Google’s unhealthy cookie habit
Google got its hand caught in the cookie jar last week — and this time it really does have some explaining to do.
The search giant, which derives some 97 percent of its revenues from advertising, thought it would be all right to circumvent some protections incorporated into Apple’s Safari browser so that it could better target its ads. By intentionally bypassing the default privacy settings of Apple’s Safari browser — and, as Microsoft has now asserted, Internet Explorer — Google has decided for all of us that our Web activity will be more closely tracked. They opted us in, without asking. And without a way for us to opt out. (We didn’t even know about it until the Wall Street Journal blew the lid off this last Thursday.)
On the merits, this is a pretty big deal. A class action has already been filed, and an FTC probe is almost certain. That the no-tracking settings were circumvented (and secretly) makes it easier to infer that even Google worried it might be touching a third rail. It says it wasn’t, that its intent was only to discern whether Google users were logged into Google services and that the enabling of advertising cookies was inadvertent.
But the atmospherics are horrible:
- Google is the company whose unofficial motto is “Don’t be Evil.”
- Google and Apple already have a pretty tortured relationship. Secretly deploying an exploit for an Apple product isn’t exactly a good-faith gesture.
- Google only a month ago got some props for putting the best face possible on a big change in its privacy rules under which it now aggregates information gathered about you from one Google service with that collected from all the others you might use.
That last point in particular frames the bigger problem: We, the general Internet-using public, have an innately uneasy relationship with the “free” services we use. We vaguely understand that we are being spied upon — how else could Amazon and Netflix make such darn good suggestions? — and more or less see it as a reasonable trade-off. Then we try not to think about all the consequences of this new world order.
Tech wrap: Google bypassed Safari privacy settings
Google landed in hot water over revelations that the search giant and ad companies had bypassed the privacy settings of millions of people using Apple’s Safari Web browser, using special computer code that tracked their movements online. Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer discovered the code. Subsequently, a technical adviser to the Wall Street Journal found that ads on 22 of the top 100 websites installed the Google tracking code on a test computer, and ads on 23 sites installed it on an iPhone browser. Google disabled the code after being contacted by the Journal, the newspaper said, and Google issued a statement, saying: “The Journal mischaracterizes what happened and why. We used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled. It’s important to stress that these advertising cookies do not collect personal information.”
Apple’s share of China’s booming smartphone market slipped for a second straight quarter in October-December, as it lost ground to cheaper local brands and as some shoppers held off until after the iPhone 4S launch last month. While Apple regained its top spot as the world’s largest smartphone vendor in the fourth quarter and for last year as a whole, it slipped to 5th place in China. In the last quarter, Samsung knocked Nokia off the top slot, taking 24.3 percent of the market, more than three times Apple’s share, data from research firm Gartner showed.
A British student, who hacked into Facebook’s internal network risking “disastrous” consequences for the website, was jailed for eight months in what prosecutors described as the most serious case of its kind they had seen. Glenn Mangham, 26, a software development student, admitted infiltrating Facebook from his bedroom at his parents’ house in York in northern England last year, sparking fears at the company that it was dealing with major industrial espionage.
Foxconn, the top maker of Apple’s iPhones and iPads whose factories are under scrutiny over labor practices, has raised wages of its Chinese workers by 16-25 percent from this month, the third rise since 2010. In a statement, Taiwan-based Foxconn said the pay of a junior level worker in Shenzhen, southern China, had risen to 1,800 yuan ($290) per month and could be further raised above 2,200 yuan if the worker passed a technical examination.
Tech wrap: Apple iOS apps to require “explicit” OK to share your contacts
Apple tweaked its policy on permission iOS apps need to access the contact information of users after legislators sought more information from the company regarding its privacy policies.
“Apps that collect or transmit a user’s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines,” an Apple spokesman told Reuters. “We’re working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.”
