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Jernej Prodnik

Google raises privacy fears as personal details are released to app developers | Techno... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...e-privacy-fears-app-developers

google privacy technology guardian personal details surveillance surveillance society

shared by Jernej Prodnik on 25 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Google raises privacy fears as personal details are released to app developers Campaigner says tech giant's policies don't make it clear that Google Play users who buy apps give over information
  • Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 February 2013 14.39 GMT
  • Google Play: the personal details of app buyers are released to developers Google could face a third privacy row in a two years, after a leading campaigner called for the US government to investigate the fact that the names, geographic region and email addresses of people who buy apps from its Play store are passed on to the app developers without users' explicit permission.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Ben Edelman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, says that analysis of Google's terms and conditions relating to its Google Play store and Google Wallet transaction system (used for buying apps) doesn't show any clauses where users are specifically told that their emails will be sent on to the developer. He also warns that developers could use that information to "track and harass" people who have given apps low ratings or requested refunds. And hackers – or malicious developers – could create personalised emails to send out to people to steal passwords (phishing) or install "updates" that were actually malware.
  • Google says it has to provide some location data about which country apps are bought in so developers can calculate the correct amount of tax to pay. But that does not explain why it passes on buyers' names and email addresses, which together with a postcode could be used to identify a person's location and address."Google's prior privacy blunders have put [it] under higher scrutiny," Edelman says, pointing to the 20-year consent order with the US Federal Trade Commission that Google signed in March 2011 in the wake of its Buzz social network fiasco – followed by a record $22.5m fine in August 2012 for hacking Apple users' browsers to install tracking cookies. It has also been fiercely criticised in Europe for its changes in March 2012 to its privacy policies, which data protection chiefs said could mean "uncontrolled" use of personal data.
  • Eric Butler, a freelance software developer of the Tapchat and Farebot apps, tweeted in July 2012 "I wonder if most Android users realise that when you buy an app in the Play Store the seller [of the app] can see your name, email address and phone."Following the row, he has noted on his blog that "Because the entire experience of purchasing Android apps is so sloppy, it's not unreasonable to assume that this privacy issue was actually an oversight." But, he says, "Google should follow Apple's lead and offer users and developers better privacy protection."
  • Another developer, Jesse Wilson, pointed out the same problem in November on Google+, and was quickly echoed by Chris Lacy, who said that "as a developer I never asked for this information, I have no need for it, and I simply do not want to be a custodian of such information."Lacy added that "As a consumer, this is distressing on many levels: there is no fair warning that this information will be transferred … trusting my personal information to Google is one thing. But with this system, users are unknowingly having to trust their information to a third party. There's no way to know what security measures that third party might have in place." He added that it meant that the app developer "has gained my personal information without requesting the appropriate permissions via the app."
  • Google has said that passing on the details does not breach its privacy conditions. In a quote to Siliconvalley.com, a representative told the site that "Google Wallet shares the information necessary to process a transaction, which is clearly spelled out in the Google Wallet privacy notice."
Veronika Lavrenčič

Google Buzz aims to crack the social web - News - Gadgets & Tech - The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...ck-the-social-web-1894974.html

shared by Veronika Lavrenčič on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Google Buzz aims to crack the social web
  • Google Buzz
  • share messages, web links and photos with friends and colleagues directly within Gmail
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • smartphones based on Google's Android operating system.
  • Google's new technology mimics some of the key features of popular social networking services like Twitter and Facebook
  • Gmail is the third most popular web-based email in the world
  • the large pool of Gmail users.
  • There's always been a giant social network underneath Gmail,"
  • Todd Jackson
  • 176.5 million unique visitors in December
  • Forrester Research social media analyst Augie Ray
  • flag as viewable to everyone
  • utomatically indexed by Google's search engine
  • be available within Google's recently launched real-time search results.
  • users can also keep messages private by sharing only with customized groups of friends and colleagues.
  • users can easily share content from various Google online properties like photo-sharing service Picasa and video site YouTube.
  • Content from certain third-party services such as Twitter can also be shared
  • Buzz is not currently able to display messages that originated on Facebook
  • "The fact that Gmail did not connect and allow broadcasts out to Twitter and Facebook could be a real challenge to them
  • Google hopes to jumpstart its social networking push
  • the Orkut social network in 2004
  • Google has tried to ride the social networking wave before
  • ailed to attract as many users as social giants like Facebook and MySpace in the United States.
  • Google is following in the footsteps of Yahoo
  • has seen lackluster results according to analysts.
  • Google appears to be putting a heavy emphasis on mobile and location-based capabilities
  • a special mobile application for Buzz that will run on smartphones based on Google's Android software, Windows Mobile and the Symbian operating system.
  • Veronika Lavrenčič on 07 Mar 13
     
