Google Has Launched a For-Profit Privacy Invasion Into Our Electronic Lives

By Steven Rosenfeld
February 3, 2014 | AlterNet

No longer content to vacuum up, scan, index and sell analytics based on the content of our texts, emails, searches, locations and more, Google now has a new target: tapping, mapping and colonizing the networks wiring our lives.

“Google argues that it has the right to collect your most sensitive data, as long as it flows across an open WiFi network,” PrivacySOS.org [3] said [4] last month after Google announced a $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest [5], which sells WiFi-controlled home heating appliances. “Now do you want to let this company inside your home?”

“Uhm… I hate to break this to the ACLU—given they’re supposed to be on the cutting edge of the privacy debate—but the thing is, Google’s already in our homes,” commented [6] PandoDaily’s Yasha Levine. “It has been in our homes for a long, long time. And not just in our homes, but at work, in our cars and even when we’re walking down the street.”

“As many have pointed out the privacy concerns of this development are huge,” wrote two other PandoDaily writers, Carmel Deamicus and Michael Carney. “Nest products track detailed information [7] about their users’ movements, in addition to things like a user’s WiFi IP address, and whether the specific address is a home or a business.”

Google is poised to cross another personal boundary. It is not just that our questions and queries are being aggressively collected, parsed, sold and resold, but that the networks tying together our digitized lives—via our devices, their settings and passwords—are also being eyed by the global data-hungry Goliath.
“The acquisition will help Google close the circle of search, people and goods in a broad Internet of Everything,” wrote [8] Wall Street Journal editor Michael Hickins. “As Aaron Levie, CEO of Box Inc. tweeted, ‘With home automation, self-driving cars, robots, mobile, and life sciences, Google is setting itself up to own the 21st century.’”

Anyone who cares about maintaining some degree of privacy should pay attention. Google has been doing a lot more than its lobbyists and executives have disclosed when defending or promoting its initiatives. Here are four examples that undescrore Google’s corporate ethos that any data it can grab is Google's for the taking.

1. Street View: not just street mapping. After being sued by 38 states, Google admitted last March that its weird-looking cars outfitted with roof cameras facing four directions were not just taking pictures; they were collecting data from computers inside homes and structures, including “passwords, e-mails and other personal information from unsuspecting computer users,” the New York Times reported [9].
   
2. Gmail: prying and spying. This October, a federal judge refused to dismiss a potential class-action lawsuit brought by Gmail users who objected to its practice of analyzing the content of all the messages on its network and selling byproducts to advertisers. Those suing Google said it violated federal wiretap laws.

   This issue isn’t new to Google. In congressional testimony in 2009, Google’s lawyers said [10] its email technology was used for scanning for spam, computer viruses and serving ads “within the Gmail user’s experience.” But last fall, U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh held that Google never told Gmail users that Google would create personal profiles and target users with ads. Nor did people who are not Gmail users, but who were writing to Gmail addresses, agree to let Google collect and parse their messages.

3. Google Safari: not just hunting WiFi. Google’s court record includes more than just grabbing and snatching data. In early 2012, theWall Street Journal broke the story that its software was bypassing security settings for Apple devices using the Safari browser. “Google hated this [Safari’s anti-tracking features] and used a secret code to bypass this security setting,” the blog GoogleExposed wrote [11]. “This exposed millions of Safari users to tracking for months without them even knowing about it.” In August 2012, the Federal Trade Commission fined [12] Google $22.5 million, its largest civil fine, noting that Google also had violated previous privacy agreements.
   
4. Android: another data gateway. One year after the FTC fine, ComputerWorld.com [13]’s Michael Horowitz, who writes its Defensive Computing feature, noted Google was back to its old tricks. “Google knows nearly every WiFi password in the world,” he declared, explaining that was the result of backdoor access to hundreds of millions of phones and devices using its Android operating system.

   “Sounds great. Backing up your data/settings makes moving to a new Android device much easier,” Horowitz wrote, citing how the company sold this feature to consumers. “It lets Google configure your new Android device very much like your old one. What is not said, is that Google can read the WiFi passwords.” The good news, he said, is that this feature can be turned off. “The bad news is that, like any American company, Google can be compelled by agencies of the U.S. government to silently spill the beans.”

ComputerWorld was careful [14] not to pick just on Google for domestic spying. DropBox, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, FaceBook, Skype—and others—all do pretty much the same thing: read user data and grant government access to it. But Google’s mission, detailed [15] in its patents, stands apart. Its business is based on analyzing user metrics with ever-growing [8] precision, and selling those insights to advertisers.

Thus, the recent handwringing [16] by Google CEO Eric Schmidt that Google—and others—was taken advantage of by America’s top spymasters following Edward Snowden’s still-unfolding National Security Agency whistleblowing, is more than hollow. It’s a farce. The record shows that Google knows exactly what it is doing.

2014 is likely to be a year where the trade-off for more profits and data for Google will be the loss of privacy. It’s not paranoid to say that Google’s acquisition of Nest is at the cutting edge of colonizing the links between our electronic devices and our lives. The trend of aggregating all the data that’s out there is behind many privacy-invading social media products, such as an app launching this week [17] that literally allows a man to walk into a bar, see a woman and know her name “before he even says hello."

Later this summer, Google will start selling its voice- and video-capturing Glass eyewear. Google Glass may be fantastic as a hands-liberating computing platform, but it also enables its users to film, analyze or spy upon others from afar. But it's up to us to say where the red lines should be drawn when it comes to protecting privacy and personal rights, and balacing those aganist overly intrusive individuals, corporations, institutions and governments.

---

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/4-ways-google-raking-it-massive-profit-privacy-invasion

Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/steven-rosenfeld
[3] http://privacysos.org/
[4] http://privacysos.org/node/1299
[5] https://nest.com/blog/2014/01/13/welcome-home/
[6] http://pando.com/2014/01/14/privacy-advocates-freak-out-at-googles-nest-acquisition-what-took-them-so-long/
[7] https://nest.com/legal/privacy-statement/
[8] http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2014/01/14/the-morning-download-googles-nest-building-may-alarm-privacy-hawks/
[9] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/technology/google-pays-fine-over-street-view-privacy-breach.html
[10] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/10/02/technology/google-email-case.html
[11] http://googleexposed.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/huge-fine-against-google-for-violating-privacy-is-imminent/
[12] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/f-t-c-fines-google-22-5-million-for-safari-privacy-violations/
[13] http://computerworld.com/
[14] http://blogs.computerworld.com/print/22300
[15] http://www.google.de/patents/EP1634206A4?hl=de&cl=en
[16] http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/04/eric-schmidt-slams-for-snooping/
[17] http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/01/30/socialradar-balances-privacy-with-new-social-geolocation-app/?KEYWORDS=google+privacy
[18] http://www.alternet.org/tags/google-0
[19] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Google Report Shows 'Disturbing Growth in Government Surveillance'

Wednesday, January 23, 2013 by Common Dreams
Most recent Transparency Report from web giant reveals 136% increase in user data requests from US since 2009
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer

Google has released its newest semiannual Transparency Report on Wednesday, which shows a "steady increase in government requests" for user data and marks a "disturbing growth in government surveillance online."

