EX-GOOGLE WORKER SAYS COMPANY 'F***ED UP'

Original Story: cnbc.com

A former designer at Google took to the blog site Medium to explain—in strong but not virulent language—that the company has uncharacteristically missed a big opportunity with Google+, its three-year-old answer to Facebook.

The former employee, Chris Messina, said in his somewhat lengthy post that the company has missed so many opportunities to make a unique, industry leading product with Google+ that it's hard to understand what purpose the platform still serves.

Or, as Messina put it: "So what the f*** is Google+ for anyway?"

With privacy both an important and misunderstood concept in cyberspace, Messina wrote that the Google's lack of strategic thinking means that the development of online identity—with all its positive and negative connotations—has been essentially ceded to Facebook.

Google did not respond to a request for comment. Read the entire post below.

Thoughts on Google+
I fucked up. So has Google.

It’s been over a year since I left Google. Over 450 days, actually. During that time, I joined and left a startup; traveled to Paris (twice). I got divorced. I started a new relationship, moved, and became a bonus dad. Now I’m on the cusp of starting a new company (I think, details pending).

Any of these changes could be significant on their own, but I bring them up merely for comparison’s sake. I’m one person and these things happened to me over the course of a year. If there are roughly 3000 people working on Google+, what have they been doing during the same period?

While this post touches on the recent-past, present, and future, I’m going to start with a stupid mistake I made earlier this week.

I fucked up

I need to make a retraction. I fucked up. Publicly.

I cast aspersions where none were warranted. I called out Google+ on Twitter (in front of 68K followers no less) for a bug that—I argued—proved that they’d stopped doing QA (an essential step in the launch of any product at Google) and must have therefore and finally abandoned its social network.

But I was wrong.

The problem—as diagnosed by Googler Melissa Chang —was interference from Jesse Middleton’s Better BCC extension. Once I disabled it, the problem went away. (He tells me that he’s updated his extension to address this.)

Egg on my face. My bad. And apologies to my Googler friends Ade and Paul, in particular, for pointing out my mistake.

So what the fuck is Google+ for anyway?

When I thought about what motivated me to lob this snarkbomb, I realized I was looking for a reaction. I wanted some kind of defiant response to questions that’ve recently bugged me—What’s going on with Google+? Where is it headed? What the fuck is it for, anyway?

The last time David Besbris (Vic Gundotra’s successor and top exec on Google+) was interviewed by Recode, he said nothing. Literally.

No vision. No insight. Just pollyannaish platitudes: “We’re … very happy with the progress of Google+.”

The most salient thing he said was, “[The Google+ audience sees] Google+ as a social network for their interests.”, which at least suggests how the team must be thinking about the network internally. But if they’re more worried about Facebook, Snapchat, or Pinterest—I can’t tell. And if they have a plan and a vision for creating something new and wonderful in the world, I certainly can’t deduce it from their Oct 9 feature release: Polls (a feature I contributed to over a year and a half ago when I was a UX designer on the team).

Furthermore, if you simply look at the velocity of iOS releases across the most popular social apps over 2014, you’ll see that Google+ and Hangouts lag significantly behind (WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook this year, which likely explains their lack of updates).

Why do I care about Google+?

Dear reader, I wouldn’t fault you if you’re wondering why I give a shit. It’s not like I work there anymore. Sure, I have a few friends who do but most rolled off to work on other projects at Google, left, or started new companies. And yes, I run a popular mixology community, but it’s not like it’s blowing up or anything.

So why do I care?

Simple: for the same reason that motivated me to join Google in 2010— that the future of digital identity should not be determined by one company (namely, Facebook). I still believe that competition in this space is better for consumers, for startups, and for the industry. And Google still remains one of the few companies (besides Apple, perhaps) that stands a chance to take on Facebook in this arena—but Google+, as I see it, has lost its way.

(Or maybe never found its way. I dunno.)

It matters to me because there’s a lot at stake here—way more than the success of a mere social network. What’s at stake is how individuals participate in the web ecosystem, and whether one company will determine how we get online, gain access, connect and communicate through the increasing number of apps, devices, and digital experiences that we rely upon.

If you take the long view, you’ll understand why this moment in time is important: the companies and apps that solidify their position in our lives today will likely live on far into the future. Google is one of those companies that has already done this. I believe Facebook will too. So the fundamental problem that I have with Google+ is that I just don’t understand it. And what I don’t understand makes me nervous—and should make you nervous too.

Digital identity, circa 2014

I’ll be the first (well, maybe the second) to admit that we’re no longer living in the golden era of social networking. We’ve migrated away from the mouse and keyboard era of computing and replaced them with glossy, touchable surfaces that we carry around in our pockets and alert us to all of our friends’ most recent doings. We have access to our contacts, to information, and to superpowers that we’ve never had before. And not only are we starting to take this all for granted—there’s a younger generation growing up without any conception of a time Before Siri, and are living Post Browser.

All this is perfectly normal to them. Things are exactly as they should be, and always have been.

So why does the competition for control of digital identity matter anymore? Frankly, because as I’ve long held, identity is the platform—the killer app of networked personal computing devices (even more so as we increasingly depend on more than one authenticated device at a time!).

Digital identity unlocks universal personalization (i.e. better ads), payments and commerce (i.e. Snapcash), environmental adaptation (i.e. an Uber that plays your Spotify music), communications (i.e. Path Talk), and access (i.e. Sosh Concierge). Today’s most exciting apps are barely scratching the surface of what will be possible when there are years of preferences data stored up on each of us, that we can leverage at a moments notice, in any context.

Privacy is a four-letter word

But before you go get your pitchfork and scream bloody murder about the loss of individual “privacy”, stop for a second.

This word, privacy ?— it’s a problem.

It’s one of those words that puts a stop to useful conversations and prevents us from actually engaging with what’s going on in our digital lives. It obscures and glosses over.

WAKE UP!

Maintaining your privacy doesn’t strictly mean keeping people from having data or information about you. Certainly not preventing yourself from having access to data about yourself. Privacy is about the ability to be left alone, or about not being watched, if you don’t want to be. Which is fine. Turn on Do Not Disturb. There—you’ve got a bit of your privacy back. But that has nothing to do with the huge amounts of data you’re still producing and is being tracked.

So, given that expectations of privacy are changing (or being changed), I challenge you: what if you want to be watched? What if you were offered an outsize amount of value in exchange for allowing someone else to watch you? What would you do? Who would you want to watch over you? Who would you want to look after you and your best interests? Who would you trust? Do you feel like you have reasonable choices in today’s marketplace?

This, my friends, is the dilemma presented and the opportunity omitted by an overused term like “privacy”.

Taking the data-positive perspective, it seems completely reasonable to me that companies would vie to become my lifelong “data bank”. Ultimately I do want companies to know more about me and to use more data about me in exchange for better, faster, easier, and cheaper experiences. But I also want to be treated like an adult when talking about my data. Watery terms like “cloud” or “dropbox” or “backup” sound utilitarian but mask the true aspirations of these service providers. They should just come out and say it: they want all this information to establish a competitive advantage in delivering more personalized services to me and people like me. Backing up my files is absolutely not the long game (but it’s a convenient lock-in strategy in the meantime).

Seizing your data capital

Here’s the thing: you and me, we’re being tracked whether we like it or not. Use a web browser, use apps —and there’s a company or companies out there amassing huge amounts of data about every click, tap, photo, notification, or icon in your digital life. Sometimes they anonymize it so that your preferences or behavioral data can’t be easily tracked back to you, but then you have no way of auditing that information, accessing it, or perhaps granting access to some other trusted party of your choosing. This may reassure you that your data won’t be that valuable if its leaked when there’s another breach, but this also means that you’re leaving a ton of value on the table. And frankly, most of these companies (especially the ad-driven ones) don’t really care about your data specifically. They can target you just as effectively through other means. And frankly, most would rather anonymize it to avoid embarrassing moments than do the heavy lifting to make your data accessible to you in more useful formats.