    Kako si Google prizadeva ustvariti podobno socialno omrežje, kot sta Facebook in Twitter.
mancamikulic

Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy? | Technology | The Guardian - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...le-glass-threat-to-our-privacy

google glass technology privacy shooting

shared by mancamikulic on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • glasses that can shoot video, take pictures, and broadcast what you're seeing to the world
  • They weren't due to get them until last Friday
  • Google Glass is the most hotly anticipated new arrival in "wearable computing"
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • from "mainframe" computers
  • Google's idea is that you need only speak to operate it
  • "OK, Glass, take video!"
  • The only other way to get that point of view is to strap a camera to your head.
  • And yet people are already beginning to fret about the social implications of Glass
  • the question of privacy
  • how will we behave in groups
  • David Yee, the chief technology officer at a company called Editorially
  • Yee's worry was that the young person might be filming everything
  • Joshua Topolsky
  • have tried out Google Glass
  • This is the company that has repeatedly breached the boundaries of what we think is "private".
  • forgetting that sometimes deadly enemies have mutual friends
  • use of personal data without an individual's clear consent.
  • So how comfortable – or uneasy – should we feel about the possibility that what we're doing in a public or semi-public place (or even somewhere private) might get slurped up and assimilated by Google?
  • Oliver Stokes
  • ou could inadvertently become part of somebody else's data collection – that could be quite alarming
  • Now it's going to be able to compute what it is you're looking at.
  • Song Chaoming
  • nalysing mobile phone records
  • how your smartphone is able to show where you are on an onscreen map
  • Social media
  • Where the five million are the wearers of Glass – and the one monitor is Google
  • Google probably knows what you're going to do before you do.
  • Twitter
  • we're more used to the snatched photo or video that tells a story
  • Google doesn't want to discuss these issues.
  • this is a live issue,
  • One of the reasons they're doing Explorers is to get feedback on these things
  • how will we behave with each other?
  • hows data such as your speed, altitude, and even ski-resort maps
  • Concentrating on what was in front of me wasn't hard
  • they do it without letting others realise you are doing anything
  • we get too deeply involved with our technology
  • she pointed out how smartphones change us:
  • Topolsky
  • It brought something new into view
  • the more I used Glass the more it made sense to me; the more I wanted it."
  • how text messages or phone calls would just appear as alerts
  • Glass makes you feel more powerful
  • Hurst
  • is likely to be annoying
  • here's where the problems really start – you don't know if they're taking a video of you.
  • body language change
  • model seems to require voice control
  • how much are we going to share with others
Maj Krek

Google and Skyhook: the internet privacy invasion | openDemocracy - 1 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...ok-internet-privacy-invasion-0

google privacy surveillance wi-fi internet

shared by Maj Krek on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • every v isitor
  • “Location Based Browsing
  • Location Based Browsing”,
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • address of every visitor
  • “Location Based Browsing
  • most governments are unaware that a second American company, Skyhook, is driving around
  • Google, Microsoft and Firefox all claim we can switch off Location Based Browsing
  • ensure every website
  • most governments are unaware that a second American company, Skyhook, is driving around the world’s streets
  • we can switch off Location Based Browsing
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody.
  • most governments are unaware that a second American company, Skyhook, is driving around the world’s streets , including Britain’s, gathering wi-fi data from people’s homes and businesses.
  • To ensure every website in the world can contact Google and ask the home address of every visitor to any page on their website
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody.
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody.
  • most governments are unaware that a second American company, Skyhook, is driving around
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody.
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybody
  • Up until now, our router MAC address was unknown and worthless to anybod
  • website
  • Location Based Browsing
  • their
  • Location Based Browsing
  • Street View project
  • every website
  • in the world can
  • contact Google and ask
  • the home
  • To ensure every
  • address of
  • isitor to any page on their website. Websites can have a little piece of software (known as XSS) installed to grab our router’s MAC address from our browser if we visit any page on their site. This software is undetectable to the user, the browser does not warn us what is happening and has no setting to prevent it. The website owner can then send your MAC address to Google Location Services. At this point, without verifying that you have given permission, Google can provide your home address.
inesmag

