Google, Yahoo Revise Key Data Strategy, Privacy Rules

Google and Yahoo issued separate announcements about visitor data and the plans for use at each respective company.

Google said it will revise its privacy policies and terms of service, effective March 1, making them shorter and easier to understand. The new privacy policy makes it clear that Google can use information shared on one service in other Google services.

"If you’re signed in, we may combine information you've provided from one service with information from other services," explains Alma Whitten, director of privacy, product and engineering at Google. "In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience."

Today, Google has about 70 documents governing policies, but the company will introduce a new main privacy policy that covers the majority of its products and explains the information it collects and how it intends to use it.

Users will start receiving an email to alert them of the changes, according to Whitten, who wrote in a blog post that the company had to keep a handful of separate privacy notices for legal and other reasons, but intends to consolidate more than 60 into one main Privacy Policy.

Data owned by search companies and publishers has become the big ticket for ad targeting and support.

During the Q4 2011 earnings call, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson and other company execs said data will become the key component for driving innovation at the company that holds bits and bytes from more than 702 million unique visitors and users of its products and services.

"We can use data to render the experience exactly the way you want it to create uniquely relevant experiences in everything from content to the layout of the page to the flow between pages and, of course, the advertising," Thompson said.

Thompson called Yahoo's data the "single most underrated, underappreciated and underused asset."


By Lauren Sullivan

Yes, the Feds Are Spying on Social Media

Just in case anyone still harbors illusions on this score, the answer is “Yes, the federal government is definitely spying on social media.” In the latest development, a group of online privacy advocates is suing the Department of Homeland Security for failing to release records of its online spying -- which isn’t terribly surprising, considering that it’s not really spying anymore if everyone knows what you’re doing.

The DHS has admitted in a public statement that it creates profiles to monitor “publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards,” including social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, in what is known as the “Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative.” The aim is to “to provide situational awareness” for the federal, state, and local governments; the DHS “may also share this de-identified information with international partners and the private sector where necessary and appropriate for coordination.” Crucially, the DHS statement also reveals that participating agencies may reveal personally identifying information about Internet users in emergency, life-and-death situations.

The list of search and monitoring tools used by the DHS includes Collecta, RSSOwl, Social Mention, Spy, Who’s Talkin, and Shrook RSS Reader, while public content and media sharing sites monitored by DHS include Hulu, iReport.com, Live Leak, Magma, Time Tube, Vimeo, YouTube, and MySpace Video. Twitter alone is monitored through a score of Twitter-specific search engines and trend monitoring services.

The array of search terms used by DHS to keep tabs on social media includes “Secret Service,” “Border Patrol,” “Agent,” “Task Force,” “Air Marshal,” “Assassination,” “Attack,” “Drill,” “Exercise,” “Cops,” “Dirty Bomb,” “Militia,” “Shooting,” “Shots fired,” “Deaths,” “Explosion,” “Gangs,” “Breach,” and “Lockdown,” as well as -- surprise -- the names of agencies like the CIA, the FBI, and of course the DHS itself.

Back in April 2011 an organization called the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records pertaining to the DHS use of social media monitoring -- a request that EPIC says the DHS has failed to respond to. Thus on December 20 EPIC filed an FOIA lawsuit against DHS for these records, which EPIC director Marc Rotenberg told ABC News will supply more information about when, where, and how social media monitoring is used.

ABC News quotes Rotenberg: “We want to know how they're collecting information online, what they're collecting online and if there's legal basis to do this… We are trying to understand what the circumstances are when the DHS is engaged in tracking to social media sites.”

In an earlier post I wrote about the fact that the DHS is using social networks to ferret out fake "green card" marriages between U.S. citizens and immigrants for the purpose of obtaining residency or citizenship for the latter. According to awesomely frank internal DHS records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation under a Freedom of Information Act request, “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of ‘friends’ link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don't even know. This provides an excellent vantage point for [the Office of Fraud Detection and National Security] to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities.”


Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/164961/yes-the-feds-are-spying-on-social-media.html?print#ixzz1i7RR7pE7

FTC, Facebook Reach Privacy Settlement

Facebook has agreed to settle a Federal Trade Commission complaint by promising to obtain users' express consent before sharing their information with a wider audience than in the past.

The social networking service also promised to prevent anyone from accessing deleted accounts within 30 days of deletion. Plus, Facebook agreed to institute a comprehensive privacy policy and to submit to audits for 20 years.

The proposed settlement, announced Tuesday, would resolve an FTC complaint alleging that Facebook deceived users by repeatedly sharing information that users believed would be private when uploaded. The FTC's 19-page complaint, unveiled on Tuesday along with the proposed settlement, spells out a variety of ways that Facebook allegedly deceived users.

Among others, in December of 2009 Facebook reclassified a host of data about users as “public” -- including people's names, photos and friend lists. “They didn't warn users that this change was coming, or get their approval in advance,” the FTC said in a statement. That Facebook shift also prompted the Electronic Privacy Information Center and other groups -- including the American Library Association, Center for Digital Democracy and Consumer Federation of America -- to file a complaint against the company.

The FTC also said that Facebook broke promises to users by allowing app developers to access profile information they didn't need. “A platform application with a narrow purpose, such as a quiz regarding a television show, in many instances could access a user’s relationship status, as well as the URL for every photo and video that the user had uploaded to Facebook’s Web site, despite the lack of relevance of this information to the application,” the FTC said in its complaint.

The authorities also alleged that Facebook shared some users' names with advertisers via referrer headers. (Facebook recently prevailed in a lawsuit stemming from that same issue. A judge in that case ruled that the users weren't harmed by any disclosures and, therefore, couldn't pursue their claim in court.)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post that the company had made “a bunch of mistakes.” He added: “I think that a small number of high-profile mistakes, like Beacon four years ago and poor execution as we transitioned our privacy model two years ago, have often overshadowed much of the good work we've done.”

Zuckerberg also noted that Facebook had already fixed some of the issues noted by the FTC.

In the last two years, Facebook revised its privacy controls to give users more say over who can access their data. But the social networking service hadn't promised prior to Tuesday to seek users' opt-in consent to future privacy-related changes.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who introduced an online privacy bill earlier this year, praised the deal.

“This settlement will help ensure that companies keep their promises to consumers and give those consumers a real voice in how their information is used, distributed, and managed,” Kerry stated. “These priorities are consistent with what Senator McCain and I had in mind when we introduced our Internet Privacy Bill of Rights.”

The terms of the Facebook settlement, which were first rumored earlier this month, are in line with the FTC's settlement with Google over its launch of Buzz. That deal requires Google to create a comprehensive privacy program and submit to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. Google also promised that it will obtain people's express consent before sharing their information more broadly than its privacy policy allowed at the time of collection.

Buzz created social networks out of people's Gmail contacts. At launch, the service revealed information about the names of users' email contacts, if users activated Buzz without changing the defaults. That design meant that a host of confidential information could inadvertently become known, including the names of Gmail users' doctors, lawyers or coworkers.

The FTC will accept comment on the proposed Facebook settlement until Dec. 30.

by Wendy Davis