Taken at the individual level, you’re just a rounding error at the millionth decimal. And yet this data could be hugely valuable to you if you collect and let it accrue for long enough. This is why I’ve called this kind of information exhaust “data capital”. If you think of this data as your money being burned, maybe you’ll rethink what “privacy” is all about, and what stake you should claim in the data being captured about you.

So what about Google+?

So what does this have to do with Google+?

As it stands, Facebook, Apple, and Google (and to some degree Amazon) are in a battle to know you better than you do. Facebook is pretty clear about what they’re doing, and do a fair job explaining it—and have improved over the years. Apple recently came out aggressively about their own commitment to user privacy (but they make money from hardware, rather than ads). Google’s efforts, meanwhile, seem disjointed and confused, despite significant improvements to their settings and security features. If Google+ was intended to serve as Google’s “social backbone”, it should be the locus of control and access over the kind of information I’ve described above. And yet… it’s not. Far from it, in fact.

To my point, most people would likely describe Google+ as a newsfeed, a kind of Facebook-lite. Sure, it’s got neat photo and video chat apps hanging off of it. And die-hard users would call out the interest-based communities as the reason they return, as Bez did. But few if any would say that it’s where they go to understand the data that Google holds about them, or where they go to adjust their preferences, or to adjust how people see and find them online. And maybe that’s intentional and maybe that’s the point—but if so, then I don’t get it. Why did the world need another Facebook, unless to benefit Google by making their ad targeting more effective? Why wasn’t Google+ one of Google’s famous moonshots, intended to improve personal social networking by 10x? Why did they take a conventional approach to social networking rather than think about what controls people might need in the next 5–10 years in their digital lives? Moreover, how does Google+ help deliver better, richer, more interesting, and more personalized experiences, to motivate people to store more information with Google? I mean, why did Google hitch their digital identity strategy to 2004-era social networking trends?

And damnit all, why am I so disappointed?!

When it comes right down to it, maybe I just don’t want to admit that I spent 3½ years working on something that will become irrelevant. Even if Google+ regains focus and simplifies its mission, I want to believe that we were working on something significant and that had an opinion about what the world should look like. Lately, I just feel like Google+ is confused and adrift at sea. It’s so far behind, how can it possibly catch up? I mean, Facebook launched a polling ad unit in 2009; five years later, Google+ launched their own. Is mentions really a differentiator? (Nope, Facebook has a dedicated app for that, and it’s been baked into Twitter for how long?) Is this kind of slow-following going to win the future?

I’m disappointed because I expect better from Google. Like, self-driving cars better, or hot-air balloon internet access better. I don’t want excuses. I don’t want to hear about how competitive or political the internal environment is. Larry is a strong leader. Sundar is too. And I know that they’re getting a ton of mileage (and cash) out of ads, Chrome, and Android —there are plenty of resources. Leaving internet identity in Facebook’s hands would be a massive fail. At least Twitter is making a go at it with Digits. But how does Google[+] fit into this picture? Will it ever? (And no, Google+ Sign In isn’t enough.)

Is there any hope that Google+ will find a compelling reason to continue to exist, and perhaps deliver on the data-positive vision I’ve outlined above?

The missed opportunity

I remember the primordial days of Emerald Sea (the codename for Google+). Its original name was Google Me (at least until Kevin Rose leaked the name and a new name needed to be chosen). I loved the name, not because it was a good name, but because of what it implied: “Just google me and I’ll be there”. Google Me was necessary to improve Google’s profile and social graph to make search more personalized and humane. It was like Google was saying, “We’re going to be your trusted partner in cyberspace, and we’ll help you surface the right information to the people you choose, at the right time.” The value proposition was search oriented, rather than social.

So, if I searched for my mom’s phone number on Google, I could find it—because it‘d be on her profile and she would have shared it with me. An obvious query like “mom’s phone number” would work.

“Google is where I search for things and I should be able to find useful information about my friends if they’ve shared it with me.”

But when the name to Google+ (cue terrifying echos of Microsoft Plus!), the focus shifted. Now, not only was Google+ fast-following Facebook, but the name of the product was a hedge against another Buzz-like debacle. If for some reason the product failed (and lots of Buzz veterans actively worried about this), Google could just drop the “+” and pretend the “project” never existed. Genius.

But this was all wrong. By starting off on a defensive footing, Google+ didn’t defiantly stand for something special in the world. Instead it defined itself by what it wasn’t—i.e. Facebook—though it was positioned internally as chasing after their success. And while Facebook executed a bold, ambitious (and uncomfortable) plan to create a “more open and connected world”, Google+ confusingly claimed to be rethinking real-life sharing on the web, with “nuance and richness”, even though we clearly hadn’t figured it out. Indeed, our solution (Circles (read: “lists”) put the onus on the user to manually curate groups of people—a great concept in theory, but too arduous and awkward in practice.

Now, it’d be one thing if Circles and “better privacy” (there’s that word again!) were merely a launch ploy to drum up interest (it’s worked for others in the past). Instead, Google+ continued to throw its weight behind this narrative long after Facebook overhauled its privacy features, and “grew up”. To this day, I still don’t know what Google+ is for, let alone better at than Facebook. Some might argue it’s “cleaner” and has fewer ads, but even those won’t be lasting competitive advantages.

What’s sad to me is that the promise of Google Me could be found in launch post: “We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests.”

Yes! Yes!

But by launching a conventional social network, Google missed the pivotal opportunity to establish a data-positive paradigm for sharing, individual control, and personalization that set itself apart from Facebook. Ultimately it offered too little, too late.

More recently, the Google+ marketing team came back to the message of personalization— at least for Google’s own apps. Instead, Google+ was about uniting Google products with one user account —something that should have been inevitable after Eric Schmidt’s tenure ended anyway.

So now what?

I read this passage from the launch post for Google+ and I get excited, to this day. The sentiment here echoes Ello’s claims upon their launch. The difference is that I actually believe Google to make good on these promises.

You and over a billion others trust Google, and we don’t take this lightly. In fact we’ve focused on the user for over a decade: liberating data, working for an open Internet, and respecting people’s freedom to be who they want to be. We realize, however, that Google+ is a different kind of project, requiring a different kind of focus?—?on you. That’s why we’re giving you more ways to stay private or go public; more meaningful choices around your friends and your data; and more ways to let us know how we’re doing. All across Google.
Yes! Yes!

But now what? Google’s work here is far from over.

The Google+ feed does nothing towards addressing the issues I’ve raised about data capital and privacy. Sure, Google gives you controls to set your ads preferences, but this framing is all wrong. Whereas Pinterest helps you express your aspirational self, Google pigeonholes you into what you already are, based on your previous search activity. This is where improving the data that Google has about you—in turn trusting Google as a steward of that data—changes the nature of the conversation by making it less about “privacy” and more about empowerment. While some people will freak out (as they always do), this would be a bold, productive, future-forward direction to take. Hell, we’re living in this reality already—but few give straight talk about what’s going on, and how their data is, or could be, used for their benefit. If Google took the approach I’ve suggested here—becoming more user-centric—I’d finally understand why what they’re doing is different. And then I could evaluate Google on being a steward of my data, and acting as my universal user agent in my digital life.

But until that happens, [object Object] makes just as much sense to me as their strategy.

Child Web Privacy Law Gets Updated

originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal:

In a move to update rules governing children's privacy online to cover new areas like smartphones, U.S. regulators broadened decade-old policies, but amid pressure from the technology industry backed away from proposals that could have made companies like Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. more responsible for violations.

The Federal Trade Commission said it would change how it implements the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, or Coppa, to reflect the growth of social networks and smartphone apps among children.

The commission also expanded the types of information it considers personal under the law. Kids' apps and websites will now have to obtain parental consent before gathering photos, videos or geographic location, and before tracking kids' online behavior and passing along the data to other companies.

But in a departure from rule changes the government proposed in August, the FTC explicitly exempted app stores like those run by Apple and Google Inc. from responsibility for privacy violations by the games and other software that are sold there.

The updated rules, which go into effect July 1, also make clear that software such as Facebook's "Like" button and ads placed by advertising networks will only have to meet child online privacy regulations if companies have "actual knowledge" that they're collecting information through a website or app that targets kids.