The US made 8,438 user data requests during the second half of 2012, a nearly 136% percent increase since 2009. The report from the web giant, which discloses the number of requests it receives from governments and courts worldwide, shows that user data requests are up 70 percent since 2009, with a total of over 21,000 user data requests from over 33,000 users or accounts in the second half of 2012.

The U.S. made the biggest number of requests by far—8,438 during this period, which marks a nearly 136 percent increase since 2009.

Of those U.S. requests, 68% were from subpoenas, as Richard Salgado writes on Google's blog on the report, and "are requests for user-identifying information, issued under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), and are the easiest to get because they typically don’t involve judges."

The Guardian's Dominic Rushe points out how the use of EPCA to get user data is dangerous:

The ECPA has been widely criticised by privacy advocates, and was passed in 1986, long before electronic communication became so common. Under the act, email stored on a third party's server for more than 180 days is considered abandoned. To access that information, officials need only a written statement certifying that the information is relevant to an investigation.

But Holmes Wilson, co-founder of online advocacy group Fight For the Future, said the Justice Department had argued that emails are "abandoned" once they are opened. "Ironically, the emails that now have the most protection are the spam that you never open," he said. "ECPA is under dire need of reform. Right now the government can access almost anything that you have online without a warrant and at anytime. Electronic communication should be afforded the same protection as your physical mail or files stores in a cabinet," he said.

Berin Szoka, president of TechFreedom, says the report "reveals a disturbing growth in government surveillance online," and adds:

On its own, the growth in number of requests for private information like emails should be alarming, especially after the Petreus case. Even more disturbing is that most requests have not been reviewed by a court to ensure that law enforcement has established probable cause to believe a crime has actually been committed, as the Fourth Amendment generally requires.

Today's report doesn't really tell us the full extent of unconstitutional privacy invasions. Law enforcement officials rightly note that they need subpoena access to subscriber information as the 'building blocks' for establishing probable case. They also insist they're already getting warrants for content information, even when ECPA doesn't require that. But we still don't have hard data on either claim. Worse, while large companies like Google may rightly refuse to turn over user data without a warrant, smaller companies without legal staffs may feel compelled to turn over private data with only a subpoena, or perhaps even without one at all.

Your Lack of Privacy on the Internet

Criminals use Facebook and Tumblr to push Chrome extensions that can access all your website data

TNW - The Next Web
19 December 2012


A Facebook user by the name of Philippe Harewood on Wednesday spotted a rather interesting scam that leverages Facebook, Tumblr, and Google Chrome to spy on its victims. The privacy-violating campaign was later detailed further by security firm Webroot.

The whole campaign is based on the hopes that Facebook users want to change the theme of the site to another color, such as red. It can be of course adjusted to target other users as well.

 Harewood explains how it works. A Facebook user is invited to a fake event on the social network. He or she then clicks on a Tumblr link, which redirects to another page (typically hosted on Amazon Web Services) that prompts the user to install a Chrome extension.

The extension then executes a JavaScript file (also hosted on Amazon) when it detects an open Facebook page, which creates a new Tumblr page and a new Facebook event. Finally, the script invites all your friends and pushes the Tumblr link, and the scam starts again.

As Webroot notes, the real danger is the malicious Chrome extension, which once installed, has access to all your data on all websites, as well as access to your tabs and browsing history. The Facebook event and Tumblr links are merely used to trick users into thinking the extension will do what they want; all the URLs in question look legitimate since they are hosted on the aforementioned sites.

Here’s the page that entices users into changing their Facebook color theme:

As you can see, there’s even an accompanying EULA and privacy policy, in an attempt to further improve the scam’s legitimacy. If the user chooses not to accept the agreements, the cybercriminals behind the campaign try to monetize the hijacked Facebook traffic by asking the victims to participate in surveys full of ads to generate revenue for them anyway.

Protecting yourself is very easy: don’t click on random links on Facebook, even if they are hosted on Tumblr. Being invited to a Facebook event does not suddenly make them safe.

US government takedown requests more than triple in 12 months, says Google Report

By Jeff Blagdon on June 18, 2012

In its new Transparency Report, Google presents a look at the number and nature of the takedown requests it received from governments and copyright holders during the second half of 2011. In an accompanying blog post, the company states that current trends are "troubling," before stating that it complies with 65 percent of court orders and 47 percent of "more informal requests" to remove material from its search results (e.g., requests from police and executive branches of government). 

The report indicates that the number of US court and government requests to remove material more than doubled over the previous 6-month period — from 92 to 187. The number for the same period (July to December) in 2010 was 54.

Since May, the report now includes takedown requests from copyright holders and reporting organizations like Marketly. Also present are notes on specific removal requests by governments, including a gem from Passport Canada concerning video footage of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet (Google didn’t comply).

The UK makes the highest number of information requests per capita
 
Statistics on the user data requests that Google receives from courts and government agencies are also available in the report, broken down by country. The top spot once again goes to the US, with 6,321 requests and a 93 percent rate of full or partial compliance on Google’s part. The country with the highest number of information requests per capita might surprise you, however — the United Kingdom makes 23 for every million citizens (the US is slightly lower, at just over 20), and gets compliance 64 percent of the time. In comparison, Canada posted a more restrained 1.18 per million.

Apple Has Destroyed 490,000 American Jobs

Eric Platt and Ben Duronio | May 1, 2012 - Business Insider

After taking heat for shipping jobs to China and contracting to employers with questionable labor conditions, Apple (rather publicly) took credit for creating more than half a million jobs in the U.S.

514,000 to be exact.


That figure included nearly 50,000 employees in its retail network and its corporate headquarters, where products are designed.

But it also included FedEx and UPS employees who deliver its products and employees at Corning who make glass for iPads and iPhones.

So Apple basically counts anyone vaguely associated with the company or its products as a job that Apple created.

But what about the competitors Apple has bumped off in its relentless move to the top? What about the once-profitable markets, products, and companies it has destroyed? What happened to those jobs?

Business Insider analyzed data on Bloomberg, went through dozens of 10-Ks, and read through layoff announcements to see how Apple's peers have done.

What we found:

Apple has destroyed nearly as many jobs as it helped create, eliminating some 490,570 positions.

Click here to see the jobs that Apple has destroyed >

So even if Apple had created all the jobs it takes credit for creating, its chest-thumping would be misplaced, to say the least.

The truth, of course, is it is not "companies" or "entrepreneurs" who create jobs--it is healthy economic ecosystems that create jobs. (If Apple's customers couldn't afford to buy Apple's products, Apple wouldn't create a single job, no matter how cool Apple's products were). Companies are an important element of those ecosystems, but to credit them for job-creation is to give them a lot more credit than they deserve.

But that's another story.

For now, let's take a detailed look at all the jobs Apple has destroyed or helped destroy.

Here's our methodology:

Business Insider identified some 50 companies that Apple's success has impacted, including big names like IBM and HP, and smaller ones like Barnes & Noble and Adobe.

Some companies and peers prospered. Most did not, announcing a combined 306,606 layoffs over the past several years.

In choosing the companies, Business Insider took a liberal approach to the businesses hit by Apple. Could you attribute all of Circuit City's problems to Apple? Probably not. BI used similar definitions as Apple to identify these companies.

Apple was unresponsive to repeated request for comment.

Those layoffs include direct competitors like Cisco's flip camera business, which the company shuttered after poor sales, and companies like AOL,  which lose out on lucrative search traffic because of Apple's choice to default to Google.