Google and competition: searching for a solution | Tom Watson | Comment is free | guard... - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...competition-searching-solution

google competition searching solution comment

shared by inesmag on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Some time later this month we are expecting the European commission to decide how it will proceed with its investigation of the search giant Google, following the latter's submission of proposed remedies at the end of January over allegations that it has engaged in a range of anticompetitive practices.
  • Google is a global company and its activities will require a global solution.
  • Google's global revenues were £23.5bn in 2011. Those are its revenues before tax, although Google's approach to tax is another and equally interesting story. Those vast revenues do not come from those who search, but from those who bid to place advertisements alongside the search results. This means that Google has a clear interest to arrange the rankings in a way that maximises its profits and faces a stark conflict of interests when it does so. It has every incentive to demote other companies, who might actually be offering answers or services that are more relevant to the user queries, and to advance its own services.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • There is no reason why an appropriate remedy that introduces fair rankings should in any way impair the user experience.
  • that Google, with more than 90% of the search market in Europe, is overwhelmingly dominant.
  • Effective remedies will aim to protect competition for the future but need also to acknowledge the past. Google has continued to expand and exploit its position during the period of the investigation and it will be necessary to find a solution that tackles that past misbehaviour and reintroduces something approaching a level playing field.
Urška Cerar

What Does Google Do If the Government Comes Looking for Your Emails? - Rebecca J. Rosen... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...272591

google law enforcement request

shared by Urška Cerar on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Every single day, dozens of requests from law-enforcement officials, courts, and other government agencies pour into Google's offices, requesting that Google hand over different pieces of information its users have amassed
  • many of these requests are legitimate
  • It's important for law enforcement agencies to pursue illegal activity and keep the public safe.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Google says, "When we receive such a request, our team reviews the request to make sure it satisfies legal requirements and Google's policies.
  • once a request has been deemed valid, Google will notify users when possible.
  • Google will not provide a user's search-query information or the contents of a user's account (email content, pictures, documents, etc.) without a warrant.
  • Google has advocated for updating ECPA, "so the same protections that apply to your personal documents that you keep in your home also apply to your email and online documents."
  • If Google can establish clear practices now that somehow balance the competing needs of law-enforcement agencies and private users, that effort will pay off
Kaja Horvat

EU agencies to sanction Google over privacy violations - INTERNET - FRANCE 24 - 0 views

www.france24.com/...google-privacy-violations-cnil

internet privacy google violation

shared by Kaja Horvat on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • EU data-protection agencies will take action against internet giant Google after it failed to comply with EU privacy laws,
  • In October the data protection agencies warned Google that its new confidentiality policy did not comply with EU laws and gave it four months to make changes or face legal action.
  • Google rolled out the new privacy policy in March 2012, allowing it to track users across various services to develop targeted advertising, despite sharp criticism from US and European consumer advocacy groups.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • It contends the move simplifies and unifies its policies across its various services such as Gmail, YouTube, Android mobile systems, social networks and Internet search.
  • But critics argue that the policy, which offers no ability to opt out aside from refraining from signing into Google services, gives the operator of the world's largest search engine unprecedented ability to monitor its users.
  • European data protection agencies had recommended to Google that it improve information provided to users, particularly on the categories of data being processed, and for what purposes and services.
  • changes are designed to improve the user experience across the various Google products, and give the firm a more integrated view of its users
inesmag

How to keep your privacy online | Ask Jack | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 2 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...t-privacy-web-browsers-cookies

website privacy google network

shared by inesmag on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • I would like my browsing and Google searches to be private. I don't want targeted advertising and I don't want to feel that anonymous companies are harvesting my clicks to learn all about me.
  • When the web was young, and a lot less shiny, web pages were fixed (static) and – barring browser quirks – everybody saw much the same thing. Today, much of the web is dynamic, which means that what you see has been adapted or possibly constructed on the fly just for you.
  • From your point of view, the advantage is that the websites you visit will be personalised to suit your needs and tastes. From the website's point of view, the advantage is that it can also personalise its prices and advertising to try to suit your needs and tastes, and increase your propensity to click and buy.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • On the web, the rule is: if you're not paying, then you are what's being sold.
  • Probably the simplest way to reduce personalisation is to use an anonymising service. Instead of accessing the web directly, you access it via a third-party proxy server, so your that requests are mixed in with thousands of others. These services usually allow you to control cookies, turn JavaScript on and off, withhold "referrer details" and so on.
  • Nonetheless, it's often useful to have access to an anonymous proxy service, and everybody should find one they like. Examples include The Cloak, Megaproxy, Proxify and ID Zap. There are also networked open source privacy systems such as Tor and I2P.
  • Google also tracks your progress across hundreds of thousands of websites via Google Analytics. To opt out of this, install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on (Beta), which Google offers for Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera. However, some sites use different analytics software or track visitors in other ways you will be unaware of. Ghostery may help reduce these.
  • Finally, Facebook Connect is a potential privacy problem because it "allows users to 'connect' their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site".
  • In general, the more you do online – social networking, cloud computing etc – the more your privacy and security are at risk. Reducing that risk involves effort and inconvenience, so it's up to you to find an acceptable compromise
Katja Saje

Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy? | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...le-glass-threat-to-our-privacy

google glass privacy public misuse social deprivation

shared by Katja Saje on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Google Glass is the most hotly anticipated new arrival in "wearable computing" – which experts predict will become pervasive.
  • The next stage is computers that fit on to your body, and Google's idea is that you need only speak to operate it.
  • (To activate Glass you need to tilt your head, or touch the side, and then say, "OK Glass, record a video" or "OK Glass take a picture".)
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Google has become the company which knows where you are and what you're looking for. Now it's going to be able to compute what it is you're looking at."
  • For Google, "privacy" means "what you've agreed to", and that is slightly different from the privacy we've become used to over time. So how comfortable – or uneasy – should we feel about the possibility that what we're doing in a public or semi-public place (or even somewhere private) might get slurped up and assimilated by Google?
  • The first, and most obvious, is the question of privacy. The second is: how will we behave in groups when the distraction of the internet is only an eye movement away?
  • we already live in a world where the boundaries of what's private and what's public are melting.
  • Google doesn't want to discuss these issues. "We are not making any comment," says a company spokesperson. But other sources suggest that Google's chiefs know that this is a live issue, and they're watching it develop.
  • "People will have to work out what the new normal is,"
anonymous

Google's Sergey Brin: smartphones are 'emasculating' | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...-brin-smartphones-emasculating

shared by anonymous on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Smartphones are "emasculating" – at least according to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, who explained his view while addressing an audience wearing a computer headset that made him look slightly like a technological pirate.
  • Brin suggested that the way people today use their smartphones was unappealing.
  • "When we started Google 15 years ago," Brin said, "my vision was that information would come to you as you need it. You wouldn't have to search query at all."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • At the website BoingBoing, the suggestion was that Google Glass would need an appropriately named version of the Android mobile operating system – whose robot-themed icon has pleased many geeks. But each version is named after a dessert (Frozen Yogurt, Jelly Bean) – insufficiently manly, suggested Rob Beschizza.
  • "My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn't have to have a search query at all – the information would just come to you as you needed it," he said. Glass, added Brin, "is the first form factor that can deliver that vision". He said it had improved radically in the past two years since its first versions, which he said were "like a cellphone [mobile phone] strapped to your head".
Janja Petek

Upgrade or Die: Are Perfectionism and Inequality Linked? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ism-and-income-inequality.html

technology google

shared by Janja Petek on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The New Yorker Online Only « The Powerless Presidency Main When a Criminal Leads a Country » March 6, 2013 Upgrade or Die Posted by George Packer Every day, in every way, things are getting
  • better and better.
  • Google is developing Google Glass, which will allow users to text, take pictures and videos, perform Google searches, and execute other essential functions of contemporary life simply by issuing conversation-level spoken commands to a smart lens attached to a lightweight frame worn above the eyes.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The good news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies saw its profits increase by thirty-five per cent. The bad news: between 2005 and 2012, United Technologies hired a net total of zero workers.
  • “Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.”
  • The strange thing is that technological romanticism doesn’t divide Americans. In an age when class and wealth determine everything from your food and beverage to your TV shows, news sources, mode of air travel, education, spouse, children’s prospects, longevity, and cause of death, it’s the one thing that still unites us.
  • the future, when the price drops below its current fifteen hundred dollars, the unemployed might wear Google Glass, too.
donnamariee

Firefox OS won't magically succeed just because it's open source - see webOS | Technolo... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...firefox-os-open-source-failure