The commission's move ended one chapter in the long-running Washington debate over how closely the government should regulate online privacy, but set the stage for new battles.

Consumer advocates said they would continue their push to make Apple and Google more responsible for the data-gathering practices of the apps they distribute, while several members of Congress are pushing legislation to further tighten limits on online tracking of children and teenagers.

Just last week, the FTC put a spotlight on gaps in kids' online privacy with a report that found hundreds of popular kids' apps were collecting data without parental consent.

Coppa governs how companies must proceed when collecting personal data from children under the age of 13. Enforcement falls to the FTC, which has been reviewing how it should approach the law in the age of smartphones and social media for two years. Kids' entertainment and Internet companies have lobbied heavily to blunt the impact of the update.

Apple, for example, met with FTC officials five times this fall, in particular contesting the possibility that the updated rules might hold it responsible for the data-collection practices of the third-party apps it distributes on the iPhone and iPad. Google made a similar point in a filing with the commission.

Google said it was evaluating the changes and would continue to work on effective ways to protect children's privacy and security. Facebook said it was pleased with the FTC's decision on so-called plug-ins, such as the "Like" button.

In several cases, the industry got what it wanted. Reversing a prior proposal, the commission agreed to continue to allow parental consent to be obtained by email as long as apps and websites only collect data for internal use.

The FTC's Chairman said the final rules strike the right balance between protecting innovation that will provide rich and engaging content for children, and ensuring that parents are informed and involved in their children's online activities.

While Apple, Google and Facebook scored partial victories, some smaller developers were disappointed. The president of the Application Developers Alliance, said that the new regulations could prove so burdensome that talented and responsible developers will abandon the children's app marketplace.

One FTC commissioner voted against the updated rules. She argued the commission went too far with the update by holding websites responsible when third parties like advertising networks gather personal data from children.

But some government officials made clear Wednesday they would like to place additional regulations on technology companies. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D., W.Va.), a leading advocate on privacy issues, said he viewed the Coppa regulations as a step toward legislation that gives Americans more control of how they are tracked online.

The executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy and a consumer advocate who has been involved in the Coppa debate for years, said the FTC's decision was a step in the right direction but left loopholes for companies to mine kids' data inappropriately.

He said he would continue to push for more scrutiny of the role of the Internet giants that distribute kids' apps.

The FTC's chairman has made monitoring online privacy one of his priorities at the commission. At Wednesday's news conference announcing the revised rules, he repeatedly held up what he said was his 15-year-old daughter's white iPhone to illustrate how much technology has changed in the past decade.

It was enormously difficult for me to pry this away from my child today, he said.

Watchdog Planned for Online Privacy

The Wall Street Journal

The Obama administration is preparing a stepped-up approach to policing Internet privacy that calls for new laws and the creation of a new position to oversee the effort, according to people familiar with the situation.

The strategy is expected to be unveiled in a report being issued by the U.S. Commerce Department in coming weeks, these people said. The report isn't yet final and could change, these people said.

In a related move, the White House has created a special task force that is expected to help transform the Commerce Department recommendations into policy, these people said. The White House task force, set up three weeks ago, is led by Cameron Kerry, the brother of Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.) and Commerce Department general counsel, and Christopher Schroeder, assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice.

The initiatives would mark a turning point in Internet policy. Recent administrations typically steered away from Internet regulations out of concern for stifling innovation. But the increasingly central role of personal information in the Internet economy helped spark government action, according to people familiar with the situation.

The Wall Street Journal has been examining this online information-gathering industry in its "What They Know" investigative series.

Privacy issues are bubbling up on Capitol Hill. Rep. Joe Barton (R., Texas), co-chairman of the Congressional Privacy Caucus and ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he welcomed the administration's privacy initiative.

"Better late than never," Mr. Barton said. "I am glad more and more folks, in the government and otherwise, are beginning to realize that there is a war against privacy."

Yet the administration faces significant obstacles to enacting its privacy agenda. While the Republicans who now control the House of Representatives generally support privacy, they are unlikely to support any bill to expand the enforcement powers of the Federal Trade Commission, GOP congressional aides say. Privacy advocates will be reluctant to back legislation that lacks enforcement and is perceived as toothless.

There is no comprehensive U.S. law that protects consumer privacy online. Internet privacy issues generally are policed by the FTC, which can take action only if a privacy-violating action is deemed "deceptive" or "unfair."

That means the recent privacy crackdowns on Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. were led by Canada, Germany, the U.K. and other countries that have stronger privacy laws.

The central issue in writing federal privacy legislation is whether the Internet industry's efforts to police its own behavior has been effective enough. Proponents of legislation argue the industry is a Wild West where consumer data are gathered and sold without restrictions. Opponents of legislation say the industry is committed to providing tools to give consumers better insight into and control over data about themselves.

Commerce's draft report doesn't recommend specific legislation, but does indicate that self-regulation isn't robust enough, these people said. The administration would seek to guide the legislative debate through its new privacy office.

In remarks in Jerusalem in late October, U.S. Commerce Department Assistant Secretary Lawrence E. Strickling said that Internet privacy needs to be strengthened for the industry to sustain users' trust.

"It's difficult for consumers to act in their own interest if the law doesn't meet their basic expectations," Mr. Strickling said. He cautioned that the coming report isn't a final position statement, but rather the beginning of a "dialogue" that would lead to an official administration policy on information privacy.

A spokesman for the Commerce Department said the administration is "committed to promoting policies that will preserve consumer privacy online while ensuring the Web remains a platform for innovation, jobs, and economic growth. These are complementary goals, because consumer trust in the Internet is essential for businesses to succeed online."

The Federal Trade Commission is also expected to issue a report on Internet privacy by the end of the year. It is expected to call for the industry to develop a so-called do-not-track tool that people could use to remove themselves from online surveillance by marketers and others.

The prospect of new laws raised hackles at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which represents the online-ad industry. "We believe we are living up to consumer-privacy expectations and are very advanced in privacy protections and innovation," said Mike Zaneis, senior vice president, who said he wasn't familiar with the report's contents.

Some privacy advocates expressed disappointment that Commerce isn't going further. "While [the report] gives lip service to legislation and fair information practices, its framework is based on industry self-regulation," said Jeff Chester, founder of the Center for Digital Democracy, who has met with Commerce officials about the report.

In 1999 President Bill Clinton appointed Peter Swire as chief counselor for privacy in the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Swire helped craft privacy guidelines for the use of consumer medical and financial data. The new office would be similar but have more resources, and would engage other countries in privacy discussions and negotiations.

MySpace, Apps Leak User Data

The Wall Street Journal

MySpace and some popular applications have been transmitting information to outside advertising companies that could be used to identify users. Above, website pages from MySpace.com.

MySpace and some popular applications on the social-networking site have been transmitting data to outside advertising companies that could be used to identify users, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The information was primarily sent by MySpace when users clicked on ads. The website had pledged to discontinue the practice of sending personal data when users click on ads after the Journal reported it in May.

A MySpace spokesman said the data identify the user profile being viewed but not necessarily the person who clicked on the ad. MySpace is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

MySpace, which had 58 million visitors in the U.S. in September, has been struggling to turn its business around in the face of tough competition from Facebook Inc., which had 148 million U.S. visitors last month, according to comScore Inc.

The data being transmitted were MySpace user IDs. These unique numbers can be used to look up a person's MySpace profile page, which sometimes includes their real name, photographs, location, gender and age. The advertising companies being sent the data, which included Google Inc., Quantcast Corp. and Rubicon Project, said they didn't use the information.

Earlier this week, the Journal reported that the top 10 most-popular applications on Facebook were passing that site's user ID numbers to outside companies. Facebook said it is changing its technology to block the transmission of user IDs.

The MySpace leaks appear to be more limited than those at Facebook, which has far more users and requires them to make public their name, gender and country.

On Facebook, the user ID is linked to a person's real name. MySpace allows users to hide their real names and use a "display name" on the network. That means that user IDs don't necessarily link to people's real identities. MySpace says knowledge of a user ID number only provides access to information a person has made public on their profile.