We also looked at Apple's decision to contract to private companies like UPS and FedEx instead of using public services like the U.S. Postal Service, as well as loopholes it uses in U.S. tax law to save billions of dollars a year.

The figure above does not include the jobs Apple could have created had it manufactured its products in America — instead of at Foxconn plants in China — because the corporate mantra to cut costs and build products overseas is not simply tied to the Cupertino, Calif., based company.

Business Insider also considered the ripple effect of layoffs in the U.S. When a company fires hundreds of employees, it curtails regional spending, causing restaurants and retailers to close their doors, decreases tax collection at the state, local, and federal level, and can trigger other rounds of layoffs elsewhere in the economy.

Using data from the Economic Policy Institute, coupled with average pay in industries that saw lay offs because of Apple's success, Business Insider estimated the additional loss to the employment picture at some 180,000 jobs.

Taking that into account with the 306,000 layoffs from competitors, Apple has destroyed some 490,570 positions in the U.S.

Circuit City Layoffs: 42,974 

At its peak, Circuit City employed more than 42,000 people in its stores and corporate offices, offering the only real competing electronics network to Best Buy. But as Apple took greater share of the PC market, and had sustainable margins, Circuit City had difficulty keeping up. Add in the collapse of LCD TV prices and by the holiday season in 2008, Circuit City filed for bankruptcy and laid off its staff.

Source: Bloomberg and Company Filings

Federal Government Layoffs: 42,105

One of the biggest revelations from the recent New York Times piece was the amount of money Apple saved by using tax loop-holes. Sullivan estimated that number at $2.4 billion in 2011 (Federal Taxes). Divide that by the average rate of pay for public employees in 2011 and you get to some 42,000 lost jobs.

Source: Economic Analysis by former Treasury economist Martin Sullivan 

Kodak Layoffs: 28,000

Kodak has had problems for a number of years - with total employment declining from more than 100,000 to just 17,100 today. The iPhone and other mobile devices have eliminated the demand for stand alone cameras, and Kodak was a company that suffered greatly from the link between cameras and phones. The 131-year-old company filed for bankruptcy in January. 

Source: Company Filings

Hewlett Packard Layoffs: 16,995

The iPad has made what was once a dominant PC builder an afterthought. HP attempted to enter the tablet game, but their touchpad was a disaster and they have laid off thousands of employees over the past few years (especially after costly purchases like Compaq).

Source: Bloomberg

Motorola Layoffs: 16,474

Motorola has had a painful decade after the success of its Razr - only recently regaining some strength in mobile. But after the Razr fizzled, Motorola hemorrhaged money, as well as headcount, as it tried to create a product that could compete with the iPhone.

Source: Company Filings

Borders Layoffs: 16,600
Apple hardware made a number of businesses obsolete: including the need to buy physical copies of books, movies and music. Borders went bankrupt after consumers moved to digital downloads and streaming online, all fueled by Apple.
Source: Company Filings

Sprint Layoffs: 14,600
Sprint struggled to gain post-paid subscribers for years because it did not offer a device comparable to the iPhone. After AT&T and Verizon exclusivity deals finally expired, it gained the iPhone and saw some growth in subscribers.
Source: Bloomberg

IBM Layoffs: 12,668
IBM conducted a number of layoffs over the past several years, including several thousand people in research in development roles and those in certain hardware businesses that it could not compete in - on the consumer side, that was fueled by gains at companies like Apple.
Source: Bloomberg

Musical Group Layoffs: 12,500
Performing art and spectator sport employment declined from a peak of 415,000 in 2007, to a preliminary estimate of 402,500 in March of 2012. The music industry has faced substantive difficulty since Napster hit (and continues with the lower share groups are paid on iTunes), making it harder for music groups to sign with a label and get backing.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (ID: CES7071100001)

Ericsson Layoffs: 10,690
GlassdoorIn the 1990's Ericsson actually had abot 35 percent of the cell phone market. Needless to say, they did not keep up with the technology to compete with Apple and the rest.
Source: Bloomberg

U.S. Postal Service Layoffs: 10,615
Apple attributed part of its 514,000 job creation figure to shipping giants UPS and FedEx. But the truth is, it just moved the needle away from the U.S. Postal Service by using the private providers. According to Bloomberg estimates, Amazon accounts for 1.9 percent of big brown's revenue. Using that as a reference point, and the fact that Apple revenues are more than twice Amazon's, Business Insider constructed the number of jobs Apple could have sustained if it shipped its products through the USPS.
Source: Business Insider Estimate 

Barnes & Noble Layoffs: 9,000
The Nook has kept Barnes & Noble around as competitors like Borders failed, but its core business remains significantly challenged as Apple's products have moved consumers away from traditional physical units. BKS has closed a number of stores and employs 9,000 fewer people today than it did in 2007.
Source: Company Filings

Blockbuster Layoffs: 7,200
Streaming services have butchered the DVD and VHS business, and Blue Ray has not been the boon many industry analysts thought it would. Since 2007, Blockbuster has laid off more than 20,000 employees. BI attributed a third of those who lost their jobs to Apple.
Source: Company Filings

CompUSA Layoffs: 6,300
It's a repeat of Circuit City, just on a smaller scale. The computer superstore withered in the face of intense electronic retail competition and closed 126 stores, as Apple prospered and gained share.
Source: Business Insider Estimate

Sony Layoffs: 6,000
Sony once held a dominant market position in the portable music business with the Sony Walkman and other entertainment devices. The iPod made the Walkman the new 8-track player, and Apple has pressured Sony in the laptop market as well with the iPad and its Mac lineup. (These figures do not include mobile layoffs, attributed to Ericsson).
Source: Bloomberg

RadioShack Layoffs: 6,000
This retailer has faced significant challenges over the past few years as its main wireless offerings (Sprint, T-Mobile) did not sell the iPhone. RadioShack did have AT&T, and recently switched T-Mobile for Verizon Wireless. Still, its shelves are purgatory for HDMI cables and old electronics Apple seems to have made obsolete.
Source: Company Filings

Microsoft Layoffs: 5,827
Microsoft has struggled in the ancillary businesses Apple is prospering in, such as mobile, portable music, and the tablet industry. These struggles forced the software juggernaut to make cuts over the past few years.
Source: Bloomberg

Yahoo! Layoffs: 5,780
Yahoo! has struggled over the years as it has been outmoded by Google. So why is Apple to blame? The default search engine on all of Apple's products are Google, which gives the search giant a nice leg up.
Source: Bloomberg

Xerox Layoffs: 5,400
Xerox has laid off thousands of employees as its printer business steadily declined. Part of that has to do with difficulty within both the PC and inkjet sectors — industries you don't need when you use a Mac. The Xerox layoffs are based on total company announced firings, multiplied by the company's long-term asset base in the U.S. as a percent of global operations (to exclude impact to its international offices).
Source: Bloomberg

AMD Layoffs: 4,460
Apple uses intel chips in their Mac computers, which means AMD misses out on a huge potential market.
Source: Bloomberg

Best Buy Layoffs: 3,400
With Apple retail stores opening (and intense competition from Amazon) Best Buy has struggled to turn weak comparable store sales around. The company recently announced 400 layoffs in corporate as well as the closing of 50 stores.
Source: Company Filings, Business Insider Estimate

