MediaFile

from Paul Smalera:

The piracy of online privacy

Paul Smalera

Feb 10, 2012 13:28 EST

Online privacy doesn’t exist. It was lost years ago. And not only was it taken, we’ve all already gotten used to it. Loss of privacy is a fundamental tradeoff at the very core of social networking. Our privacy has been taken in service of the social tools we so crave and suddenly cannot live without. If not for the piracy of privacy, Facebook wouldn’t exist. Nor would Twitter. Nor even would Gmail, Foursquare, Groupon, Zynga, etc.

And yet people keep fretting about losing what’s already gone. This week, like most others of the past decade, has brought fresh new outrages for privacy advocates. Google, which a few weeks ago changed its privacy policy to allow the company to share your personal data across as many as 60 of its products, was again castigated this week for the changes. Except this time, the shouts came in the form of a lawsuit. The Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the FTC to compel it to block Google’s changes, saying they violated a privacy agreement Google signed less than a year ago.

Elsewhere, social photography app Path was caught storing users’ entire iPhone address books on their servers and have issued a red-faced apology. (The lesser-known app Hipster committed the same sin and also offered a mea culpa.) And Facebook’s IPO has brought fresh concerns that Mark Zuckerberg will find creative new ways to leverage user data into ever more desirable revenue-generating products.

This is the way we’re private now. It’s ludicrous for anyone who loves the Internet to expect otherwise. How else are these services supposed to exist -- let alone make any money? Theft or misuse of private user data is a crime, certainly. But no social web app -- not one -- can work without intense analytics performed on the huge data sets that users provide to them voluntarily (you did read the terms of service agreement...right?).

And the issue compounds when people connect one site to another. By linking their Twitter to their Facebook to their Google+ to their Foursquare to their Zynga to their Instagram to their iOS, users are consolidating their lives, and in the process making them more attractive to marketers. While Facebook, Twitter and other services have made attempts to warn users about hitting the “connect” button, many of us hit that button with reckless abandon, without a thought of who’s slavering on the other side.

The reason social media and digital information companies want that data is because of what we refuse to give them: money. No one wants to pay for the privilege of chatting with their friends or using a coupon, and to this day, no one has to: Go ahead, ring their doorbell or pick up the free coupon book from your front stoop. But if you want to chat using Facebook or Gmail, or you want to buy a groupon for an 80 percent-off Botox service, you will have to tell those companies who you are. And those companies will use that information to tailor their offerings to you, increasing your value as a user and a customer. They will slice their data sets into a million different pieces and show those pieces to people -- advertisers -- who will pay them money for the privilege of using their service. They’ll use it to get to you.

This is an update on an old media model. Magazines and newspapers for decades could only guess at the readership of their product and the demographic of their customers. But now social and new media demand to -- and can -- know exactly who you are before they agree to let you use their free services. Even email newsletter services like the increasingly hot Thrillist -- which might innocuously start you on their service by asking only for your simple email address -- deploy click trackers, pixel trackers and other online data-gathering techniques to start to put together a picture of you as a user, both individually and in aggregate. A deceased magazine like Spy could only dream of that kind of intel.

Is Facebook building a Gmail killer?

By Kevin Kelleher

Facebook is hosting one of its increasingly common “events” Monday to announce a new feature for its site. Along with Apple, Facebook is probably the only company at this point that could collect a large audience on short notice with only the vaguest of descriptions.

The invitation only said that the announcement would reveal what CEO Mark Zuckerberg would talk about on Tuesday at the annual Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco – in other words, it was an event to discuss a conversation that would happen somewhere else on a later day. But there were tantalizing hints in it that suggested Facebook would announce an e-mail service along the lines of Gmail and Yahoo Mail: The invitation had the red-and-blue stripes along the border that were once commonly seen on envelopes, and it bore Facebook’s email inbox icon from its iPhone app.

That gave blogs the weekend to speculate on what a Facebook email service would mean to the web. The most common analysis was that this could be a Gmail killer, a shot across the bow of one of Google’s most popular services. But I don’t see that happening—at least right away.

Instead, a Facebook email account is likely to hurt the other webmail services out there: Yahoo, MySpace mail, AOL mail, etc. Many of these services have seen the number of accounts dwindle in recent months as Gmail’s user base steadily improved. The exception seems to be Microsoft’s Hotmail. Not long ago, the web comic The Oatmeal had a telling cartoon describing what your email address says about your computer skills. Outside of Google, they weren’t flattering – and it only underscored the exodus from older web services to new ones like Facebook.