In addition, the Journal investigation found some MySpace applications were transmitting user IDs, including BitRhymes Inc.'s TagMe, which lets its 8.3 million users make and comment on friends; WonderHill Inc.'s GreenSpot, a virtual gardening game with 1.8 million users; and RockYou Inc.'s RockYou Pets, a game with 6.1 million users.

MySpace said it prohibits app makers from sharing user data, including user IDs, with other entities. "It has recently come to our attention that several third-party app developers may have violated these terms and we are taking appropriate action against those developers," a MySpace spokesman said.

The Journal's investigation demonstrates how fundamental Web technologies can jeopardize user privacy. When a user clicks on an online ad, several pieces of data are transmitted, including the web address of the page where the user saw the ad. At both MySpace and Facebook, that web address has included a user ID.

Craig Wills, a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute who has studied how social-networking sites handle user IDs, said such referral data are a growing problem for the Web. As more sites try to tap into social-networking capabilities, "there is the potential danger that those sites with the identifier don't necessarily take care of it, and potentially leak it to whatever third parties are present," he said.

In many cases, the transmission is inadvertent. A RockYou spokeswoman said a company that works with RockYou was transmitting user information to a third company without RockYou's knowledge. "We have taken immediate action to indefinitely suspend their services in connection with RockYou and we are reviewing all third-party providers to ensure compliance with our platform partners' terms of service," she said.

WonderHill didn't respond to requests for comment.

The Journal found that TagMe transmitted a user ID to online tracking company RapLeaf Inc. MySpace and TagMe both said TagMe has since stopped the practice. RapLeaf declined to comment.

BitRhymes, maker of TagMe, said it "has a strict policy of not passing personally identifiable information to any third parties. When we were informed of the issue, any suspect relationship was immediately dissolved."

Google Tightening Privacy Leash on Employees

Associated Press

 

Google Inc. is tightening its privacy leash on employees in an effort to ensure they don't intrude on people while the Internet search leader collects and stores information about its users.

Besides promoting longtime employee Alma Whitten to be its director of privacy, Google said Friday that it will require all 23,000 of its employees to undergo privacy training. The company also is introducing more checks aimed at making sure workers are obeying the rules.

Google's tougher privacy measures appear to be a response to recent breaches that have raised questions about the company's internal controls and policies.

In the most glaring example that indicated the company didn't have a good grasp on what its workers were doing, Google acknowledged in May that one of its engineers had created a program that vacuumed up potentially sensitive personal information, including e-mails and passwords, from unsecured wireless networks while Google cars cruised neighborhoods around the world. The vehicles were dispatched primarily to take photos for Google's online mapping service, but they also carried equipment to log the location of Wi-Fi networks.

The incident, which some critics have derisively labeled as "Wi-Spy," was caused by "an engineer's careless error as well as a lack of controls to ensure that necessary procedures to protect privacy were followed," Canada Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart concluded in a report this week.

Several other countries have skewered Google for scooping up 600 gigabytes of data - equivalent to about six floors of an academic library - from Wi-Fi systems for more than two years before detecting a problem five months ago in response from to an inquiry from regulators in Germany.

Google initially said it had only captured fragments of people's online activities, but Canada's investigation determined that entire e-mails, passwords and website addresses had been obtained and stored. In confirming Canada's findings Friday, Google said it wants to delete all the Wi-Fi data remaining on its computers as quickly as possible, but must hold on to most of the information while authorities in different countries conduct their own investigations.

So far, Google has purged the Wi-Fi data it got in Ireland, Austria, Denmark and Hong Kong after gaining clearance from regulators in those countries. It still has the data from more than 20 other countries, including the United States, where a coalition of state attorneys generals has been looking into the breach.

While some countries have asserted Google's Wi-Fi snooping was illegal, the company has maintained it didn't break any laws even as management apologized for its bad behavior.

"We are mortified by what happened, but confident that these changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users," Alan Eustace, Google's head of engineering, wrote in a Friday blog post.

Google's privacy safeguards appeared to be suspect once again after the Gawker blog reported that an engineer in its Kirkland, Wash. office had been using the privileges of his job to spy on the online accounts of four minors. Prompted by that report, Google last month acknowledged that it had fired the engineer for violating its privacy policies.

Maintaining the public's trust is critical to Google because the success of its search engine and part of its long-term business plans hinge in part on its ability to build databases about its users' preferences. Among other things, Google believes the information helps it deliver better search results than its rivals and sell more of the ads that generate virtually all the company's revenue.

Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., hopes to become an even bigger part of people's online lives by introducing more social networking features on its website so it can better compete with Facebook in the increasingly lucrative field of connecting friends and family members online. When Google introduced a social networking option into its free e-mail service in February, many users protested because the feature exposed their contact lists without prior permission.

More Questions for Facebook

The Wall Street Journal

Two House members asked Facebook Inc. for more details about the way applications on the social network handle user information, following revelations of new privacy concerns.

U.S. Reps. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Joe Barton (R., Texas) sent Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg a letter expressing concerns that "third-party applications gathered and transmitted personally identifiable information about Facebook users and those users' friends." The two representatives are co-chairmen of the House Bipartisan Privacy Caucus.

Their letter follows an article in Monday's Wall Street Journal highlighting a potential privacy loophole in many of the most popular applications on Facebook. The Journal reported apps were transmitting identification numbers for users and their friends to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies. The ID numbers can be used to look up a user's real name, and sometimes other information users have made public, and potentially tie it to their activity inside the apps.

Given Facebook's 500 million users and the amount of information they post on the site, "this series of breaches of consumer privacy is a cause for concern," the lawmakers wrote.

The letter asked Mr. Zuckerberg how many users had been affected by the breach, when Facebook became aware of it, and what changes Facebook plans in order to deal with the problem, among other questions. Facebook must respond by Oct. 27.

In August, Reps. Markey and Barton requested information about data-collection practices from 15 websites identified by the Journal as installing the most tracking technology on visitors' computers.

A Facebook spokesman said the company looked forward "to addressing any confusion" and working with the congressmen. "The suggestion that the passing of a user ID to an application, as described in Facebook's privacy policy, constitutes a 'breach' is curious at best," he said.

In a blog post Sunday night, Facebook executive Mike Vernal said that passing along user IDs violated the company's policies. "In most cases, developers did not intend to pass this information, but did so because of the technical details of how browsers work," he wrote.

Still, he said Facebook was "committed to ensuring that even the inadvertent passing of (user IDs) is prevented and all applications are in compliance with our policy."

Mr. Vernal played down the potential risks, writing that knowing a user's ID "does not enable anyone to access private user information without explicit user consent."

Privacy watchdogs called on Facebook to improve privacy controls regarding applications. "Facebook needs to stop addressing this problem with secret 'policy enforcement' and start putting choices and control" in users' hands, wrote Chris Conley, a fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

At least some of the apps that Facebook shut down after Journal queries into privacy breaches were reinstated by Monday.

"We're back!" wrote Arjun Sethi, the CEO of LOLapps Media Inc., in a blog post. LOLapps makes applications like Gift Creator, which has 3.5 million monthly active users. His company's apps were shut down Friday, after the Journal had found that some LOLapps applications were transmitting users' Facebook ID numbers to a company called RapLeaf Inc., which then sent them with other personal details to a dozen other advertising and data firms. RapLeaf said the transmission was inadvertent.

LOLapps' Mr. Sethi said the company didn't intend to pass along user IDs. He didn't say that the problem was what led to the apps being shut down.

He also wrote that LOLapps had "immediately dissolved" the relationship that had caused it to run afoul of Facebook. He didn't specify whether that relationship was with RapLeaf.

Children Face Intensive Tracking on the Web

The Wall Street Journal

 

A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children's websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults.

The Journal examined 50 sites popular with U.S. teens and children to see what tracking tools they installed on a test computer. As a group, the sites placed 4,123 "cookies," "beacons" and other pieces of tracking technology. That is 30% more than were found in an analysis of the 50 most popular U.S. sites overall, which are generally aimed at adults.