Tower Records Layoffs: 3,000
Apple's assault on the music industry hit retailers particularly hard, with stateside closings of Virgin, HMV and Sam Goody. The iPod greatly accelerated the losses of record stores as consumers switched to digital downloads (whether legal or through sites like Napster and LimeWire).
Source: New Reports

Trans World Entertainment (Sam Goody, F.Y.E.) Layoffs: 2,900
Tower Records part two. Trans World, the owner of chain stores including Coconuts, Sam Goody, and Record Town, has closed hundreds of stores and laid off thousands. Blame the iPod.
Source: Company Filings

Gateway (Acer) Layoffs: 2,500
Gateway once ran quite the successful retail chain, but a crowded environment made its PCs seem outmoded and overly expensive. Gateway ultimately closed its entire 188-store division, invested in eMachines and was then bought out by Acer during a period of consolidation. Apple did not have the same problem with its growing Mac business.
Source: News Reports

EMI Layoffs: 2,000
EMI is another record label drastically hurt by the world's move away from CDs. As the big five record companies became four, and now three, EMI had to layoff thousands and cut costs. Universal Music Group purchased EMI as greater consolidation became necessary to eek out some profits from online sales. Apple's role in the shift to digital (even as it offers a new revenue source) is pretty clear.
Source: News Reports

Lenovo Layoffs: 2,000
Lenovo was on the up when it purchased the ThinkPad unit from IBM with the goal to turn it into a dominant PC player. Unfortunately, PC sales were challenged during the recession, even as consumers scooped up Apple's Mac line up. Lenovo announced more than 2,000 layoffs to prop up margins (not included in figures for IBM).
Source: Bloomberg

Adobe Layoffs: 1,950
Adobe's issues with Apple are well documented. The company started a viral campaign to convince Apple to put Flash in its mobile devices. But Steve Jobs didn't warm to that approach, firing off a memo on his thoughts of Adobe (not too flattering). Adobe ultimately had to layoff some 1,950 as it focused on core operations and curtailed special projects.
Source: Bloomberg

T-Mobile Layoffs: 1,900
T-Mobile has lost share without having the iPhone in its device lineup, a sore point for the company that pinned its hopes on joining forces with the carrier that first offered it. But with the FCC blocking the AT&T merger, T-Mobile has had to pare back its operations to invest in 4G technology.
Source: Bloomberg

EMC Layoffs: 1,476
The very profitable cloud computing company has had to issue job cuts after competitors gained share in the market it helped create. Those competitors, like DropBox, have leveraged Apple's iOS platform and taken share through strong offerings on the iPad and iPhone.
Source: Company Filings

Palm Layoffs: 1,247
Palm hoped that the Pre and Pixi smartphones could compete with the iPhone and that it could offer some semblance of a comeback. After first sales looked promising, the products withered as Apple (and Android), continued to grow. Palm was then purchased by HP, before the company decided to shutter the whole unit. (Palm layoffs not included in HP figures).
Source: Company Filings

Virgin Megastores Layoffs: 1,060
Virgin Megastores had a surprisingly profitable run, with giant stores in Times Square generating healthy margins. But when digital sales decimated book, movie and music sales, Virgin decided to cut its losses and sell off its coveted real estate holdings which housed the Megastores.
Source: News Reports

Dell Layoffs: 905
Against Apple's strong gains with its Mac computers, Dell has seemed staid. The company has difficulty competing with Apple's premium offerings, and when demand for its PCs slumped, it saw margins substantively pressured. Dell has yet to find a way to successfully compete with any of Apple's other products — including mobile, mp3 players, and tablets.
Source: Bloomberg

AOL Layoffs: 800 
AOL was supposed to be the darling of the Internet age, until it wasn't. Torn up by larger competitors like Google, AOL has forged ahead with a push into content. But what the company used to bet on, search, is stymied by Apple's choice to default to Google on its iPad, iPhone and MacBook lines.
Source: Bloomberg 

Cisco Layoffs: 500
Networking giant Cisco has tried to push into the consumer sphere for sometime, and it thought it had a hit with the well priced flip camera business. But the camera never took off as consumers defaulted to their iPhones to take photos. Cisco ended up closing the business and laying off the employees in the division.
Source: Bloomberg

Warner Music Group Layoffs: 300
Warner Music Group is yet another music company hit by the move to digital and purchases on iTunes (you could argue that it performed better than most of the industry during the transition). Warner was forced to lay off 300 employees as revenues struggled.
Source: Company Filings

Hasbro Layoffs: 200
Who needs board games when you can use an iPad or iPhone to entertain yourself? Hasbro decided to close its board-game manufacturing plant in Massachusetts after demand dried up. You can blame that on the success of games like Words With Friends on your iPhone.
Source: Bloomberg

IAC (Ask.com) Layoffs: 170
Ask.com was once a powerhouse in search (depending on how you define powerhouse) but as the iPhone and iPad grew mobile search, Ask lost out. The company decided to axe some 170 employees over two different periods as it gave up on the product.
Source: Bloomberg

Universal Music Group Layoffs: 110
Universal, much like Warner, is one of the three main remaining music companies. The company has laid off some 110 employees as traditional CD sales tumbled. Recording companies have been upset with Apple's pricing strategy for some time, but that has lessened as Apple changed it's $0.99 per song requirement.
Source: News Reports

Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years

4/30/2012 

Eric Jackson, Forbes

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We think of Google and Facebook as Web gorillas.  They’ll be around forever. Yet, with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years.  Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone.

 And there’s some academic theory to back up that view, along with casual observations from recent history.

When I was a PhD student 15 years ago, I studied with Don Hambrick who is a scholar known for a career showing the effects of management teams and directors (for good and for ill) on their organizations’ strategies and performance.  One of the central tenents of this school of thought on organizations is that senior teams and directors have an outsized influence on organizational outcomes.  What’s more, their backgrounds (including education and career paths) have a big effect on how they see the world, various competitive situations and the choices they make.

There’s another school of thought which takes the opposite view called population ecology or organizational ecology which put forward that managers don’t really matter all that much.  This view grew out of sociologists who’d taken to study organizations in the 1970s.  They assert that organizational outcomes have much more to do with industry effects than who the CEO is and the choices he or she makes.  They study birth and death rates of populations of organizations, as well as the effects of age, competition and resources in the surrounding environment on an organization’s birth and death rate.  Most of these organizational ecology scholars come out of the University of California at Berkeley.

As a graduate student, I didn’t have much time for this ecology line of thinking.  I believed in the power of the individual executive to overcome all challenges in the external environment.  We can always point to dynamic CEOs as case studies, even though the sociologists would say those are the equivalent of celebrating the smarts of lottery winners.

As I age and watch what’s happening in the world of Internet and mobile, I can’t stop thinking of these ecologists though.

More and more in the Internet space, it seems that your long-term viability as a company is dependent on when you were born.

Think of the differences between generations and when we talk about how the Baby Boomers behave differently from Gen X’ers and additional differences with the Millennials.  Each generation is perceived to see the world in a very unique way that translates into their buying decisions and countless other habits.

In the tech Internet world, we’ve really had 3 generations:

• Web 1.0 (companies founded from 1994 – 2001, including Netscape, Yahoo! (YHOO), AOL (AOL), Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY)),

• Web 2.0 or Social (companies founded from 2002 – 2009, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), and Groupon (GRPN)),

• and now Mobile (from 2010 – present, including Instagram).
  