shared by donnamariee on 01 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Firefox OS won't magically succeed just because it's open source - see webOS The siren song of open source means some people think Firefox OS could take the smartphone market by storm - but that's what they thought about webOS
  • Open source" operating systems are the siren call of the internet. For years, we were promised, Linux was going to be the Next Big Thing on the desktop; the tired old empires of Windows and MacOS were going to be pushed aside, and everyone was going to embrace Linux (though quite which distro wasn't clear). From infants to grannies, they would all see the light, and install software that was built with the user in mind - as long as the user was someone who could hold the idea of the concentric circles of file ownership (root/wheel/std) in their head
  • Despite the fevered imaginings of a fair number at the time, there was simply no chance that webOS was going to go anywhere without direct help from HP; and HP wasn't going to give it that help, since it had plenty of troubles of its own.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • LG has indicated that it will be using webOS in its Smart TV line (which, in passing, suggests that Google's hopes of having a multi-manufacturer-pronged assault on the living room with Google TV are being chipped away; Samsung has gone its own way, Sony offers a mixture of Google and its own smart TV offerings, and now it looks like LG isn't exactly all-in). Though that might, in time, become something that it uses on phones or tablets, you'd be crazy to bet on it. LG is smart enough to know that TVs are a world away from phones and tablets, both in terms of the user interaction experience, and the demands that they make for user acceptance.
  • But the siren song of open source OSs becomes deafening when you look at the other announcement to come out of Mobile World Congress, in which Mozilla is touting its Firefox OS as the anathema to the world's ills - or at least those afflicting the smartphone industry. What does Moziila chief executive Gary Kovacs think is going to be the unique selling point of the Firefox OS phones that he expects to see in 2014? "Our goal is to level the playing field and usher in an explosion of content and services that will meet the diverse needs of the next two billion people online," he said in Barcelona, adding "We're not trying to get in the middle of an operating system fight; what we are trying to do is be the catalyst to drive more development around the open web."
  • The problem for Firefox OS is that it doesn't have a dedicated hardware backer. Sure, Sony has said that it will make some phones using it. ZTE and Alcatel say they will build hardware that will run it. And Kovacs points to the fact that Firefox OS will run HTML5 apps - not "native" apps (in the sense that iOS or Android apps run natively). That might put a questionmark over whether, by some analysts' measure, the FFOS phone is truly a "smartphone", since their definition for that includes "running apps on a native API". (That's why Gartner and IDC don't class Nokia's Asha phones as smartphones.)
  • So how did Android succeed? Three things. First, Google get a vibrant app ecosystem going even before there was a single phone: it had competitions for apps, with a $10m fund to seed developer ideas. By April 2008 there were almost 2,000 Android applications; two-third came from outside the US. Among the offerings: photo-enhanced driving, on-the-fly party mashups with maps, maintaining passive surveillance on your family's whereabouts. (Some things never change.) Second, it was able to go to Verizon, which was looking enviously at how AT&T was able to offer the iPhone, and suggest that Android phones - when they came along - could be the answer to that competitive challenge. And third, it was Google - the gigantic search-engine-and-everything-else company with the international reputation. If Google was doing a new generation of smartphone software (and if Apple had validated the idea), then it looked like a good deal for everyone. And handset manufacturers were eager to find an alternative to Microsoft.
  • Android is gigantic - some version of it might be on a billion phones this year - meaning there's no obvious need for another open source OS. What, after all, is FFOS actually going to do that Android doesn't, or that iOS or Windows Phone or BlackBerry can't? Yes, we've heard that the target isn't the west, but the developing world; that still doesn't explain why a Chinese handset manufacturer would deploy FFOS rather than Android, whether the Google version or a forked one that could connect to a local app store.
  • Even worse, FFOS is at an immediate competitive disadvantage because the principal browser on smartphones now is based on WebKit. Chrome uses it, MobileSafari uses it, BlackBerry uses it, and Opera uses it too now. That leaves only Internet Explorer on Windows Phone standing alone. Developers writing HTML5 apps will naturally write for compatibility with WebKit, which is always going to behave slightly differently from Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. For FFOS's sake, you have to hope the differences aren't big.
  • That's the trouble with the magical thinking that often attaches to open source projects. Making webOS open source didn't solve its problems; it simply shoved them off into a siding. Having an open source mobile OS didn't guarantee Android's success; the efforts of Google, and the timing in the market, did that.
  • Perhaps for that reason, people have high expectations for the Ubuntu OS and phone, with its fabulously complex array of gestures for control. Bad news, dreamers: it's going to fail in the market too if Canonical attempts to market it as a hardware-software combination - that is, sells Ubuntu phones at retail.
sintija