The most prolific site: Snazzyspace.com, which helps teens customize their social-networking pages, installed 248 tracking tools. Its operator described the site as a "hobby" and said the tracking tools come from advertisers.

Starfall.com, an education site for young children, installed the fewest, five.

The research is part of a Journal investigation into the expanding business of tracking people's activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.

The tiny tracking tools are used by data-collection companies to follow people as they surf the Internet and to build profiles detailing their online activities, which advertisers and others buy. The profiles don't include names, but can include age, tastes, hobbies, shopping habits, race, likelihood to post comments and general location, such as city.

Selling the data is legal, but controversial, especially when it involves young people. Two companies identified by the Journal as selling teen data initially denied doing so. Only when shown evidence that they were offering data for sale—in one case, it was labeled "teeny boppers"—did they confirm it.

The Journal found that many popular children's sites are run by small companies or mom-and-pops, and privacy practices vary widely. Among the sites studied, the Journal identified one, y8.com—featuring kids' games with names like "Crush the Castle 2" and "Dreamy Nails Makeover"—that has had ties to a pornography site, xnxx.com, according to Internet registration records. Y8 installed 69 tracking files on the Journal's test computer. It also asks users to provide an email address to register.

"Children are safe on y8," a site employee named Olivier G. said in response to emailed questions. "We are *strongly against* the exposure of children to any adult content." Asked twice about y8.com's apparent ties to a pornography site, he didn't respond.

The Journal's study focused on sites popular with young people according to comScore Media Metrix.

Companies placing the tracking tools say the information they collect is anonymous and mainly used to deliver targeted ads or to gauge ads' effectiveness. They also say they don't collect "personally identifiable information" like names or email addresses and generally don't specifically target children.

Collecting data on minors is regulated, albeit lightly. The only federal restrictions require parental consent to collect names and other personal information of children under 13 in most circumstances. Currently, the Federal Trade Commission is considering whether changes to the law are warranted. No changes are expected before next year.

Many kids' sites are heavily dependent on advertising, which likely explains the presence of so many tracking tools. Research has shown children influence hundreds of billions of dollars in annual family purchases.

Google Inc. placed the most tracking files overall on the 50 sites examined. A Google spokesman said "a small proportion" of the files may be used to determine computer users' interests. He also said Google doesn't include "topics solely of interest to children" in its profiles.

Still, Google's "Ads Preferences" page (google.com/ads/preferences) displays what Google has determined about web users' interests. There, Google accurately identified a dozen pastimes of 10-year-old Jenna Maas—including pets, photography, "virtual worlds" and "online goodies" such as little animated graphics to decorate a website.

"It is a real eye opener," said Jenna's mother, Kate Maas, a schoolteacher in Charleston, S.C., viewing that data.

Jenna, now in fifth grade, said: "I don't like everyone knowing what I'm doing and stuff."

A Google spokesman said its preference lists are "based on anonymous browser activity. We don't know if it's one user or four using a particular browser, or who those users are." He said users can adjust the privacy settings on their browser or use the Ads Preferences page to limit data collection.

As part of the project, the Journal calculated an "exposure index" for each site, taking into account the number of trackers on the site and data-handling practices of those trackers. Snazzyspace.com ranked highest in exposing users to potentially aggressive tracking. A site owned by Viacom Inc., neopets.com, where kids can create make-believe "pets," had the highest exposure index of sites popular with children under 12.

Viacom's Nickelodeon TV network accounted for eight of the 50 sites in the survey. On average, the eight installed 81 tracking tools, close to the 82 average for all 50 sites. One, a games site called Shockwave.com, installed 146; another game-and-video site, nick.com, installed 92.

The vast majority of tracking files on Nickelodeon sites were installed by other firms, such as ad networks. A Nickelodeon official said those services "are collecting data on what users like to see and do based on their web behaviors and activities."

Many tools raise no privacy concerns. They might merely remember, say, where users pause in a game, so they aren't forced to start every time they visit.

But other tools are used to develop profiles of web-surfing behavior. Those can be used to deliver targeted ads that home in on children's concerns—say, dieting ads aimed at youngsters worried about their weight.

The number of tracking files installed by any specific site can vary from visit to visit. In the Journal's examination, the math-games site coolmath4kids.com installed 60 on a test computer.

However, when Angela La Fon, a teacher in Big Island, Va., checked her own computer with a tracker-detection tool called Abine, she found the site had installed 89 "cookies" on her machine. (Cookies are little text files that can give a computer a unique identity, which data-collection companies can use to track people's activities).

"That's creepy," says Ms. La Fon, who encouraged her six-year-old son, Lee, to use the site. "I wouldn't have thought I would have had 89 cookies, period. Much less than from one site."

Karen Davis, chief executive of coolmath4kids.com, declined to be interviewed, citing concern for her own privacy. In an email she wrote, "We are assured by our service providers that all data gathered is anonymous and compliant with all laws and privacy policies."

Several sites, including coolmath4kids.com, modified their privacy policies after being contacted by the Journal with its findings. For example, the math-games site no longer states that using cookies to collect anonymous data is "no big deal." Ms. Davis said she made the changes "to provide as much transparency as possible for our users."

A spokeswoman for weeworld.com, where kids can create a WeeMee avatar and chat with friends, said that as a result of a Journal analysis, it changed its privacy policy to provide a clearer explanation of how to disable cookies. Weeworld.com installed 144 tracking tools in the Journal's test.

Of the 50 sites examined by the Journal, only one had no posted privacy policy, the gaming site y8.com. Records at archive.org, a library of previous versions of websites, indicate that y8.com launched in the late 1990s as a sex site for adults at least 21 years old.

Y8.com became a game site aimed at a younger audience in 2006. ComScore reports that 12.2% of its users are 2 to 11 years old, and 22.8% are 12 to 17.

Internet registration records from December 2006 show that y8.com and a hard-core sex site, xnxx.com, shared the same mailing address in France, plus the same email address. Later, the sites changed their contact information and no longer share the same addresses. On the website games.xnxx.com, which bills itself as offering "fun sex games," there is a prominent link at the top and bottom of the page to "non-adult" games on y8.com.

The y8.com employee, Olivier G., didn't respond to questions about who owns the site or its apparent relationship with xnxx.com. He wrote in an email that y8.com is "strongly against the collection and use of personal information." He also said "we don't do anything" with email addresses provided by users.

Parents hoping to let their kids use the Internet, while protecting them from snooping, are in a bind. That's because many sites put the onus on visitors to figure out how data companies use the information they collect.

Gaiaonline.com—where teens hang out together in a virtual world—says in its privacy policy that it "cannot control the activities" of other companies that install tracking files on its users' computers. It suggests that users consult the privacy policies of 11 different companies.

In a statement, gaiaonline.com said, "It is standard industry practice that advertisers and ad networks are bound by their own privacy policy, which is why we recommend that our users review those." The Journal's examination found that gaiaonline.com installed 131 tracking files from third parties, such as ad networks.

An executive at a company that installed several of those 131 files, eXelate Media Ltd., said in an email that his firm wasn't collecting or selling teen-related data. "We currently are not specifically capturing or promoting any 'teen' oriented segments for marketing purposes," wrote Mark S. Zagorski, eXelate's chief revenue officer.

But the Journal found that eXelate was offering data for sale on 5.9 million people it described as "Age: 13-17." In a later interview, Mr. Zagorski confirmed eXelate was selling teen data. He said it was a small part of its business and didn't include personal details such as names.

BlueKai Inc., which auctions data on Internet users, also said it wasn't offering for sale data on minors. "We are not selling data on kids," chief executive Omar Tawakol wrote in an email. "Let there be no doubt on what we do."

However, another data-collecting company, Lotame Solutions Inc., told the Journal that it was selling what it labeled "teeny bopper" data on kids age 13 to 19 via BlueKai's auctions. "If you log into BlueKai, you'll see 'teeny boppers' available for sale," said Eric L. Porres, Lotame's chief marketing officer.

Mr. Tawakol of BlueKai later confirmed the "teeny bopper" data had been for sale on BlueKai's exchange but no one had ever bought it. He said as a result of the Journal's inquiries, BlueKai had removed it.

