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Sunday, 12 February 2012

Many websites share users’ data without consent, study says

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from the L.A. TimesMany websites share users’ data without consent, study saysOctober 11, 2011 | 6:15am

Privacy A new report says consumers have less privacy on the Web than they think.

The study concludes that personally identifiable information is being regularly shared without consumers' knowledge or consent, according to Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student in law and computer science at Stanford University who conducted it.

The study of 185 of the most-visited websites found that a consumer's user name or user ID was shared with another website on 59% of the sites visited. The study also says websites appear to sell information about users such as gender, age, ZIP code and relationship status to data collectors.

"Many first-party websites and third parties make what would appear to be incorrect representations about not sharing or collecting 'personally identifiable information,'" Mayer said in a written statement.

The report comes as privacy watchdogs look to put pressure on the Obama administration and the Federal Trade Commission to enact sweeping reforms that they say are needed to protect consumers' privacy.

A coalition of 10 consumer, privacy and civil rights groups that are pushing for increased regulation is expected to unveil the new research from Stanford's Computer Security Laboratory at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday at which FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz is the keynote speaker.

The coalition includes the ACLU, Center for Digital Democracy and Electronic Privacy Information Center.

RELATED:

Tighter preteen privacy rules urged

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Online 'do not track' bill introduced in California senate

-- Jessica Guynn

twitter.com/jguynn

Image credit: Anya Johnson / Tribune Media Services

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Saturday, 1 October 2011

Facebook wants users to share it all

At Facebook, they call it "Zuck's law" after founder Mark Zuckerberg: Every year people share twice as much online.

Now Facebook is pushing its 800 million users to share far more about themselves than ever before by making these acts of show and tell automatic.

The plan: When users sign up for one of these new social apps –- say Spotify or Hulu –- they will be asked to give permission to update their friends in real time every time they listen to Kanye West or watch the latest episode of "Breaking Bad." That way their friends can click on that same song or TV show and alert their friends and so on and so on.

Photos: The many faces of Facebook

While onstage Thursday at the company's annual developers conference in San Francisco, Zuckerberg underscored how much better he thinks the Facebook experience will be for everyone when users stop getting those pesky pop-up boxes to give consent for these updates and just share everything by default.

That already has some users complaining of too much information. (Slate's Farhad Manjoo also makes a compelling argument for people not sharing absolutely everything, not because of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad privacy concerns but because he thinks it will amount to people sharing a whole lot of drivel).

Even though Facebook says users will have the ability to set privacy controls when they sign up for these social apps, the company could face another privacy backlash from people worried that they are baring far too much on Facebook.

But that's really the point. Zuckerberg spoke again and again Thursday about "the open graph," which is basically all the connections people have to each other and –- increasingly -- to everything: the books and articles they read, the music they listen to and the movies and shows they watch.

As Altimeter Group analyst Brian Solis put it succinctly: As Facebook moves beyond the verb "like" to "read," "listen," "watch," it will not only own those verbs, it will own the actions themselves.

Every time I "run" through Golden Gate Park or "cook" rainbow chard, I will automatically share those acts with all of my Facebook friends. If Facebook has its way, I will not do much of anything anymore without telling my friends (and marketers) all about it.

Zuckerberg calls it "frictionless sharing." But analysts say Facebook seems to be removing as much "friction" for Facebook as it does for Facebook's users.

The more Facebook knows and understands about people's lives -- their relationships, their interests, their whereabouts –- the better it can profit from that information by targeting advertising to eager marketers, just the kind of turboboost it needs with its highly anticipated initial public offering coming next year.

For the cynical, the latest features that Facebook rolled out on Thursday are just another big step in the company's unstoppable march toward World Wide Web domination (or the creation of a parallel Internet).

What do you think about sharing on Facebook? Let us know in the comments.

Facebook updates its status: It wants to be an entertainment hub

Facebook F8: Is Facebook a 'social operating system'?

Facebook users protest changes to News Feed, new 'ticker'

-- Jessica Guynn

Photo: Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg at the company's F8 developers conference in San Francisco. Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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Sunday, 26 June 2011

Android This Week: Hulu Plus lands; Falling market share; TV tech on phones

A handful of Android devices this week became the first to gain access to Hulu Plus, a subscription-based service for online movies and television programs. The software is free, but most content on Hulu Plus is only accessible by paying a $7.99 monthly fee. Similar to Netflix, Hulu Plus is only available for small subset of Android phones during the initial rollout; likely due to testing each individual Android phone model to ensure it meets the appropriate Digital Rights Management (DRM) requirements.

For now, Hulu Plus is only supported on the Nexus One, Nexus S, HTC Inspire 4G, and three Motorola phones: the Droid 2, Droid X, and Atrix 4G. In a blog post announcing the new software, the folks at Hulu Plus said it “expects to add to the number of Android smartphones and will be making additional device announcements throughout the year.”

I have both a Nexus One and a trial subscription to Hulu Plus, so I gave the software a try earlier this week. I found it to work quite well, even over a 3G connection. The menus are intuitive and the video quality is on par with other high-quality video streaming services.

In other Android news related to video quality, Sony Ericsson announced two new smartphones that borrow from Sony’s high definition television technology. The Xperia Active and Xperia Ray both use the Bravia Mobile Engine to enhance video playback on their “Reality Displays”, bringing improved contrast, color management and noise reduction. Although I haven’t seen either of these phones yet — they aren’t due to arrive until the third quarter of 2011 — the video demonstration shows promise:

Aside from the display technology, Sony Ericsson is trying to differentiate the Active by ruggedizing it for exercise. The capacitive touch screen works even with water or sweat on the screen and can survive up to one meter in water for 30 minutes. Various sports tracking software applications are also pre-installed.

