,” Zandt pointed out.

Buzz is Google's social networking platform in which Gmail users had their contact lists automatically made publicly available unless they opted out—many of whom did not immediately know such an option existed.

But even with the ability to “opt-out,” it might just be time to get over any notions of true privacy.

Zandt, author of Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking, says, “What we all need to wrap our heads around at this point is that privacy is not a binary option anymore—there's no absolute private and absolute public. We have nuanced and varying degrees of privacy (we always have, it's just more apparent now), and the social networking applications that claim to enhance our lives better be working hard and fast to represent those nuances accurately.”

Some say Google hasn’t been sensitive to the privacy concerns of its users. In a December 2009 CNBC interview, CEO Steve Schmidt said, “If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.” He continued, “But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time.”

But the company did pull out of the Chinese market earlier this year, saying that they could no longer comply with the country's extensive censorship rules. Google accused China of hacking its popular Gmail service, which may have been intended to spy on anti-government activists.

Google first faced intense scrutiny over privacy issues on a broad scale surrounding the company’s popular Gmail service, where advertisements would appear in the sidebar directly related to the content of the email. Google insists that the only reader of Gmail is the account holder and bots are used explicitly to increase the relevance of advertisements.

In January 2009, as President Barack Obama moved into the White House, the Obama administration drew heavy criticism for granting a waiver to YouTube from the White House’s privacy policy promising that the site would not use long-term tracking cookies. It was a direct contradiction to a long-standing rule keeping federal agencies from tracking visitors.

YouTube, created in 2005 by three former PayPal employees, was purchased in 2006 by Google Inc. According to YouTube, 2 billion videos are viewed each day and hundreds of thousands of daily video uploads means that 24 hours of video are uploaded each minute.

Giving FCC authority to set policy on net neutrality

Congress should give the FCC specific authority over broadband to keep traffic flowing freely.

5:01 PM PDT, April 8, 2010

A federal appeals court reined in the Federal Communications Commission this week, ruling that it overstepped its authority when it penalized Comcast for surreptitiously disabling a popular technology that let people share files online. But the ruling did not quell the commission's interest in regulating the way Internet service providers such as Comcast manage their networks. Instead, it set up a potential fight over whether the commission's regulatory authority should be expanded, either by Congress or the commission itself. We think the best course is for lawmakers to give the FCC clear but limited power to preserve the openness that has made the Internet not just a hotbed for innovation but also the most important communications medium of our time.

At issue is "net neutrality," which is the idea that companies selling high-speed Internet connections should treat all legal websites and online offerings equally. These companies take an essentially neutral approach today, discriminating only against malicious content and spam. But with their customers sending and receiving increasing amounts of data, Internet service providers warn that they won't be able to keep pace with the demand for bandwidth unless they can generate more revenue -- possibly by letting online companies pay extra to make their sites and services more accessible than their competitors' (the so-called Internet "fast lane"). Such a shift could help well-financed companies with established audiences cement their advantage over smaller and newer contenders.

Both sides of the neutrality debate agree that the free and open nature of the Internet is crucial to spurring innovation. What divides them are the questions of whether the government should try to protect those qualities and whether the possibility of a fast lane constitutes a threat or an upgrade. We'd prefer to rely on the market, but that would require more competition among broadband service providers. Today, most homes have at best two options for high-speed service: a cable modem from the local cable TV operator or a DSL connection from the local phone company. Wireless companies are emerging as a third option in some areas, but they may never be able to match the capacity of wired connections.

Because consumers have few real alternatives, broadband providers could abuse their position as gatekeepers to steer traffic to affiliated websites or away from competitors, and to manage congestion in a way that handicaps rival phone and video services. There's little evidence that they're doing such things; the FCC has taken action against only two companies for interfering with their customers' activities online. One was Madison River Communications, a North Carolina-based telephone and DSL provider accused in 2005 of blocking customers’ access to an Internet phone service. The other was Comcast, which secretly prevented customers from using BitTorrent software to share files in 2008. But the decision Tuesday by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals called into question not just the Comcast ruling but the FCC's power to stop any Internet provider from interfering with its customers' access to the websites and services of their choice, no matter how blatantly.

The FCC gave up much of its authority over Internet providers as broadband services proliferated. Back in the dial-up modem days, it classified Internet access as a communications service subject to extensive federal regulation, similar to long-distance phone plans. But in 2002 and 2005, it reclassified cable modems and DSL connections as information services -- a deregulatory move that left the commission with little clear rule-making power over them. Instead, the FCC called on broadband providers to grant their customers four freedoms online: to access any legal content, run any application, use any compatible device and be fully informed about their service plans.

Those principles were simply declared, not adopted as rules, which contributed to the FCC's problem before the D.C. Circuit. Last year the commission's new chairman, Julius Genachowski, launched a formal process to adopt the four principles as rules, along with two additional ones: broadband providers should not discriminate against any legal sites or applications, nor should they conceal how they manage traffic on their networks. That's a better approach, but the D.C. Circuit's ruling suggests that information services simply cannot be regulated that way.

One option is for the FCC to reverse its previous decisions and classify broadband as a communications service. It wouldn't be far-fetched -- the Internet is a more sophisticated and powerful communications medium than traditional telephony. In fact, phone service is just one of many communications applications the Internet supports. Considering how much has changed since Congress overhauled telecommunications law in 1996, however, it would be better to have lawmakers give the FCC specific powers to safeguard the Net than to have the commission stuff broadband providers into the same regulatory category as last century's Bell system.

Congress has dodged this issue for several years, with at least three net neutrality bills foundering in House or Senate committees since 2006. Not only is the issue complex, but there's no consensus even within the usual political and ideological alliances. For example, some social conservatives support neutrality rules on free-speech grounds, while fiscal conservatives oppose them as a regulatory intrusion. The major Hollywood studios fear the rules might impede their efforts to fight piracy, but the Independent Film & Television Alliance favors them as a way to protect their members' access to viewers. Nevertheless, this week's ruling leaves Congress little choice. At the very least, it should give the FCC the power to stop the kinds of abuses that Madison River and Comcast engaged in. Otherwise, the commission may well give itself the power to do even more.

Google Gives the US Government Access To Gmail

Google Gives the US Government Access To Gmail
Published on 04-09-2010
Source: Slashdot

"Google condemns the Chinese Government for censoring its results, and Australia for planning to do the same. Meanwhile, its lawyers and security experts have told employees to 'be intentionally vague about whether or not we've given access to end-user accounts,' according to engineer James Tarquin, hinting that Google may be sharing its data with the US government. Perhaps Australia's most hated communications minister, Steven Conroy, could be right in his criticism of Google's privacy record after all."