The FTC is reviewing the only federal law that limits data collection about kids, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or Coppa. That law requires sites aimed at children under 13 to obtain parental permission before collecting, using or disclosing a child's "personal information" such as name, home or email address, and phone and Social Security number. The law also applies to general-audience sites that knowingly collect personal information from kids.

The FTC is considering, among other things, whether to broaden "personal information" to include data "collected in connection with online behavioral advertising."

To try to avoid having to comply with Coppa, some sites state they prohibit kids under 13 from visiting. But that's easy for children to circumvent. Jenna Maas, the Charleston 10-year-old, opened an account on weeworld.com (which prohibits kids under 13 from registering) simply by fibbing about her age.

In Jenna's case, she got her mother's permission first. Ms. Maas says she lets Jenna visit sites for older kids "as long as I can monitor it."

Claire Quinn, weeworld.com's chief of safety, says the site has "tools in place" to prevent underage kids from joining, but "there is obviously no great age verification system out there."

FTC officials said website operators can't be held responsible if children lie about their age unless they glean from other information that a child is under 13.

Some experts believe the federal law also should apply to collecting data on teens, though not necessarily by requiring parental consent.

"We need clearer explanations of what's happening to their data online, that they can understand—not the kind of legalese in a privacy policy that basically obscures what's really going on," says Kathryn C. Montgomery, a professor of communication at American University.

Germany: Would-Be Employers Can't Do Social Network Checks

CBS News

Ever feel that those shots of you doing a keg stand in a bikini might be hindering your career? German politicians say they have a solution: ban potential employers from looking at applicants' Facebook accounts.

A law that passed through the German cabinet Wednesday makes looking at any closed social network illegal, but looking at professional networking Web sites, like LinkedIn, or running a Google search on an applicant, would be OK.

The measure still needs to go through parliament.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière told reporters Wednesday that future employers shouldn't be looking at information they would only want to show to friends like "wild photos from their college time." It would also be illegal to try and "friend" a potential employee to find out personal details.

Social media expert Klemens Skibicki, a professor for marketing at Cologne Business School, thinks the measure would be incredibly difficult to enforce. Much of the information can be found by third party search engines such as 123people (http://www.123people.com/) and it would be difficult to determine if the employer was using a fake account or an IP address changer to access data.

"How does one prove that they were discriminated against like that?" Skibcki asked. "This law can't effectively stop anybody from searching social network information about applicants."

Christian Solmecke, a lawyer with the German Institute for Communication and Law on the Internet, thinks that individuals should control who has access to their social networks and that the government should not interfere, but that it can be difficult for people - especially teenagers - to understand how information they post on the internet could affect them in the future, as well as how to make that data private.

The measure also prohibits companies from videotaping employees in "personal" locations such as bathrooms, changing rooms and break rooms, reports Der Spiegel. Seems like that would be a given, but in 2008, a scandal emerged when discount retailer Lidl spied on workers in the bathroom and collected personal information about them.

Also off limits? Most monitoring of employees telephone calls and e-mail use, even during company time. If monitoring occurs, businesses must inform their employees.

The country, with a history of government monitoring that includes the Gestapo and Stasi, has some of the strongest privacy laws in the world.

The Facebook legislation comes as there is increasing controversy over Google Street View in Germany. The consumer ministry is expecting the number of citizens requesting to opt out - have their property blurred on Google Street view and expunged from Google servers - to rise above 200,000 as many people worry that having such data on the internet is a violation of their privacy.

Microsoft Quashed Effort to Boost Online Privacy

The Wall Street Journal

 

The online habits of most people who use the world's dominant Web browser are an open book to advertisers. That wasn't the plan at first.

In early 2008, Microsoft Corp.'s product planners for the Internet Explorer 8.0 browser intended to give users a simple, effective way to avoid being tracked online. They wanted to design the software to automatically thwart common tracking tools, unless a user deliberately switched to settings affording less privacy.

That triggered heated debate inside Microsoft. As the leading maker of Web browsers, the gateway software to the Internet, Microsoft must balance conflicting interests: helping people surf the Web with its browser to keep their mouse clicks private, and helping advertisers who want to see those clicks.
In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads. Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.

Microsoft's original privacy plans for the new Explorer were "industry-leading" and technically superior to privacy features in earlier browsers, says Simon Davies, a privacy-rights advocate in the U.K. whom Microsoft consulted while forming its browser privacy plans. Most users of the final product aren't even aware its privacy settings are available, he says. "That's where the disappointment lies."

Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith says that in developing the new browsers, the company tried to "synthesize" both points of view about privacy "in a way that advanced both the privacy interests of consumers and the critical role advertising plays in content."

Microsoft's decision reveals the economic forces driving the spread of online tracking of individuals. A Wall Street Journal investigation of the practice showed tracking to be pervasive and ever-more intrusive: The 50 most-popular U.S. websites, including four run by Microsoft, installed an average of 64 pieces of tracking technology each onto a test computer.

As online advertising grows more sophisticated, companies playing prominent roles in consumers' online experiences have discovered they have access to a valuable trove of information. In addition to Microsoft, such companies include search-engine giant Google Inc., iPhone maker Apple Inc., and Adobe Systems Inc., whose Flash software makes much of the Internet's video, gaming and animation possible. These companies now have a big say in how much information can be collected about individual users.

Many also have big stakes in online advertising. Microsoft bought aQuantive, a Web-ad firm, in 2007 for more than $6 billion, to build a business selling ads online. Google, already a giant in online marketing, in September 2008 launched a Web browser, Chrome, that gives it new insight into Internet users' habits. Apple has launched an ad network, iAds, for its iPhone and iPad. And Adobe last year paid $1.8 billion to buy Omniture, which measures the effectiveness of online ads.

Executives in Microsoft's new ad business were upset when the designers of Internet Explorer hatched the plan to block tracking activity, say people involved in the debate. At a meeting in the spring of 2008, Brian McAndrews, a Microsoft senior vice president who had been chief executive of aQuantive before Microsoft acquired it, complained to the browser planners. Their privacy plan, he argued, would disrupt the selling of Web ads by Microsoft and other companies, these people say.

Mr. McAndrews was taken aback that Explorer planners seemed unwilling to accept input from advertising executives, given that Microsoft had spent $6 billion on a Web-ad firm, according two people who participated in the meeting.

Mr. Smith, the general counsel, says Microsoft weighed both sides of the argument in its debate. He says the company was concerned about the effect strict privacy features might have on free sites supported by advertising, including newspaper sites. Such sites, including WSJ.com, use information derived from tracking to sell targeted ads, an important revenue source.

Web browsers like Internet Explorer can play an important role in protecting privacy because the software sits between consumers and the array of technologies used to track them online. The best-known of those technologies are browser "cookies," small files stored on users' computers that act as identification tags for them when they visit websites.

Some cookies, such as those installed when a user asks a favorite website to remember his password, don't do tracking.

Others are installed on computers by companies that provide advertising services to the websites a user visits. These "third-party" cookies can be designed to track a user's online activities over time, building a database of personal interests and other details.

The Journal's examination of the top 50 most popular U.S. websites showed that Microsoft placed third-party tracking devices on 27 of the top 46 sites that it doesn't itself own.

All the latest Web browsers, including Internet Explorer, let consumers turn on a feature that prevents third-party browser cookies from being installed on their computers. But those settings aren't always easy to find. Only one major browser, Apple's Safari, is preset to block all third-party cookies, in the interest of user privacy.

"Only browser developers have the resources and large user bases necessary to create a privacy-friendly version of the Web," says Peter Eckersley, staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group.

Because Internet Explorer is used by so many people—nearly 60% of all Web users—the 2008 decision by planners of the new version to make it easy for users to block tracking could have had a big effect on the marketplace.

At the time, the practice of tailoring ads to consumers based on their browsing habits was taking off. Google was in the process of buying DoubleClick Inc., a leader in the placing and tracking of online ads, for $3.1 billion. A coalition of privacy groups was petitioning the Federal Trade Commission to develop stricter policies for preventing advertisers from tracking Web-browsing habits. Companies with stakes in Internet advertising were feeling heat to try to stave off government regulation by voluntarily protecting consumer privacy.