With each succeeding generation in tech the Internet, it seems the prior generation can’t quite wrap its head around the subtle changes that the next generation brings.  Web 1.0 companies did a great job of aggregating data and presenting it in an easy to digest portal fashion.  Google did a good job organizing the chaos of the Web better than AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and all the other search engines that preceded it.  Amazon did a great job of centralizing the chaos of e-commerce shopping and putting all you needed in one place.

When Web 2.0 companies began to emerge, they seemed to gravitate to the importance of social connections.   MySpace built a network of people with a passion for music initially.  Facebook got college students.  LinkedIn got the white collar professionals.  Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon showed how users could generate content themselves and make the overall community more valuable.

Yet, Web 1.0 companies never really seemed to be able to grasp the importance of building a social community and tapping into the backgrounds of those users.  Even when it seems painfully obvious to everyone, there just doesn’t seem to be the capacity of these older companies to shift to a new paradigm.

Why has Amazon done so little in social?  And Google?  Even as they pour billions at the problem, their primary business model which made them successful in the first place seems to override their expansion into some new way of thinking.

Social companies born since 2010 have a very different view of the world.  These companies – and Instagram is the most topical example at the moment – view the mobile smartphone as the primary (and oftentimes exclusive) platform for their application.  They don’t even think of launching via a web site.  They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites.
We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.

Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies still seem unsure how to adapt to this new paradigm.  Facebook is the triumphant winner of social companies.  It will go public in a few weeks and probably hit $140 billion in market capitalization.  Yet, it loses money in mobile and has rather simple iPhone and iPad versions of its desktop experience.  It is just trying to figure out how to make money on the web – as it only had $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011 and its revenues actually decelerated in Q1 of this year relative to Q4 of last year.  It has no idea how it will make money in mobile.

The failed history of Web 1.0 companies adapting to the world of social suggests that Facebook will be as woeful at adapting to socialmobile as Google has been with its “ghost town” Google+ initiative last year.

The organizational ecologists talked about the “liability of obsolescence” which is a growing mismatch between an organization’s inherent product strategy and its operating environment over time.  This probably is a good explanation for what we’re seeing in the tech world today.

Are companies like Google, Amazon, and Yahoo! obsolete?  They’re still growing.  They still have enormous audiences.  They also have very talented managers.

But with each new paradigm shift (first to social, now to mobile, and next to whatever else), the older generations get increasingly out of touch and likely closer to their significant decline.  What’s more, the tech world in which we live in seems to be speeding up.  Tim Cook had an interesting line about the velocity of change in his earnings call last week:

through the last quarter, I should say, which is just 2 years after we shipped the initial iPad, we’ve sold 67 million. And to put that in some context, it took us 24 years to sell that many Macs and 5 years for that many iPods and over 3 years for that many iPhones. And we were extremely happy with the trajectory on all of those products. And so I think iPad, it’s a profound product.

Yahoo is already a shell of its 2000 self.  There is increasing chatter (including from me) about how Google’s facing a painful multiple contraction, once its desktop search business (still accounting for the vast majority of its revenues and profits) starts to fall off a cliff as users dramatically drop traditional search for new ways of getting information they want in a mobile world.  Is Amazon destined to decline?  There seem to be no signs of it today and people will still need to buy stuff in a mobile world, but the new mobile platform will certainly open the possibilities for new entrants that Amazon can’t even imagine today.

Facebook is also probably facing a tough road ahead as this shift to mobile happens.  As Hamish McKenzie said last week, “I suspect that Facebook will try to address that issue [of the shift to mobile] by breaking up its various features into separate apps or HTML5 sites: one for messaging, one for the news feed, one for photos, and, perhaps, one for an address book. But that fragments the core product, probably to its detriment.”

Considering how long Facebook dragged its feet to get into mobile in the first place, the data suggests they will be exactly as slow to change as Google was to social.  Does the Instagram acquisition change that? Not really, in my view.  It shows they’re really fearful of being displaced by a mobile upstart.  However, why would bolting on a mobile app to a Web 2.0 platform (and a very good one at that) change any of the underlying dynamics we’re discussing here? I doubt it.

What about Apple?  Where does it fit in to this classification scheme?

Apple is really a hardware company, so it’s difficult to put it into a bucket related to web apps.  It certainly seemed very Web 1.0 with its Ping social application.  Yet it’s succeeded in mobile from making the best hardware and software ecosystem for apps to proliferate on.  In some ways, as long as it has a successful iOS platform, it doesn’t care which Web 1.0, 2.0 and mobile companies fail or succeed on top of it.

Maybe that’s why so many non-mobile companies seem to want to emulate Apple.  Google bought Motorola Mobility (MMI) to get into the hardware business.  Facebook and Baidu (BIDU) are rumored to be launching their own mobile OS.

The bottom line is that the next 5 – 8 years could be incredibly dynamic.  It’s possible that both Google and Facebook could be shells of their current selves – or gone entirely.

They will have all the money in the world to try and adapt to the shift to mobile but history suggests they won’t be able to successfully do it.  I often hear Google bulls point to the market share of Android or Eric Schmidt’s hypothesis that Google could one day charge all Android subscribers $10 a month for value-added services as proof of future profits.  Yet, where are all the great social success stories by Web 1.0 companies?  I imagine we’ll see as many great examples of social companies jumping horses mid-race to become great mobile companies.

It’s a lot easier to start asking Siri for information instead of typing search terms into a box compared to thousands of enterprises ceasing to upgrade to the next version of Windows.  Google’s 76% market share. Facebook’s 900 million monthly users.  They just aren’t as sticky as they seem.

And does anyone think the pace of change is going to increase in the next 5 years versus the last?  That we’re going to see fewer innovations, fewer start-ups trying more stuff on cheaper and more powerful processing power?  In all likelihood, we could have an entirely new way of gathering information and interacting with ads in a new mobile world than what we’re currently used to today.

The Googles and Facebooks of tomorrow might not even exist today.  And several Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies might be completely wiped off the map by then.

Fortunes will be made by those who adapt to and invest in this complete greenfield.

Those who own the future are going to be the ones who create it.  It’s all up for grabs.  Web monopolies are not as sticky as the monopolies of old.

Google: Internet Freedom Faces Greatest Threat Ever

Sunday, April 15, 2012 by Common Dreams

In an interview published today, Google Co-founder Sergey Brin told The Guardian that internet openness and universal access are under immediate attack by "very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world".

"I am more worried than I have been in the past," he said. "It's scary."

The threat to the internet comes "from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of 'restrictive' walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms," The Guardian reports.

In the interview Brin alludes to the reach of the US government, telling how Google is forced to hand over data and is restricted from notifying users that their privacy has been breached.

* * *

The Guardian: Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin

Brin said he and co-founder Larry Page would not have been able to create Google if the internet was dominated by Facebook. "You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive," he said. "The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation."

He criticised Facebook for not making it easy for users to switch their data to other services. "Facebook has been sucking down Gmail contacts for many years," he said. [...]

He reserved his harshest words for the entertainment industry, which he said was "shooting itself in the foot, or maybe worse than in the foot" by lobbying for legislation to block sites offering pirate material.