Over the weekend, AOL put out a press release announcing the preview of its not-quite-finished email service Project Phoenix – a name that seems a tacit acknowledgment of just how far AOL has had to go to become a major player in the web again. While AOL’s email audience has been dwindling it still accounts for 45 percent of page views on the AOL network. (Disclosure: I am a contributor to AOL’s DailyFinance.)

With those older webmail services shoved even further to the periphery of the web, this will help clear the battlefield for a showdown between Google and Facebook. Facebook has the clear advantage in social-networking—an area it thrives in while Google helplessly searches for traction. Google is emerging as a web company that—relative to Facebook’s standards, at least—holds up its users’ privacy. Both will see their email accounts grow for some time. Whether the web of the next few years is big enough for both of them is another question.

Yahoo revamps email with social sheen

Alexei Oreskovic

Oct 26, 2010 20:22 EDT

Social networking services like Facebook have become a key form of communication, but Yahoo believes there’s plenty of room left to improve good old email.

On Tuesday, Yahoo Inc <YHOO.O> began to roll out a new version of its Web-based Yahoo mail product that boasts faster performance, new capabilities, and yes, even more social networking features.

Yahoo had provided a sneak peek at its improved email product at the company’s “Product Runway” event last month. Beginning on Tuesday, you can try out a beta test version of the new Yahoo Mail for yourself.

So what’s new? For one thing, Yahoo says its latest email product performs twice as fast as the previous version, according to internal tests. And the company says an improved search feature makes it easier to cull through the morass of messages that have accumulated in your inbox over the years.

You can also instantly peruse the Flicker and Picasa photos your friends email you from directly within Yahoo Mail, instead of clicking a link and viewing the photos on a separate web page.

Yahoo Mail is also adding some social savvy, by alerting you to unread email messages from the friends and contacts that it has somehow determined are most important to you. And in addition to typing out traditional email messages, the new Yahoo Mail lets you quickly fire off status updates to Facebook friends, Twitter followers, or Yahoo network connections.

It’s hard to fault Yahoo for innovating. But one wonders how much change consumers actually want in their email.

PluggedIn: Struggling to ride Google Wave

What will Google do about China? Can Google’s Android defeat the iPhone? Important questions all, but I’m still curious about Google Wave, and wondering: do I want to use it?

Now undergoing testing with a limited number of users, the web-based email/word processing software was introduced last year, but it should begin open access later this year.

At its heart, Google Wave is a document living on the Internet, that can be edited by anyone collaboratively. What that means is a person can be working on one part of a document while his co-worker is changing another.

For the moment, this is a technology only available through Google and by invitation only. To be sure, my contact list has grown by leaps and bounds over the past six months — but no one is Waving with me nearly at all. And those who have don’t really know what to do with this new service. A lot of the early users — myself included — wax on at parties about tools for faster collaboration and flexible access through a computer or an Apple iPhone, Research in Motion Blackberry, Motorola Droid, Palm Pre, or some other new device.

Here is a kid – I think – explaining how to use it:

Google walks into privacy Buzz-saw

Alexei Oreskovic

Feb 12, 2010 13:15 EST

Google touted its 176 million Gmail users as a key advantage in its latest attempt to break into the red-hot social networking market, dominated by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. But email may turn out to be Google’s Achilles heel.

Less than four days after introducing Google Buzz, a social networking service that is built-in to Gmail, the company is already moving to address a growing privacy backlash.

At issue is the network of contacts that Buzz automatically creates for new users based on their existing email contacts, saving people the laborious chore of manually building a social graph from scratch.

The problem is that Google’s ready-made social network is composed of people’s frequent email contacts – which are not necessarily the folks you want to receive regular status updates and random musings from (e.g. your landlord).

But the bigger problem – as many blogs and online publications have pointed out in recent days – is that people’s email contacts are in inherently private and the mere fact of making them publicly accessible can be dangerous.

Journalists with deep-throat sources, doctors who email patients, and dissidents living under repressive regimes who have potentially incriminating email contacts in other countries are among the most obvious examples being bandied about.

On Thursday evening, Google showed it was attuned to the issue and announced some changes to Buzz. The company made it easier for Buzz users to make their lists of followers private with a check box that appears front-and-center during the Buzz set-up process. And Google also made it easier to block an individual from following a Buzz user.