The announcement came after Path, a San Francisco startup, attracted widespread criticism last week after a Singaporean developer discovered that Path’s iPhone app had been quietly uploading his contacts’ names and phone numbers onto Path’s servers. In the following days, other tech bloggers discovered that iPhone apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare similarly uploads user data – without permission, in some cases. Later, blogger Dustin Curtis, wrote in a widely distributed post that “there’s a quiet understanding among many iOS app developers that it is acceptable to send a user’s entire address book, without their permission to remote servers and then store it for future reference.”
Chinese technology firm Proview, which has been seeking to ban all shipments of Apple’s iPad tablet into and out of China, said that customs authorities had told it that the sheer size of the market and the popularity of iPads would make it difficult to impose a ban. The legal battle between Proview and Apple centers around using the name “iPad” in China, which a Chinese court last year said Proview owned the trademark rights to. Authorities in some Chinese cities had ordered retailers to stop selling Apple’s iPad due to the dispute.
Working conditions at Chinese manufacturing plants where Apple’s iPads and iPhones are made are far better than those at garment factories or other facilities elsewhere in the country, according to the head of a non-profit agency investigating the plants. The Fair Labor Association is beginning a study of the working conditions of Apple’s top eight suppliers in China, following reports of worker suicides, a plant explosion and slave-like conditions at one of those suppliers, Foxconn. Auret van Heerden, president of the FLA offered no immediate conclusions on the working conditions, but he noted that boredom and alienation could have contributed to the stress that led some workers to take their own lives.
Telemarketers will have to get written consent before placing automated calls to consumers under new rules the Federal Communications Commission voted to adopt. The FCC will enforce stricter rules on so-called telemarketing “robocalls,” mandating that these autodialed or prerecorded calls can only be placed to consumers who have already agreed in writing to receive them. Companies will no longer be able to point to an established business relationship with a consumer to justify the automated pitches. All robocalls will also have to include an automated opt-out option to allow consumers to immediately notify telemarketers that they no longer want to receive these calls.
from Paul Smalera:
The piracy of online privacy
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.
It is utter rubbish to claim that we cannot have a better internet than the one we have right now. Most users simply do not really understand what and how much they have given up. And what has been given up unknowingly can be reclaimed. That is what laws are for.
Europe has a much better system, and much more privacy. And we can improve on that, without wrecking the essentials of the internet.
Tech wrap: Earnings hit as Apple reigns
Quarterly earnings suffered at major technology and telecoms companies in part because of demand for gadgets made by Apple, one day after core suppliers to Apple savored strong earnings results posted by the iPhone and iPad maker on Tuesday.
AT&T posted a $6.7 billion quarterly loss as it was weighed down by a hefty break-up fee for its failed T-Mobile USA merger and other big charges on top of costly subsidies for smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone. While the wireless provider beat analysts’ expectations for subscriber additions, the growth came at a massive cost as its wireless service margins plummeted. On top of the $4 billion break-up package charge, AT&T also took a big impairment charge for its telephone directory business, which it said it was considering selling.
Nokia reported a 73 percent fall in fourth-quarter earnings as sales of its new Windows Phones failed to dent the dominance of Apple’s iPhone or compensate for diving sales of its own old smartphones. Apple reported earlier this week sales of 37 million iPhones for the December quarter. Nokia has sold over 1 million Windows “Lumia” smartphones since its launch in mid-November. Nokia said it expected its phone business’ underlying earnings to be around breakeven in the first quarter, well below analysts’ forecasts, with sales falling more than usual in the seasonally weaker quarter.
Motorola Mobility posted a quarterly loss after it warned earlier this month that it was having a tough time competing in the smartphone market amid intense competition from rivals such as the Apple iPhone. The company, which is seeking approval to be bought by Google, reported a net loss of $80 million or 27 cents per share compared with a profit of $80 million or 27 cents per share in the same quarter the year before. Revenue rose slightly to $3.436 billion from $3.425 billion in the year ago quarter.