 

Microsoft also was trying to stem the erosion of its browser market share. Internet Explorer, which once had more than 95% of the market, hadn't kept up with competitors. Firefox, a Web browser overseen by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, picked up more than 18% of the market by May 2008, helping knock Explorer to 76%, according to NetApplications.com, which tracks browser use.

The browser planners at Microsoft believed aggressive new privacy features could help differentiate the new Internet Explorer from rivals, according to several current and former Microsoft executives.

The planners, led by Microsoft veteran Dean Hachamovitch, came up with a concept for preventing consumer tracking. A new feature would monitor where each piece of content on a visited Web page was originating on the Internet—every picture, video or chunk of text. The feature would pay special attention to content from "third party" Internet addresses—addresses different from the one a user sees in the address bar at the top of the browser.

Some of that third-party content could be innocuous things like YouTube video clips displayed on the Web page, which viewers presumably wouldn't want to block. Other items might be tracking tools such as Web "beacons," snippets of code embedded in the page that can monitor the clicks of visitors, or even record their keystrokes. Users might want such tracking tools blocked automatically.

The Internet Explorer planners proposed a feature that would block any third-party content that turned up on more than 10 visited websites, figuring that anything so pervasive was likely to be a tracking tool. This, they believed, was a more comprehensive approach to privacy than simply turning off browser cookies, one that would thwart other tracking methods.

The group also planned to design the Internet Explorer set-up process so that it guaranteed the privacy feature would be used by most people.

When he heard of the ideas, Mr. McAndrews, the executive involved with Microsoft's Internet advertising business, was angry, according to several people familiar with the matter. Mr. McAndrews feared the Explorer group's privacy plans would dramatically reduce the effectiveness of online advertising by curbing the data that could be collected about consumers.

He heard about the proposal through back channels rather than directly from the browser planners, these people say, which surprised him given its implications. Some people who worked in the browser group acknowledge that they should have been more upfront about their intentions. Mr. McAndrews later left the company.

"We were worried it was going to cause a stampede" away from tracking technologies, says an executive who worked with Mr. McAndrews. "It was an act with the potential to reverberate across the industry."

The browser group and its manager, Mr. Hachamovitch, tried to hold their ground. They were reluctant to let advertising executives interfere with the new Explorer design, according to people involved in the debate. Microsoft said that Mr. Hachamovitch and other members of the planning group wouldn't comment on the matter.

The debate widened after executives from Microsoft's advertising team informed outside advertising and online-publishing groups of Microsoft's privacy plans for Explorer. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer assigned two senior executives, chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie and the general counsel, Mr. Smith, to help referee the debate, according to Peter Cullen, Microsoft's chief privacy strategist.

The two men convened a four-hour meeting in Mr. Mundie's conference room in late spring 2008 to allow outside organizations to voice their concerns, including the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Online Publishers' Association and the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

One of the attendees, Interactive Advertising Bureau Chief Executive Randall Rothenberg, says he was worried that Explorer's proposed privacy features would block not just the collection of consumer data, but also the delivery of some Web advertisements themselves. He says the features "seemed to equate the delivery of advertisements with privacy violations." He was especially troubled, he says, by the prospect of Microsoft turning the features on for all consumers, by default.

One other consideration: Some Microsoft executives were concerned that the preset-privacy plan might jeopardize support among ad-industry organizations that Microsoft wanted to rally against a proposed advertising deal between Google and Yahoo Inc., says a former Microsoft executive. A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to comment on that issue. U.S. regulators ended up blocking the deal.

The former Microsoft executive says he had never before experienced a debate at Microsoft "so driven by external influences and conflicting priorities to protect users" as the tussle over the Explorer privacy controls.

"It was a healthy debate," says Mr. Smith, the general counsel, with "well-informed views by people who are passionate."

When Microsoft released the browser in its final form in March 2009, the privacy features were a lot different from what its planners had envisioned. Internet Explorer required the consumer to turn on the feature that blocks tracking by websites, called InPrivate Filtering. It wasn't activated automatically.

What's more, even if consumers turn the feature on, Microsoft designed the browser so InPrivate Filtering doesn't stay on permanently. Users must activate the privacy setting every time they start up the browser.

Microsoft dropped another proposed feature, known as InPrivate Subscriptions, that would have let users further conceal their online browsing habits, by automatically blocking Web addresses suspected of consumer tracking if those addresses appeared on "black lists" compiled by privacy groups.

Mr. Cullen, Microsoft's chief privacy strategist, says the input of outsiders helped Microsoft strike a balance between privacy and advertising interests. The browser, he says, "was a better product than when it came off the drawing-room floor of the Internet Explorer group."

Advertising groups say they were pleased, too. "They ended up with something pretty excellent," says Mr. Rothenberg of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Personal Details Exposed Via Biggest U.S. Websites

The Wall Street Journal

The largest U.S. websites are installing new and intrusive consumer-tracking technologies on the computers of people visiting their sites—in some cases, more than 100 tracking tools at a time—a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The tracking files represent the leading edge of a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers who are in effect establishing a new business model for the Internet: one based on intensive surveillance of people to sell data about, and predictions of, their interests and activities, in real time.

The Journal's study shows the extent to which Web users are in effect exchanging personal data for the broad access to information and services that is a defining feature of the Internet.

In an effort to quantify the reach and sophistication of the tracking industry, the Journal examined the 50 most popular websites in the U.S. to measure the quantity and capabilities of the "cookies," "beacons" and other trackers installed on a visitor's computer by each site. Together, the 50 sites account for roughly 40% of U.S. page-views.

The 50 sites installed a total of 3,180 tracking files on a test computer used to conduct the study. Only one site, the encyclopedia Wikipedia.org, installed none. Twelve sites, including IAC/InterActive Corp.'s Dictionary.com, Comcast Corp.'s Comcast.net and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.com, installed more than 100 tracking tools apiece in the course of the Journal's test.

The Journal also surveyed its own site, WSJ.com, which doesn't rank among the top 50 by visitors. WSJ.com installed 60 tracking files, slightly below the 64 average for the top 50 sites.

Some two-thirds of the tracking tools installed—2,224—came from 131 companies that, for the most part, are in the business of following Internet users to create rich databases of consumer profiles that can be sold. The companies that placed the most such tools were Google Inc., Microsoft. and Quantcast Corp., all of which are in the business of targeting ads at people online.

Google, Microsoft and Quantcast all said they don't track individuals by name and offer Internet users a way to remove themselves from their tracking networks. Comcast, MSN and Dictionary.com said they disclose tracking practices in their privacy policies, and said their visitors aren't identified by name.

The state of the art is growing increasingly intrusive, the Journal found. Some tracking files can record a person's keystrokes online and then transmit the text to a data-gathering company that analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person's social connections. Other tracking files can re-spawn trackers that a person may have deleted.

To measure the sensitivity of the data gathered by tracking companies, the Journal created an "exposure index" for the top 50 sites. Dictionary.com ranked highest in exposing users to potentially aggressive surveillance: It installed 168 tracking tools that didn't let users decline to be tracked, and 121 tools that, according to their privacy statements, don't rule out collecting financial or health data. Dictionary.com attributed the number of tools to its use of many different ad networks, each of which puts tools on its site.

Some of the tracking files identified by the Journal were so detailed that they verged on being anonymous in name only. They enabled data-gathering companies to build personal profiles that could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.

The ad industry says tracking doesn't violate anyone's privacy because the data sold doesn't identify people by name, and the tracking activity is disclosed in privacy policies. And while many companies are involved in collecting, analyzing and selling the data, they provide a useful service by raising the chance Internet users see ads and information relevant to them personally.

"We are delivering free content to consumers," says Mike Zaneis, vice president of public policy for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group of advertisers and publishers. "Sometimes it means that we get involved in a very complex ecosystem with lots of third parties."

The growing use and power of tracking technology have begun to raise regulatory concerns. Congress is considering laws to limit tracking. The Federal Trade Commission is developing privacy guidelines for the industry.