BBC News - Google told to fix privacy policy by EU data regulators - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...technology-19959306

google privacy

shared by sintija on 04 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Google told to fix privacy policy by EU data regulators
  • consolidate 60 separate privacy policies into a single agreement.
  • Google has been told it should give clearer information about what data is being collected and for what purpose. It has also been told to give users more control over how the information is combined.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Google
  • has been accused of providing "incomplete and approximate" details raising "deep concerns about data protection and the respect of the European law".
  • It said that EU data protection laws place limits on such activities and proposed the following changes:
  • Google must "reinforce users' consent". It suggests this could be done by allowing its members to choose under what circumstances data about them was combined by asking them to click on dedicated buttons. The firm should offer a centralised opt-out tool and allow users to decide which of Google's services provided data about them. Google should adapt its own tools so that it could limit data use to authorised purposes. For example, it should be able to use a person's collated data to improve security efforts but not to target advertising.
Anja Vasle

Even Google won't be around for ever, let alone Facebook | Technology | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...acebook-nothing-lasts-for-ever

google facebook

shared by Anja Vasle on 03 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • At the moment, the four leading monsters are Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Yet 18 years ago, Apple was weeks away from extinction, Amazon had just launched, Google was still three years away from incorporation and Facebook lay nine years into the future.
  • We understand pretty well the factors that determine the fortunes of companies that make things people buy – which is why, for example, one can predict thatApple won't be able indefinitely to sustain its huge profit margins on its iDevices.
  • This leaves Facebook, a company that has one billion products (called users) and earns its living by selling information about them to advertisers.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The two key factors that will determine Facebook's future are the power of network effects and the "stickiness" of its service – ie, the extent to which it can dissuade users from leaving.
  • he key determinants of success or failure were (i) the average number of friends that users have and (ii) whether the difficulty of using the site comes to outweigh the perceived benefits.
  • Facebook users will constitute a captive market and will be correspondingly exploited. And the company will be regulated as a monopoly.
  • How much exploitation will users tolerate before they decide to quit?
  • n fact, it is now so dominant that millions of people around the world think that Facebook is the internet.
  • At one point in the conversation, the Google boys noticed that their collaborator had suddenly gone rather quiet.
  • But the number of commercial companies that are more than a century old is vanishingly small.
  • in the technology world one can go from zero to hero is a very short time
  • Google has a well understood and currently profitable business model and a huge technical infrastructure but ultimately is vulnerable to a well-resourced competitor armed with better search technology.
  • A telephone network with a million subscribers is infinitely more valuable then one with only 10. In technological ecosystems, network effects are very powerful: they explain, for example, how Microsoft came to dominate the market for desktop operating and office systems.
  • If you put your faith in network effects, therefore, Facebook looks like a good investment because it'll be around for the long term.
anonymous

Google to be summoned over data grab 'excesses' | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...le-summoned-data-grab-excesses

shared by anonymous on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Google representatives are to be summoned to appear before European data protection officials over concerns about the way it collects data on web users.
  • On Thursday, a coalition of 30 data protection officials, including Britain's information commissioner, demanded "significant progress" from Google before the summer
  • The authorities are concerned about changes Google introduced to its privacy policies in March last year. The changes were made to "unify" how information is collected across approximately 60 products, including YouTube GoogleMail, Google has said.
alja polajžer

BBC News - Google cookies 'bypassed Safari privacy protection' - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...technology-17076670

internetnipraktikum bbc news privacy

shared by alja polajžer on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Google cookies 'bypassed Safari privacy protection'
  • The Wall Street Journal said Google and other companies had worked around privacy settings designed to restrict cookies
  • Cookies are small text files stored by browsers which can record information about online activity, and help some online services work
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  • The Safari browser is produced by Apple, and is the browser used by the iPhone.
  • y default Safari only allows cookies to be stored by the web page a user is visiting, not from third parties such as advertisers
  • esearcher Jonathan Mayer found that advertisers were still able to store cookies on the computers of internet users browsing with Safari.
  • We are aware that some third parties are circumventing Safari's privacy features and we are working to put a stop to it”
  • The Wall Street Journal reported that Google "disabled the code after being contacted by the paper".
  • Online privacy advocates were highly critical of Google's actions.
  • The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote: "It's time for Google to acknowledge that it can do a better job of respecting the privacy of web users."
  • An Apple spokesman said in a statement: "We are aware that some third parties are circumventing Safari's privacy features and we are working to put a stop to it."
Meta Arcon