He said the SOPA and PIPA bills championed by the film and music industries would have led to the US using the same technology and approach it criticised China and Iran for using. The entertainment industry failed to appreciate people would continue to download pirated content as long as it was easier to acquire and use than legitimately obtained material, he said. [...]

Brin acknowledged that some people were anxious about the amount of their data that was now in the reach of US authorities because it sits on Google's servers. He said the company was periodically forced to hand over data and sometimes prevented by legal restrictions from even notifying users that it had done so.

Why I left Google (former Google tech on Google's Approach to Privacy)

James Whittaker 13 Mar 2012

Ok, I relent. Everyone wants to know why I left and answering individually isn’t scaling so here it is, laid out in its long form. Read a little (I get to the punch line in the 3^rd paragraph) or read it all. But a warning in advance: there is no drama here, no tell-all, no former colleagues bashed and nothing more than you couldn’t already surmise from what’s happening in the press these days surrounding Google and its attitudes toward user privacy and software developers. This is simply a more personal telling.

It wasn’t an easy decision to leave Google. During my time there I became fairly passionate about the company. I keynoted four Google Developer Day events, two Google Test Automation Conferences and was a prolific contributor to the Google testing blog. Recruiters often asked me to help sell high priority candidates on the company. No one had to ask me twice to promote Google and no one was more surprised than me when I could no longer do so. In fact, my last three months working for Google was a whirlwind of desperation, trying in vain to get my passion back.

The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

Technically I suppose Google has always been an advertising company, but for the better part of the last three years, it didn’t feel like one. Google was an ad company only in the sense that a good TV show is an ad company: having great content attracts advertisers.

Under Eric Schmidt ads were always in the background. Google was run like an innovation factory, empowering employees to be entrepreneurial through founder’s awards, peer bonuses and 20% time. Our advertising revenue gave us the headroom to think, innovate and create. Forums like App Engine, Google Labs and open source served as staging grounds for our inventions. The fact that all this was paid for by a cash machine stuffed full of advertising loot was lost on most of us. Maybe the engineers who actually worked on ads felt it, but the rest of us were convinced that Google was a technology company first and foremost; a company that hired smart people and placed a big bet on their ability to innovate.

From this innovation machine came strategically important products like Gmail and Chrome, products that were the result of entrepreneurship at the lowest levels of the company. Of course, such runaway innovative spirit creates some duds, and Google has had their share of those, but Google has always known how to fail fast and learn from it.

In such an environment you don’t have to be part of some executive’s inner circle to succeed. You don’t have to get lucky and land on a sexy project to have a great career. Anyone with ideas or the skills to contribute could get involved. I had any number of opportunities to leave Google during this period, but it was hard to imagine a better place to work.

But that was then, as the saying goes, and this is now.

It turns out that there was one place where the Google innovation machine faltered and that one place mattered a lot: competing with Facebook. Informal efforts produced a couple of antisocial dogs in Wave and Buzz. Orkut never caught on outside Brazil. Like the proverbial hare confident enough in its lead to risk a brief nap, Google awoke from its social dreaming to find its front runner status in ads threatened.

Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this kind of personal information, so much so that they are willing to put the Facebook brand before their own. Exhibit A: www.facebook.com/nike, a company with the power and clout of Nike putting their own brand after Facebook’s? No company has ever done that for Google and Google took it personally.

Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn’t enough. Search had to be social. Android had to be social. You Tube, once joyous in their independence, had to be … well, you get the point. Even worse was that innovation had to be social. Ideas that failed to put Google+ at the center of the universe were a distraction.

Suddenly, 20% meant half-assed. Google Labs was shut down. App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee. As the trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled, derisive talk of the “old Google” and its feeble attempts at competing with Facebook surfaced to justify a “new Google” that promised “more wood behind fewer arrows.”

The days of old Google hiring smart people and empowering them to invent the future was gone. The new Google knew beyond doubt what the future should look like. Employees had gotten it wrong and corporate intervention would set it right again.

Officially, Google declared that “sharing is broken on the web” and nothing but the full force of our collective minds around Google+ could fix it. You have to admire a company willing to sacrifice sacred cows and rally its talent behind a threat to its business. Had Google been right, the effort would have been heroic and clearly many of us wanted to be part of that outcome. I bought into it. I worked on Google+ as a development director and shipped a bunch of code. But the world never changed; sharing never changed. It’s arguable that we made Facebook better, but all I had to show for it was higher review scores.

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

Google+ and me, we were simply never meant to be. Truth is I’ve never been much on advertising. I don’t click on ads. When Gmail displays ads based on things I type into my email message it creeps me out. I don’t want my search results to contain the rants of Google+ posters (or Facebook’s or Twitter’s for that matter). When I search for “London pub walks” I want better than the sponsored suggestion to “Buy a London pub walk at Wal-Mart.”

The old Google made a fortune on ads because they had good content. It was like TV used to be: make the best show and you get the most ad revenue from commercials. The new Google seems more focused on the commercials themselves.

Perhaps Google is right. Perhaps the future lies in learning as much about people’s personal lives as possible. Perhaps Google is a better judge of when I should call my mom and that my life would be better if I shopped that Nordstrom sale. Perhaps if they nag me enough about all that open time on my calendar I’ll work out more often. Perhaps if they offer an ad for a divorce lawyer because I am writing an email about my 14 year old son breaking up with his girlfriend I’ll appreciate that ad enough to end my own marriage. Or perhaps I’ll figure all this stuff out on my own.

The old Google was a great place to work. The new one?

-1

Google’s virtual reality glasses coming in 2012

By Stephen C. Webster | RAW Story
Thursday, February 23, 2012

  

Search giant Google is about to take a quantum leap into next generation mobile computing with the forthcoming introduction of virtual reality glasses, according to people familiar with the project who spoke to The New York Times this week.

The glasses are expected to cost between $250 and $600, the Times noted, but Google isn’t talking about the project yet.

That’s because the Google glasses have been in development at the company’s secretive Google X lab, where other cutting-edge projects like robotics and artificial intelligence research are underway.

The glasses, which are said to look like a pair of Oakleys enhanced with an MP3 player, will come equipped with motion sensors, GPS, cameras, voice detection software and the Android operating system, which will enable Google to stream graphical enhancements over the real world, and see what their users see, all in real time.

Word of the glasses in development was first broken by a blogger at 9 to 5 Google, who said that the heads-up display will only work in one eye, and users will navigate the on-board menus with small head movements. The new navigation tech is said to be highly intuitive, and a similar system was shown off by Motorola earlier this year.

People who’ve actually seen the glasses told the Times that they will create a new layer for the Internet, where companies can stream digital advertising possibly even layered over competitors’ real world ads.

The Times also speculated how facial recognition may play a role in the glasses’ core functions, matching peoples’ faces with social network profiles for instant connections between new acquaintances.

However, in the wake of controversy over Google bypassing key security features built into web browsers designed by rivals Apple and Microsoft, the introduction of full augmented reality to consumers will likely open up an whole new realm of privacy concerns.

It could also pose new challenges to federal regulators, who are only just now getting around to proposing privacy standards for web browsers.

How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google's New Privacy Policy Takes Effect

FEBRUARY 21, 2012 | BY EVA GALPERIN | Electronic Frontier Foundation

[UPDATE 2/22/2012] It is important to note that disabling Web History in your Google account will not prevent Google from gathering and storing this information and using it for internal purposes. More information at the end of this post.