Google: Don’t Fear the Cloud

Alexei Oreskovic

Nov 5, 2009 09:22 EST

Google doesn’t want you to be afraid of the cloud.

The company announced a new feature on Thursday that lets people view all the personal information they’ve entered into Google’s sundry Web-based products over the years.

The information in Google’s new Dashboard covers everything from your personal account information for email and other Google services, to your viewing history on YouTube and the photos you’ve uploaded to Picasa. It’s information that was always accessible in the past, but Google is now making it viewable in one, all-inclusive snapshot.

Privacy advocates have long warned that Google is accumulating too much information about people through its broad menu of Web-based services and not providing enough insight into how the information is being used.

Whether Google’s Dashboard will appease them remains to be seen.

Google said it will begin by incorporating information from 23 Google products in the dashboard, with more to come in the weeks ahead.

Of course, the dashboard also has the benefit of reminding consumers about all the Google services they signed up for in the past and may forgotten about – a reminder that just could lead someone to start using a product again.

Wave: Who gets Google’s ticket to ride?

Alexei Oreskovic

Sep 29, 2009 20:23 EDT

It may be the hottest ticket in cyberspace.

On Wednesday, Google will invite more than 100,000 people to begin using Wave, its new hybrid messaging-social networking-online collaboration tool.

The version that will be available on Wednesday is a preview version that Google acknowledges is still not ready for prime time.

But scarcity is a powerful marketing tool (remember the prized Gmail invitations a few years ago?)

Google Wave was the third most popular topic of discussion on Twitter on Tuesday, with many Twitter users pleading for an invitation to become a Wave tester.

The initial 100,000 invites will go to developers, “select” paying customers of Google Apps and individuals who signed up early to test Wave.

But each Wave preview user will also get the privilege of “nominating” 8 other people to use Wave, since like any network-based service, Wave’s value and usefulness increases the more friends, family and colleagues are on-board.

Google: Gmail outage a “big deal”

Alexei Oreskovic

Sep 2, 2009 13:56 EDT

By Laura Isensee

A majority of Google users from California to Taiwan found themselves without access to Google’s popular email service on Tuesday.

Google has a diagnosis: The outage, which lasted more than an hour and a half, was a “Big Deal.”

The company outlined what went wrong on its blog.

“We took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades,” Ben Treynor, vice president of engineering and site reliability czar, wrote.

But the company “slightly underestimated” the load that placed on other servers — called request routers — that direct web queries to the right Gmail server for response.

So those servers became overloaded, pushing the load to the remaining request routers, causing more to become overloaded. And “within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded,” Treynor said.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s expected underwear

Even at a difficult moment, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone managed to be witty.

It fell to Stone to write about the hacker who broke in to the company’s computers and stole sensitive business information. His blog on the matter — the official statement from Twitter — was dubbed “Twitter, even more open than we wanted.”

Someone sent a trove of the Twitter documents to the Silicon Valley website TechCrunch. Stone’s blog clarified puzzling statements on TechCrunch that seemed to point toward Google Docs as the problem.  Said Stone: “This has nothing to do with any vulnerability in Google Apps which we continue to use.”

That must have come as a welcome relief at Google, which had been trying to explain the robustness of its security even as press agents for obscure security experts sent emails to suggest otherwise, so their clients would get a mention.

Stone said Twitter’s difficulties are an object lesson in the importance of having strong passwords. TechCrunch took some pleasure in asserting that the password for Twitter servers was the word “password.”

So, the public got its first titillating glance at privately held Twitter’s (out of date) cost and revenue numbers, which Stone likened to getting a look at the inside of someone’s underwear drawer, quoting someone else:

“No one’s really going to be surprised about what’s in there.”

Google’s Gmail says bye-bye beta

Alexei Oreskovic

Jul 7, 2009 12:34 EDT

The test is finally over.

Five years after Google released Gmail, its Web email product, the company said the product is officially out of beta.

The change is part of a broader move that Google announced on Tuesday involving Google Apps, the company’s suite of online software products that includes Google Docs and Google Calendar, among others.

While many people are familiar with the free, consumer version of Gmail, Google also sells an enterprise-grade version of Gmail and the other applications to businesses for $50 per user.

The beta label, which tech companies typically use to denote a prototype of a product in the public testing stage, was something of a turn-off to certain potential customers, said Google Senior Product Manager Rajen Sheth.

“They would look at it, see it’s a beta product and stop considering it as a result of that,” Sheth said.

So what’s changed in Gmail and other apps to make them finally ready for prime time?