Nintendo posted a sharp drop in quarterly profit and forecast a bigger-than-expected full-year loss, as it battles a strong yen and its games devices lose ground to gadgets such as Apple’s iPhone. Nintendo now expects an annual operating loss of 45 billion yen ($575 million), dwarfing expectations of a 4.2 billion yen loss, based on the average of 21 analyst forecasts.
“To say that (the days of consoles) are over is likely an overstatement, but social network and Internet delivered games are growing and structurally changing the future of the industry, which is a strong wind against Nintendo,” said Shigeo Sugawara, at Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Asset Management.
Lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee asked Google to provide answers about recent changes to the search engine’s privacy policy. On Tuesday, Google announced that it was unifying its privacy policy across 60 of its Web services, which allows the company to share data between any of those services. In a letter to Google Chief Executive Larry Page, the lawmakers said the company’s announcement “raises questions about whether consumers can opt-out of the new data sharing system either globally or on a product-by-product basis.”
Tech wrap: Netflix gets subscribers back
Netflix’s fourth-quarter revenue outpaced Wall Street’s expectations as the video rental website reversed subscriber losses to sign up more than 600,000 new U.S. customers in the period, pushing its shares up. Netflix posted a 47 percent leap in fourth-quarter revenue to $876 million, outpacing an average forecast for $857.9 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Symantec took the rare step of advising customers to stop using one of its products, saying its pcAnywhere software for accessing remote PCs is at increased risk of getting hacked after blueprints of that software were stolen. The announcement is the company’s most direct acknowledgement to date that a 2006 theft of its source code put customers at risk of attack. Also on Wednesday, Symantec reported a higher quarterly profit and issued an outlook in line with Wall Street estimates.
Europe proposed strict new data privacy rules, putting greater responsibility on companies such as Facebook to protect users’ information, and threatening those who breach the code with hefty fines. But the move, which legislators say is designed to better defend children against predators, has rattled major technology and Internet-based companies, with executives concerned the legislation will be almost impossible to implement in full or will do serious damage to their business models.
Apple’s customer service plan for the iPhone makes them more appealing to thieves because the phone’s warranty applies to the phone and not the owner, Mitch Lipka writes. This approach thrills many Apple owners, who have boasted on message boards of how generous some stores have been in replacing broken iPhones. But that same approach has apparently rewarded a lot of thieves, Lipka adds.
You are aware that NFLX actually lost over 300K paid streamers and 2M paid DVD users.
The total gains were around 13K, nowhere near the 600K your article is touting.
Free subscribers are not actual subscribers– this is a VERY misleading report by Netflix. Borderline fraudulent.
Tech wrap: New RIM CEO says no drastic change needed
RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins, who joined RIM in 2007 and previously served as a chief operating officer, said during a conference call that he would hone the current strategy rather than abandon it. “I don’t think that there is some drastic change needed. We are evolving … but this is not a seismic change,” Heins said. RIM’s U.S.-traded shares tumbled as investors wondered whether Heins could reverse the BlackBerry maker’s decline, closing the day down 8.5 percent.
The founder of file-sharing website Megaupload was ordered to be held in custody by a New Zealand court, as he denied charges of Internet piracy and money laundering and said authorities were trying to portray the blackest picture of him. U.S. authorities want to extradite Kim Dotcom, a German national also known as Kim Schmitz, on charges he masterminded a scheme that made more than $175 million in a few short years by copying and distributing music, movies and other copyrighted content without authorization. Megaupload’s lawyer has said the company simply offered online storage.
The Supreme Court ruled that police cannot put a GPS device on a suspect’s car to track his movements without a warrant. The high court ruled that placement of a device on a vehicle and using it to monitor the vehicle’s movements was covered by U.S. constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures of evidence. “A majority of the court acknowledged that advancing technology, like cellphone tracking, gives the government unprecedented ability to collect, store, and analyze an enormous amount of information about our private lives,” Steven Shapiro of the American Civil Liberties Union said.