On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google's other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.

Here's how you can do that:

1. Sign into your Google account.

2. Go to https://www.google.com/history

3. Click "remove all Web History."

4. Click "ok."

Note that removing your Web History also pauses it. Web History will remain off until you enable it again.


[UPDATE 2/22/2012]: Note that disabling Web History in your Google account will not prevent Google from gathering and storing this information and using it for internal purposes. It also does not change the fact that any information gathered and stored by Google could be sought by law enforcement.


With Web History enabled, Google will keep these records indefinitely; with it disabled, they will be partially anonymized after 18 months, and certain kinds of uses, including sending you customized search results, will be prevented. If you want to do more to reduce the records Google keeps, the advice in EFF's Six Tips to Protect Your Search Privacy white paper remains relevant.


If you have several Google accounts, you will need to do this for each of them.

Death of Privacy: 'Your cell phone Big Brother's best friend'

Authors@Google: Robert Reich

Google Confirms It Aims to Own Your Online ID

Amid a furor over Google+'s ban on pseudonymity and anonymity, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt just admitted the company intends to be an 'identity service"

By Mathew Ingram
Ever since Google (GOOG) launched its new Google+ social network, we and others have pointed out that the search giant clearly has more in mind than just providing a nice place for people to share photos of their pets. For one thing, Google needs to tap into the “social signals” that people provide through networks such as Facebook so it can improve its search results. There’s a larger motive, too: As Chairman and former Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt admitted during an interview in Edinburgh over the weekend, Google is taking a hard line on the real-name issue because it sees Google+ as an “identity service” or platform on which it can build other products.

Schmidt’s comments came during an interview with Andy Carvin, the National Public Radio digital editor who has become a one-man newswire during the Arab Spring revolutions.

Carvin asked the Google chairman about the company’s reasoning for pushing its real-name policies on Google+—a policy that many have criticized (including us) because it excludes potentially valuable viewpoints that might be expressed by political dissidents and others who prefer to remain anonymous. In effect, Schmidt said Google isn’t interested in changing its policies to accommodate those kinds of users: If people want to remain anonymous, he said, then they shouldn’t use Google+.

Google+ is primarily an “identity service”It was the former Google CEO’s remarks about the rationale for this policy that were most interesting: He didn’t just say—as Vic Gundotra, the Google executive in charge of the new social network has—that having real names maintains a certain tone of behavior that is preferable to anonymous forums (an argument that online-community pioneer Derek Powazek has also made). According to Carvin, Schmidt said the reason Google needs users with real names is that the company sees Google+ as the core of an identity platform it is building that can be used for other things:

He (Eric) replied by saying that G+ was built primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally it depends on people using their real names if they’re going to build future products that leverage that information.

As Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson noted in a blog post in response to Schmidt’s comments, this is an admission by the company that it wants to be an identity gatekeeper.

Others have made similar observations since the launch of Google+. Programmer and online veteran Dave Winer, for example, said—when the real-name policy first started to become a hot-button issue—that Google’s purpose was clearly to “provide identity in a commerce-ready way. And to give them information about what you do on the Internet, without obfuscation of pseudonyms.” In his blog post, Fred Wilson said:

It begs the question of whom Google built this service for? You or them. And the answer to why you need to use your real name in the service is because they need you to.

Real names are more valuable to advertisersAs I tried to outline in a recent GigaOM Pro research report entitled “How social search is changing the search industry” (subscription required), there’s an obvious search-related rationale for launching a social network such as Google+ because indexing and mining that kind of activity can help the company provide better “social search” results. But the real-name issue has more to do with Google’s other business: namely, advertising. Users who are anonymous or pseudonymous are arguably a lot less valuable to advertisers than those who choose to attach their real identitie—including their age, gender, location, and further demographic details—to their accounts.

What kind of services is Schmidt referring to when he says that Google is looking at Google+ as an identity platform that could support other services? Dave Winer thinks the company wants to effectively become a bank—something he suspects Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) are interested in as well. Apple and Google both seem interested in NFC technology (near-field communication), which turns mobile devices into electronic wallets; having a social network tied to an individual user’s identity would come in handy. Ross Dawson says Google wants to build a “reputation engine,” using Google+ as a platform.

Whatever its specific interests, Google clearly sees Facebook as a competitive threat, not just because it has developed a gigantic social network with hundreds of millions of devoted users, but because it has also become a kind of identity gatekeeper—with tens of millions of those devoted users happily logging into other websites and services with their Facebook credentials, thus sending Facebook valuable data about what they are doing and where they are doing it. The ubiquitous “like” button provides even further data, something Google is also trying to mimic with its +1 buttons.

Google needs a horse in the identity raceThe bottom line is that Google needs to have a horse in this identity race. It has been unable to create one so far. The growth of Google+ provides a reason for people to create Google profiles, and that data—along with their activity on the network and through +1 buttons—goes into the vast Google cyberplex where it can be crunched and indexed and codified in a hundred ways. The more people who decide to do it, the better it gets, both for Google and for its advertising strategy. As the saying goes: If you’re not paying for it, then you’re the product being sold.

That’s the obvious background to the real-name issue, something Eric Schmidt has effectively confirmed with his remarks in Edinburgh. It remains to be seen if users like the position that puts them in.

Collateral Damage in the War on Anonymity

Friday, August 12, 2011 by Creators.com
by David Sirota

From warrantless wiretapping to ever-present surveillance cameras, our world is right now in the midst of a long war on anonymity.

In the media and political arenas, we've seen paparazzi culture famously fetishize the outing of anonymous iconoclasts, from Watergate's Deep Throat (Mark Felt) to a top CIA agent working on weapons of mass destruction (Valerie Plame). Likewise, in our communities, we now know that we are almost always being monitored in highly trafficked parks, malls, airports and stadiums -- and as Slate recently reported, we may soon have apps on all of our smartphones that let us identify random faces in a crowd.

Teeming with incognito bloggers and commenters, the Internet seemed to be the last bulwark against this trend -- a rare public space that let us broadcast opinions from the shadows. But even cyberspace will likely be exposed to the white-hot spotlight of identity, as a new campaign for disclosure now starts in earnest.

Launched in response to cyber-bullying, this campaign made headlines last month when Facebook executive Randi Zuckerberg declared that "anonymity on the Internet has to go away." Her statement echoed that of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who previously called for "true transparency and no anonymity" on the Web.

As advertising corporations always seeking new information about their users, Facebook and Google have an obvious financial stake in these positions. Regardless of these firms' particular motives, though, they set standards for the entire Internet. So when their luminaries declare war on anonymity, it's presumably a fait accompli.

Thus, the key question: Will the end of Internet anonymity be good or bad for society?

The big potential benefit of users having to attach real identities to their Internet personas is more constructive dialogue.

The downside, though, is that true whistle-blowers will lose one of their most essential tools.

Though today's journalists often grant establishment sources anonymity to attack weaker critics, anonymity's real social value is rooted in helping the powerless challenge the powerful. Think WikiLeaks, which exemplifies how online anonymity provides insiders the cover they need to publish critical information without fear of retribution. Eliminating such cover will almost certainly reduce the kind of leaks that let the public occasionally see inconvenient truths.