Google Glass: what it means for business | Media Network | Guardian Professional - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ass-mobile-smartphones-tablets

google glass business media network

shared by Meta Arcon on 06 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Google Glass could herald the next phase of mobile computing.
  • One of the most exciting announcements and demos from Google IO 2012 was Project Glass – Google's computerised glasses designed to let wearers use apps, capture images and video, use the internet and social networks on the move
  • Glass has a processor, memory, and a visual display that is positioned above the eye so that one is able to interact with the virtual world without inhibiting the real one. It has a camera, microphone, and speaker to capture and receive information. It has multiple radios for data communication. Glass also has gyroscopes, an accelerometer, and a compass so the device is aware of its context not only to you, but to your location in the physical world as well.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But how does knowing a fact faster help us? How can near-instantaneous access to information make a difference?
  • How does a wearable mobile device such as Glass represent a step forward for business? It does so because it provides the ability to interact with relevant data, in real-time and in a collaborative fashion that has never before been possible.
Janja Petek

Google, Facebook and Twitter ordered to delete photos of James Bulger killers | Media |... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...google-facebook-twitter

google facebook twitter

shared by Janja Petek on 07 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Google, Facebook and Twitter have been ordered by the police to remove photographs purporting to show one of James Bulger's killers.
  • Police served the three web giants with the injunction that bans the purported identification of Venables and Robert Thompson
  • A spokeswoman for the attorney general's office said police had requested that Twitter, Facebook and Google "assist with the removal of material in breach of the terms of the order" and that the process was ongoing.
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  • The photographs are believed to have begun circulating online
  • Twitter broke its silence about the issue in a Commons home affairs select committee hearing on Tuesday afternoon.
  • what is illegal offline is illegal online."
Katja Kotnik

Me and my data: how much do the internet giants really know? | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...me-and-my-data-internet-giants

shared by Katja Kotnik on 02 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Google is not only the world's largest search engine, it's one of the top three email providers, a social network, and owner of the Blogger platform and the world's largest video site, YouTube. Facebook has the social contacts, messages, wallposts and photos of more than 750 million people.
  • The site also lists my most recent sent and received emails (in both cases a "no subject" conversation thread with a colleague).
  • The big relief comes when I note Google isn't tracking the internet searches I've made on my work account
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  • only around 29% of the information Facebook possesses on any given user is accessible through the site's tools.
  • The Facebook extended archive is a little creepier, including "poke info", each instance of tracking cookies they possess, previous names, and full login and logout info
  • Looking through anyone's list of searches gives a distressing degree of insight into odder parts of their personality.
  • how much do the internet giants really know?
  • sell us stuff
  • picked up by hackers
  • how much the internet giants know about us.
  • Google isn't totally unhelpfu
  • Every event to which I've ever been invited is neatly listed, alongside its location, time, and whether I said I would attend .
  • One piece of information – a supposed engagement to a schoolfriend, Amy Holmes – stands out. A Facebook "joke" that seemed faintly funny for about a week several years ago was undone by hiding it from any and all Facebook users, friends or otherwise (to avoid an "… is now single!" status update). The forgotten relationship helpfully explains why Facebook has served me up with badly targeted bridalwear adverts for several years, and reassures me that Facebook doesn't know quite everything.
  • This is the core of the main comfort
  • despite their mountain of data, Google and Facebook seem largely clueless, too – they've had no more luck making any sense out of it than I have. And that, for now, is a relief.
Janja Petek

Forty years of the internet: how the world changed for ever | Technology | The Guardian - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...internet-40-history-arpanet