YouTube is streaming 4 billion online videos every day, a 25 percent increase in the past eight months, according to the company. Roughly 60 hours of video is now uploaded to YouTube every minute, compared with the 48 hours of video uploaded per minute in May, Google said. The jump in video views comes as Google pushes YouTube beyond the personal computer, with versions of the site that work on smartphones and televisions, and as the company steps up efforts to offer more professional-grade content on the site.
The number of Americans owning a tablet computer or e-reader nearly doubled over the holiday period as Kindles, Nooks and iPads proved to be popular gifts, a new study found. In early January, 19 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew owned an e-reader, up from 10 percent in December, with identical results for tablets, according to a report released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Tech wrap: Wikipedia, Google protest anti-piracy bill
The English homepage of Wikipedia went dark and Google’s search page ran the logo “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!” in protest of legislation designed to stop copyright piracy but the free online encyclopedia says “could fatally damage the free and open Internet.” Big tech names including Facebook and Twitter declined to participate in protests of the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate’s PROTECT Intellectual Property Act, despite their opposition to the legislation, unwilling to sacrifice a day’s worth of revenue and risk the ire of users.
European regulators will decide around the end of March whether to file a formal complaint against Google for misuse of its market position, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia told Reuters. Until this point officials had been playing down expectations of an early conclusion to the informal investigation stage, although there still could be a long way to go. Antitrust investigations typically take several years.
EBay’s fourth-quarter profit jumped as the e-commerce company saw solid growth in its online marketplaces and an increase in transactions processed through its PayPal electronic payments business. The operator of the world’s largest online marketplace reported fourth-quarter net income of $2 billion, or $1.51 a share, compared with $559 million, or 42 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 35 percent to $3.38 billion.
Suspicion is growing that operatives in China, rather than India, were behind the hacking of emails of an official U.S. commission that monitors relations between the United States and China, U.S. officials said. U.S. officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity said the roundabout way the commission’s emails were obtained strongly suggests the intrusion originated in China, possibly by amateurs, and not from India’s spy service, as previously thought.
Cellphone makers are set to struggle with slow sales growth this year as a weaker global economy discourages consumers from replacing older handsets. Fourth-quarter results are likely to show the slowdown under way. Apple’s long-awaited iPhone 4S and Samsung’s new, broad offering were likely the exceptions in an otherwise lackluster Christmas holiday season. Vendors are expected to report sales of around 142 million smartphones in the October-December quarter, up 42 percent from a year ago, according to a Reuters poll. But analysts said not everyone benefited. “We expect smartphone demand to have remained robust in the fourth quarter, but price erosion is intensifying. Profitability remains the crucial yardstick and it’s likely Apple and Samsung extended their lead,” said CCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber.
Zynga said it bought four small mobile game companies for an undisclosed sum as the top maker of Facebook games seeks to expand its lineup on smartphones and tablets. The company’s top mobile executive David Ko told Reuters it had acquired German company Gamedoctors in December. Gamedoctors, based in Bielefeld near Hanover, makes the game ZombieSmash. The company also bought Page44 Studios, which is based in San Francisco, in September. That studio created the “World of Goo” game for Apple’s iOS platform. Zynga also acquired HipLogic, another San Francisco-based games company, in August. And Ko also confirmed Zynga purchased New York based Astro Ape Studios in August to develop new titles.
2DBOY created World of Goo in 2008, not Page44. Page44 simply helped port the game, but did not create it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Go o
Tech wrap: Zappos hacked
Online shoe retailer Zappos told customers this weekend that it has been the victim of a cyber attack affecting more than 24 million customer accounts in its database. The popular retailer, which is owned by Amazon.com, said customers’ names, email addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers and the last four digits of credit card numbers and scrambled passwords were stolen. The company, which is well known for its customer service, said due to the high volume of customer calls it is expecting it will temporarily switch off its phones and direct customers to contact via email.
Hackers disrupted online access to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, El Al Airlines and three banks in what the government described as a cyber-offensive against Israel. The attacks came just days after an unidentified hacker, proclaiming Palestinian sympathies, posted the details of thousands of Israeli credit card holders and other personal information on the Internet in a mass theft. Israel opened an agency to tackle cyber attacks earlier this month.