Encouraging civility while preserving avenues of dissent is a tough balancing act, and the core debate over whether one should have a right to anonymity in public spaces is long overdue. However, it comes with a danger -- namely, that legitimate arguments for disclosure will be expanded to justify illegitimate spying on private interactions.

If you think that's far-fetched, recall that this is precisely what happened in Congress last month, when a House committee moved forward a proposal forcing Internet service providers to keep logs of all online activity by their users.

Clearly, if it ultimately becomes law, this legislation would undermine not just anonymity in public spaces, but privacy in general. Should it succeed, we may achieve transparency, but at far too high a cost.

Google+, the pseudonym banstick, and the netizen cultural schism.

Google+, the pseudonym banstick, and the netizen cultural schism.

by Emlyn - point7

As we all know by now, Google+ has a policy of only using real names (real world identities) in profiles. And they’re enforcing that policy with a big lumpy banstick.

This is causing much angst, a lot of gnashing of teeth. However it seems that the technorati, as well as the Googlers (and Facebook before them) are unmoved by the arguments, and sincerely puzzled by the outcry. What’s the big deal? Just create another profile, for crying out loud.

The big deal is that we are having an identity related clash of values, I think, between two very different kinds of heavily engaged online people:

• Integrated Identity: These are people who live online and offline with the same personality (including the Technorati because in fact their unified identity is their bread and butter), and
• Separate Identities: people who keep their online and offline worlds quite separate, not for duplicitous reasons but because they are in many ways two people; the online person and the offline person.

The integrated identities tend to work in the web 2.0 universe. Silicon valley seems to be the cultural center of this. They meet the same people online and offline; people who have startups, tech bloggers, money guys, opinion leaders of all kind. Their identity is their primary asset, it’s got their reputation attached to it. To them, it’d be mad to have a separate online and offline identity, and seems kind of sinister; what reason could you have to split your reputation, really, other than that you are trying to hide something?

But the separate identity people are actually part of a older tradition (and yes this environment is old enough to have an older tradition). It’s the tradition of the Handle, and it comes from back when computer networks were esoteric, back when using them was a marker of class. Back before Eternal September. I think that culture began because the people you’d meet online (be that bbs, or compuserve, or whatever) were exactly people that you’d rarely meet in real life; that was the beauty of the networks, that you could meet interesting, intelligent people who you would never otherwise have access to, but with some other, better kind of proximity; shared interests, shared tastes, shared culture at some level.

I feel like the people lucky enough to live and work in the exciting geographic centers of the web 2.0 world, who do mix with the same people online and off, who all “get it”, are missing that the great majority of us live in a very different world. The types of people with a pseudonymous online life tend to live, I think, in geographical environments very unlike their online worlds. These are conservative, sleepy parts of the world, where the normal people they meet in everyday life, the family members that they love, the work colleagues they go drinking with, are largely clueless about and uninterested in the online world.

Separate Identity netizens aren’t participating in online life as an economic activity, or for networking per se; it’s really purely social. They are doing it for fun, for connection to other people who get it, for self expression. To that end, a Handle is a badge, a marker to say “I belong”. It also communicates something about the online personality (probably often as distinct from the offline personality).

There is no doubt that Separate Identity is also about keeping the identities separate, hiding one from the other to some extent. And there’s a continuum here, between people who use a pseudonym for self expression, and those who use it for far more serious reasons (like hiding from abusive stalkers, or so they can speak candidly about people in their lives, or to protect themselves from discrimination in their communities or workplaces).

I personally go by my real name, but I’m sympathetic to Separate Identity, and still partially am a Separate Identity person. Offline I’m Emlyn O’Regan, online I’m Emlyn, the virtual person. I tried using handles in my very early engagements with the online universe, but found I was too lazy to keep it going; I decided instead to make my own name into my online “brand”, let the worlds clash where they will, and deal with the fallout as it comes.

It turns out that’s been a really good decision. I was in a better position, when the web 2.0 social network storm hit, to just let loose and not worry about these issues, than many of my pseudonymous friends. But it’s still difficult. A google search on my name will dredge up a long google shadow, and while that might be cool in the context of my netizen status, to folks embedded heavily in RL it can be something that asks questions and engenders suspicion. What’s all this weird stuff he talks about online? Why does he spend all this time doing unpaid technical stuff? What’s with the weirdo anarchist/socialist tendencies?

Now I’ve chosen to just wear that stuff, and let it act as a real life filter. If you don’t like my prodigious output on frivolous social networking sites, and choose not to employ me for that reason, then maybe I’ve dodged a bullet (ie: maybe you make foolish decisions and would have been a shitty boss). But my choices are unusual.

More common in my experience is that people choose to hide parts of themselves from their real world contacts in order to live the life they want to live. Maybe you decide not to let your family know of your anarchist tendencies? Maybe the tell all blog about your relationship is something you really don’t want your partner to read? Maybe you need to discuss your atheist convictions, but not have that connect with your deeply conservative, christian employer?

For many netizens, Pseudonyms are just a way to separate concerns, to keep distinct namespaces. Forcing people to collapse these identities into one may seriously damage this, and probably end up diminishing their lives. This is especially true for those who treasure their online identity more than their offline one.

Also, many long time users of pseudonyms have serious reputation capital invested in their pseudonyms. Forcing them to rename themselves is flushing this down the toilet. It’s also potentially breaking their own relationship networks; if they are only known by the pseudonym, it might be very difficult to reestablish those ties. Certainly in the Buzz community, a crowd of google cheerleaders and fanbois, the move to Google+ has been a mixed blessing, as the banstick reeks havoc and maybe permanently damages the fabric of the community’s relationship graph.

Something else that Google (and other Integrated Identity techies) might want to consider is that people will continue to use pseudonyms. You might try to enforce real identities, but people gain value from their nicknames, and will find ways around your restrictions. The same thing applies to a large social network that applies to any large information system in which end users are being forced by policy to do something against their interests; they will rebel against the policy and fill the system with garbage, garbage that better aligns with their interests. In a work monitoring system, for example, you get stuff like bogus hours worked, weird job codes. In a social network, you’ll get real looking fake identities, and a culture of breaking the system for the lulz.

One last point for integrated identity people: you are the minority. Separate Identity is not the weird old past of the net, it is the present. The most switched on online people are Separate Identity. Look at the gamer communities and the persistent use of handles. Look at the Mommy Bloggers. Look at old email lists and usenet groups. The only subcultures that I can think of that are committed to real identities online are

• the late adopters (“your grandma”), the people who hate computers and wouldn’t be here if they weren’t forced.
• people who use LinkedIn (and that’s not really a subculture, just a reflection of the work world)
• the silicon valley web 2.0 people.

I know you guys want to change the world. I do too. But you need to absorb a truth, and that is that the Separate Identity culture is here for a *reason*. Its benefits far outweigh its drawbacks. On the internet, no one knows you are a dog, and that’s a really good thing.

You want to help people rebel against tyrants? Talk openly about their thoughts and beliefs and fears? Connect with new people, learn new things? Imagine and discuss and create a new and better world?

Then embrace the Separate Identity. It’s the right thing to do, it’s the good thing to do. And who knows? You guys might need it too one day.

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(Excellent points and I expect I'll fall any day now in this cull.--jef)