history web changed world

shared by Janja Petek on 06 Mar 13 - Cached
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  • In October 1969, a student typed 'LO' on a computer - and the internet was born
  • Towards the end of the summer of 1969
  • a large grey metal box was delivered to the office of Leonard Kleinrock, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.
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  • At 10.30pm, as Kleinrock's fellow professors and students crowded around, a computer was connected to the IMP, which made contact with a second IMP, attached to a second computer, several hundred miles away at the Stanford Research Institute, and an undergraduate named Charley Kline tapped out a message.
  • It's impossible to say for certain when the internet began, mainly because nobody can agree on what, precisely, the internet is.
  • It's interesting to compare how much has changed in computing and the internet since 1969 with, say, how much has changed in world politics.
  • On the other hand, the breakthrough accomplished that night in 1969 was a decidedly down-to-earth one
  • Twelve years after Charley Kline's first message on the Arpanet, as it was then known, there were still only 213 computers on the network; but 14 years after that, 16 million people were online, and email was beginning to change the world; the first really usable web browser wasn't launched until 1993, but by 1995 we had Amazon, by 1998 Google, and by 2001, Wikipedia, at which point there were 513 million people online. Today the figure is more like 1.7 billion.
  • on New Year's Day 1994 – only yesterday, in other words – there were an estimated 623 websites.
  • On the one hand, they were there because of the Russian Sputnik satellite launch, in 1957, which panicked the American defence establishment, prompting Eisenhower to channel millions of dollars into scientific research, and establishing Arpa, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to try to win the arms technology race. The idea was "that we would not get surprised again,"
  • "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face," they declared.
  • The few outsiders who knew of the box's existence couldn't even get its name right: it was an IMP, or "interface message processor"
  • It was already possible to link computers by telephone lines, but it was glacially slow, and every computer in the network had to be connected, by a dedicated line, to every other computer, which meant you couldn't connect more than a handful of machines without everything becoming monstrously complex and costly.
  • The solution, called "packet switching" – which owed its existence to the work of a British physicist, Donald Davies – involved breaking data down into blocks that could be routed around any part of the network that happened to be free, before getting reassembled at the other end.
  • Still, Kleinrock recalls a tangible sense of excitement that night as Kline sat down at the SDS Sigma 7 computer, connected to the IMP, and at the same time made telephone contact with his opposite number at Stanford. As his colleagues watched, he typed the letter L, to begin the word LOGIN.
  • One of the most intriguing things about the growth of the internet is this: to a select group of technological thinkers, the surprise wasn't how quickly it spread across the world, remaking business, culture and politics – but that it took so long to get off the ground.
  • In 1945, the American presidential science adviser, Vannevar Bush, was already imagining the "memex", a device in which "an individual stores all his books, records, and communications", which would be linked to each other by "a mesh of associative trails", like weblinks.
  • And in 1946, an astonishingly complete vision of the future appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. In a story entitled A Logic Named Joe, the author Murray Leinster envisioned a world in which every home was equipped with a tabletop box that he called a "logic":
  • Instead of smothering their research in the utmost secrecy – as you might expect of a cold war project aimed at winning a technological battle against Moscow – they made public every step of their thinking, in documents known as Requests For Comments.
  • Deliberately or not, they helped encourage a vibrant culture of hobbyists on the fringes of academia – students and rank amateurs who built their own electronic bulletin-board systems and eventually FidoNet, a network to connect them to each other.
  • n argument can be made that these unofficial tinkerings did as much to create the public internet as did the Arpanet. Well into the 90s, by the time the Arpanet had been replaced by NSFNet, a larger government-funded network,
  • It was the hobbyists, making unofficial connections into the main system, who first opened the internet up to allcomers.
  • This was the software known as TCP/IP, which made it possible for networks to connect to other networks, creating a "network of networks", capable of expanding virtually infinitely
  • Nevertheless, by July 1992, an Essex-born businessman named Cliff Stanford had opened Demon Internet, Britain's first commercial internet service provider.
  • After a year or so, Demon had between 2,000 and 3,000 users,
  • the @ symbol was introduced in 1971, and the first message, according to the programmer who sent it, Ray Tomlinson, was "something like QWERTYUIOP".
  • A couple of years later I got my first mobile phone, which came with two batteries: a very large one, for normal use, and an extremely large one, for those occasions on which you might actually want a few hours of power
  • For most of us, though, the web is in effect synonymous with the internet, even if we grasp that in technical terms that's inaccurate: the web is simply a system that sits on top of the internet, making it greatly easier to navigate the information there, and to use it as a medium of sharing and communication.
  • The first ever website was his own, at CERN: info.cern.ch.
  • The idea that a network of computers might enable a specific new way of thinking about information, instead of just allowing people to access the data on each other's terminals, had been around for as long as the idea of the network itself: it's there in Vannevar Bush's memex, and Murray Leinster's logics.
  • Web browsers crossed the border into mainstream use far more rapidly than had been the case with the internet itself: Mosaic launched in 1993 and Netscape followed soon after, though it was an embarrassingly long time before Microsoft realised the commercial necessity of getting involved at all. Amazon and eBay were online by 1995. And in 1998 came Google, offering a powerful new way to search the proliferating mass of information on the web.
  • Google, and others, saw that the key to the web's future would be helping users exclude almost everything on any given topic, restricting search results to the most relevant pages.
  • It is absurd – though also unavoidable here – to compact the whole of what happened from then onwards into a few sentences: the dotcom boom, the historically unprecedented dotcom bust, the growing "digital divide", and then the hugely significant flourishing, over the last seven years, of what became known as Web 2.0.
  • The most confounding thing of all is that in a few years' time, all this stupendous change will probably seem like not very much change at all.
  • Will you remember when the web was something you accessed primarily via a computer? Will you remember when there were places you couldn't get a wireless connection? Will you remember when "being on the web" was still a distinct concept, something that described only a part of your life, instead of permeating all of it? Will you remember Google?
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