If "you were in the Gap, and the sales associate said to you, 'OK, from now on, since you shopped here today, we are going to follow you around the mall and view your consumer transactions,' no person would ever agree to that," Sen. George LeMieux, R-Florida, said this week in a Senate hearing on Internet privacy.

FBI Access to Web Data Raises Concerns

Associated Press

Invasion of privacy in the Internet age. Expanding the reach of law enforcement to snoop on e-mail traffic or on Web surfing. Those are among the criticisms being aimed at the FBI as it tries to update a key surveillance law.

With its proposed amendment, is the Obama administration merely clarifying a statute or expanding it? Only time and a suddenly on guard Congress will tell.

Federal law requires communications providers to produce records in counterintelligence investigations to the FBI, which doesn't need a judge's approval and court order to get them.

They can be obtained merely with the signature of a special agent in charge of any FBI field office and there is no need even for a suspicion of wrongdoing, merely that the records would be relevant in a counterintelligence or counterterrorism investigation. The person whose records the government wants doesn't even need to be a suspect.

The bureau's use of these so-called national security letters to gather information has a checkered history.

The bureau engaged in widespread and serious misuse of its authority to issue the letters, illegally collecting data from Americans and foreigners, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded in 2007. The bureau issued 192,499 national security letter requests from 2003 to 2006.

Weathering that controversy, the FBI has continued its reliance on the letters to gather information from telephone companies, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses with personal records about their customers or subscribers - and Internet service providers.

That last source is the focus of the Justice Department's push to get Congress to modify the law.

The law already requires Internet service providers to produce the records, said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department's national security division. But he said as written it also causes confusion and the potential for unnecessary litigation as some Internet companies have argued they are not always obligated to comply with the FBI requests.

A key Democrat on Capitol Hill, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont, wants a timeout.

The administration's proposal to change the Electronic Communications Privacy Act "raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns," Leahy said Thursday in a statement.

"While the government should have the tools that it needs to keep us safe, American citizens should also have protections against improper intrusions into their private electronic communications and online transactions," said Leahy, who plans hearings in the fall on this and other issues involving the law.

Critics are lined up in opposition to what the Obama administration wants to do.

"The FBI is playing a shell game," says Al Gidari, whose clients have included major online companies, wireless service providers and their industry association.

"This is a huge expansion" of the FBI's authority "and burying it this way in the intelligence authorization bill is really intended to bury it from scrutiny," Gidari added.

Boyd, the Justice spokesman, said the changes being proposed will not allow the government to obtain or collect new categories of information; rather it simply seeks to clarify what Congress intended when the statute was amended in 1993, he argued.

Critics, however, point to a 2008 opinion by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel which found that the FBI's reach with national security letters extends only as far as getting a person's name, address, the period in which they were a customer and the numbers dialed on a telephone or to that phone.

The proposed amendment would add the category "electronic communications transactional records" to the section of the law that currently lists only those items cited in the Justice legal opinion. Those four words are already in another section of the law.

The problem the FBI has been having is that some providers, relying on the 2008 Justice opinion - issued during the Bush administration - have refused to turn over Internet records such as information about who a person e-mails and who has e-mailed them and information about a person's Web surfing history.

To deal with the issue, there's no need to change the law since the FBI has the authority to obtain the same information with a court order issued under a broad section of the Patriot Act, said Gregory Nojeim, director of the Project on Freedom, Security and Technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit Internet privacy group.

The critics say the proposed change would allow the FBI to remove federal judges and courts from scrutiny of its requests for sensitive information.

"The implications of the proposal are that no court is deciding whether even that low standard of 'relevance' is met," said Nojeim. "The FBI uses national security letters to find not just who the target of an investigation e-mailed, but also who those people e-mailed and who e-mailed them."

Google Wi-Fi Data Collection Discussed by Law Enforcement in 30 States
Bloomberg

 

Google Inc.’s collection of data via Wi-Fi networks was the subject of a conference call among law enforcement officials from 30 U.S. states, according to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

“We’re looking to establish where, when, why, for how long and for what purpose there was this collection of information on wireless networks,” Blumenthal said yesterday in an interview. The call included representatives of the states’ attorneys general.

The discussion reflects widening concern among law enforcement over the way Google handles user information. The company said last month it mistakenly gathered data from open wireless networks while it was capturing images of streets and houses for its Street View service, a product that lets users view photographs of an area online.

Blumenthal has demanded that Mountain View, California- based Google inform his office of any data gathered from his state’s residents and businesses without permission, the attorney general said this month. Google owns the world’s largest search engine.

“This was a mistake, but we don’t believe we did anything illegal,” Google said in an e-mailed statement. “We’re working with the relevant authorities to answer their questions and concerns.”

Illinois was among the states that joined in last week’s call led by Blumenthal.

Illinois in Talks

“We did participate in a conference call with other attorneys general regarding Google,” said Robyn Ziegler, a spokeswoman for Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan. Additional information wasn’t immediately available, she said.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said last month that it is reviewing Google’s data gathering. An Oregon judge has ordered the company turn over similar data collected in that state, including any e-mails, files or digital phone records, according to court documents.

Also this month, Google said it was turning over to regulators in Germany, France and Spain data it mistakenly collected from unsecured Wi-Fi networks.

Those countries are investigating Google’s data-gathering practices after the company said in May that its cars used to photograph roadsides for its Street View mapping service inadvertently recorded information.

Prosecutors in the German city of Hamburg opened a criminal investigation. Authorities in Italy, Canada and the Czech Republic also have begun inquiries.

The Oregon case is Vicki Van Valin v. Google, 10-00557, U.S. District Court, District of Oregon (Portland).

Google Introduces Encrypted Web Search Option

cNet

 

Google began offering an encrypted option for Web searchers on Friday and said it planned to roll it out for all of its services eventually.

People who want to use the more secure search option can type "https://www.google.com" into their browser, scrambling the connection so the words and phrases they search on, and the results that Google displays, will be protected from interception.

The beta service of the secure Web search option begins in the United States on Friday and will be rolled out over the next few days to users around the world, said Murali Viswanathan, a Google search product manager.

Friday's announcement makes Google the first major search engine to offer this privacy-protective feature. AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft currently do not.

"Some users will want the extra privacy and security this feature will offer," Viswanathan said in an interview with CNET. "But it's not going to be the default option, at this point. There's a lot of work to be done before we get there."

The encryption protects only data in transit between an individual's browser and the Google search server. When people click on a search result and are directed to another Web site, they leave the encrypted channel.

Offering encrypted connections to Google.com means that users in China and other regimes that engage in significant surveillance will -- assuming the connection is not blocked in the first place -- be able to conduct searches without governments knowing the search terms.

The protected Web search service will feature a customized logo that includes an icon of a lock and "SSL" which stands for Secure Sockets Layer, the technology used to encrypt the information as it travels between an individual's computer and the Google search server.

The SSL technology is typically used on banking and e-commerce Web sites. Google has always offered Gmail users the ability to use HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), which uses SSL, in the browser. The company enabled Gmail users to set it as a persistent preference in mid-2008 and offered it as an option for Google Docs, as well. It became the default for Gmail in January.

People who choose the secure option on Google will only be able to get encryption for Web searches and not for other types of searches, such as Image Search and Maps, at least for now. As a result, links for those searches will not appear on the side or top of the search page when someone is in the secure search mode.

The secure Web search option will slow down the initial connection a computer makes to the Google server, but it may be hardly noticeable to most people. It also means Google will have to use more processor power to handle the scrambling and unscrambling of the SSL connection, which is the biggest reason most Web sites don't offer it as an option.

The service does not protect data stored on an end user's computer or at the Google server, and if someone has malware or a keylogger on the computer, Web search data and other information could be stolen or leaked.

Google announced last week that it would offer encryption for Web search soon, in the wake of the news that vehicles for capturing Google Maps Street View images had mistakenly been collecting data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks for years.

But Viswanathan said the timing of the encryption announcement was completely unrelated and that Google had been working on the Web search encryption offering for a few months.