These models may help Sony Ericsson’s market share, but Android’s as a whole is showing some slowness; at least in the U.S. Earlier this week, Charlie Wolf, an analyst from Needham & Co., suggested that out that Android’s market share in the U.S. fell to 49.5 percent from 52.4 percent in the first quarter of 2011.

This marks the first decline for Android in any region of the world and is largely due to the Verizon iPhone, thinks Wolf. If true, it’s likely that Android’s market share will continue to be challenged this year as a new iPhone is expected for both Verizon and AT&T in September. In addition to new hardware, the iPhone’s software looks good too; even from an Android owner’s point of view.

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Thursday, 23 June 2011

You Need to Win the Battle for Share of Mind

This article first appeared on TechCrunch. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the proliferation of starutps in the past 2 years. It seems almost incomprehensible that only 2.5 years ago we read the “RIP Good Times” presentation from Sequoia.

But what does this all mean? Are we headed for a long era of innovation in which startups are the new norm? Are we seeing a time in which pre-revenue companies are more valuable than our offline institutional brands? As with the late 90′s the answer is “Yes. And no.”

Yes, there is unprecedented innovation. I’ve never seen anything like it in my career. The era of cheap cloud computing plus open-source software plus digital natives unleashed upon society is creating some truly amazing products that will challenge the way we do business and the way we live our lives. I don’t believe it’s hyperbole to say that Twitter and Facebook are truly transformative at a societal level, for example.

No. It’s not all sunshine and candy canes. We are building a lot of stuff now that has no longevity. In a way, startups have become kind of like the video game industry. New stuff gets created, it’s fun to play with and talk about. You want to use it because your friends are doing it and you want to find out what it’s all about. You want to see what’s new. You want the dopamine rush.

You play with it for a few weeks or months. Then you stop. You stop because it was game like. Temporal. Non valuable. Not really helping you do something better. Not improving your life or business.

Not solving a real problem.

And so it occurs to me that many startups in the consumer world are now truly hits driven like video games or movies. They get marketed as such. We compare user numbers like box office receipts. Some become true breakouts that can be built into a franchise even though they started as just a game, like Angry Birds. They had the magic formula. Others like Words with Friends solve deeper problems than games, like meeting new people or curing loneliness.

The challenge that many startups face today is: Are you really providing enough value? Will you get the TechCrunch bump, the tier-1 VC anointment, followed by great PR firm support and then the NY Times or WSJ story that follows? Will that be enough or will high churn rates creep in, new toys be introduced into the market, new time sucks pulling user attention away? This year’s Tamagotchi?

If you’re building a startup today I would encourage you to think harder about how you’re going to win the battle for share of mind. That’s much tougher than getting people to play with your hot product for 6 months. To do so you must truly provide value that changes the way that end-consumers do something in their lives that will persist.

My example du jour is LinkedIn.

Why had it endured though market machinations and become this year’s darling IPO? I can’t comment on its stock price – I’m not a public market analyst. But the obvious value to LinkedIn is that it is the dominant online resume of our generation. They got us to fill out the details of where we worked in the past and the network effect compels us to keep it updated.

The second obvious value drive is that it was one of our first true “social graphs.” I often argue that this has greatly weakened because everybody I know accepts LinkedIn requests from strangers so it’s not really a true barometer of our graph anymore but enough of the remnants are accurate enough that value persists. So resume + directionally-correct social graph = goldmine for recruiting, networking and marketing.

It doesn’t strike me as a “social network” in the way we’ve come to define them. But its focus on solving a real-world problem makes it uniquely valuable to most other social graphs.

So as I get around the country speaking at college campus in 2010 & 2011 I have been preaching the same theme. If you want to build enduring companies that weather both the tech market acceleration and the inevitable tech market correction as companies like LinkedIn have done you need to ask yourself if you’re solving a real problem for users that will persist when hotness wears off.

That might be in online resumes. It might be in online game platforms solving the problem of entertaining people. It might be online videos targeting niche audience. It might be a way to diet online or a way to manage your online scheduling / appointments. Or like a company I spoke to today, SportsForce, that is helping high-school athletes better prepare to get picked up by college sports teams. That’s a problem in need of a solution – I’m sure. Or the way Uber is shaking up the cozy, static world of taxi transportation.

Not every problem has to be a huge VC-fundable business.

But what I do see in the market in 2011 is way too many “me too” solutions where a bunch of founders have brainstormed a way to do a better GroupOn, a better GiltGroupe, a better Twitter or a better Quora. When pressed not enough of these entrepreneurs can answer questions about why users would still be using this product in 5 years, about why their product is going to solve a consumer or business problem that isn’t being solved today. They pitch me features, not value.

I play with features. I’m a tech junkie as much as the next guy. But next month I’m on to the next one.

I would encourage you to think bigger. The market is over-weight in companies trying to solve problems for bars & restaurants. Sure, that’s a fine category. I have no problem with it. But what about education? Healthcare information? Energy? Housing? Auto? Financial Services? There are so many big inefficiencies in this country that need tackling. I feel quite comfortable that our bars & restaurant industry will be just fine.

When you solve a real problem you’ll win the true battle. The battle for share of mind. Challenge yourself to think harder.

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