A hacker who goes by the name of “Yama Tough” threatened Saturday to release the full source code for Symantec’s flagship Norton Antivirus software on Tuesday. Last week, Yama Tough released fragments of source code from Symantec products along with a cache of emails. The hacker said all the data was taken from Indian government servers.
Use of microblogging in China quadrupled in 2011 compared with the previous year, with nearly half of all Chinese Internet users now taking to the near-instant service to gather news and spread views, a government Internet think tank said. Microblogging, or “Weibo” as it is known in China, allows users to send short messages of 140 characters or less to their followers. The total number of Weibo users rose 296 percent to 249.9 million in 2011, data from the China Internet Network Information Center showed.
The long-term approach of major Japanese investors, combined with an aversion to foreign and hostile takeovers and uncertainty over lawsuits stemming from the $1.7 billion accounting scandal, will likely make any change of ownership at Olympus a gradual process, writes Isabel Reynolds. Olympus is expected to stay listed for the time being and sources with the company’s powerful main bankers, who are also shareholders, say they would be prepared to wait for the firm to recover on its own.
Zappos is giving everyone a lesson on managing a data breach that everyone who may ever have to deal with the problem should look to for guidance. There is a lot to be learned. People understand that such things happen and, unless you’ve been egregiously lax in protecting their account information, will give you the benefit of the doubt. How you respond to the crisis will be what determines whether or not the issue is resolved with minimal damage or it deteriorates into a PR disaster.
As I said, Zappos is giving us a real-time lesson on how to do crisis management properly and we should all be taking notes. For a more detailed analysis: http://blog.unibulmerchantservices.com/z appos-is-giving-us-a-lesson-on-managing- a-data-breach
Tech wrap: Microsoft presses pause on Web TV
Microsoft has put its talks with media companies about an online subscription service for TV shows and movies on hold, according to people familiar with the discussions. The company had been in intense talks with potential programming partners for over a year and was hoping to roll out the service in the next few months. But it pulled back after deciding that the licensing costs were too high for the business model Microsoft envisaged, the sources said. Microsoft is still working to distribute TV shows over the Web, focusing on delivering programming via its Xbox gaming system to existing cable subscribers.
Dell intends to launch its first consumer tablet computer in late 2012, marking its entry into a hotly contested arena that has already claimed arch-foe HP. The Texas company had dipped its toe in the waters with an enterprise-focused, “Streak” tablet. Chief commercial officer Steve Felice was coy about which operating system Dell might adopt — Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 or Google’s Android — saying both were viable options. But Felice did say he liked the feel of Microsoft’s touch-enabled OS, which would be well-timed when it emerges later this year.
According to an Ipsos/Reuters poll, more than 10 percent of parents around the world say their child has been cyberbullied and nearly one-fourth know a youngster who has been a victim. The online poll of more than 18,000 adults in 24 countries, 6,500 of whom were parents, showed the most widely reported vehicle for cyberbullying was social networking sites likes Facebook, which were cited by 60 percent. Mobile devices and online chat rooms were a distant second and third.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s command center routinely monitors dozens of popular websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, WikiLeaks and news and gossip sites including the Huffington Post and Drudge Report, according to a government document. A DHS official familiar with the monitoring program said that it was intended purely to enable command center officials to keep in touch with various Internet-era media so that they were aware of major, developing events to which the Department or its agencies might have to respond.
Two Dutch cable companies were ordered by a court to block access to the website The Pirate Bay to prevent the illegal downloading of free music, films and games in case brought on behalf of the entertainment industry.
@ tangogo68 Actually, the TV analogy doesn’t really work well — even if you are a Nielsen family. It’s one thing to be part of an audience, especially when the audience is a extrapolation of a small subset of homes which are self-reporting. It’s another to have your every move monitored and logged. Google and Facebook (et al) don’t just need members — ie, an audience. They need that audience to share, not just show up. To me, that is a huge difference and a business model unique to these times.