Interesting News

Careful folks... While Washington appears to be addressing voter sentiment.  We need to see both sides of the coin.  What rights are we giving up this time??

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US lawmakers announced plans on Friday to introduce "Do Not Track" legislation that would let Internet users block companies from gathering information about their online activities.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia, said his "Do Not Track Online Act of 2011" will offer a "simple, straightforward way for people to stop companies from tracking their every move on the Internet."

"Consumers have a right to know when and how their personal and sensitive information is being used online -- and most importantly to be able to say 'no thanks' when companies seek to gather that information without their approval," Rockefeller said in a statement.

In the House of Representatives, Joe Barton, a Republican from Texas, and Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, released a draft of a separate "Do Not Track" bill aimed at protecting children online.

US senators John Kerry and John McCain introduced an online privacy bill last month that would require companies gathering data to allow a consumer to "opt-out" of having their information collected.

The former Democratic and Republican presidential candidates said their bill seeks to strike a balance between protecting the personal information of Web users and the needs of businesses to conduct electronic commerce.

The flurry of legislation comes amid a series of high-profile data theft incidents, including the theft of personal information from more than 100 million Sony accounts, and controversy over tracking technology in Apple's iPhone and in smartphones running Google's Android software.

Apple and Google are to attend a congressional hearing on privacy next week following claims the iPhone and Android devices regularly track a user's location and stores the data.

"We look forward to engaging with policymakers about how we protect our users' mobile privacy," Google said in an email to AFP.

Google explained that people must opt-in to use location-sharing on Android-powered smartphones and get to control how data is used.

"Any location data that is sent back to Google location servers is anonymized and is not tied or traceable to a specific user," the Mountain View, California-based Internet titan said.

Apple vice president of software Guy Tribble was listed as representing the Cupertino, California-based iPhone, iPad and iPod maker at the hearing.

Apple on Wednesday released updated software for iPhones to fix "bugs" that resulted in location data being unencrypted and stored for up to a year.

The changes came in an iOS 4.3.3 software update.

Apple has denied tracking iPhone users, maintaining that locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers was used for services such as navigation or targeted ads.

Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said his bill would create a "legal obligation" for all online companies to honor the choice of consumers who say they do not want to be tracked online.

It would give the Federal Trade Commission the power to pursue any company that does not honor the request.

Barton and Markey, the co-chairmen of the Bi-Partisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, said their "Do Not Track Kids Act of 2011" establishes new protections for the personal information of children and teenagers.

"For millions of kids today, the Internet is their new 21st century playground," Markey said in a statement. "But kids growing up in this online environment also need protection from the dangers that can lurk in cyberspace."

The bill would notably require online companies to obtain parental consent before collecting children's personal information and prohibit them from using personal information of children and teens for targeted marketing.

It would also create an "Eraser Button" for parents and children that would allow users to eliminate publicly available personal information content "when technologically feasible."

I'm really on the fence with this and it seems like regulators already know where they want to take this. Are you aware of the consequences this has? Keep an eye for this as so called "regulators" always try to reach for more than they should at our expense and to somebody's gain.

When it comes to privacy, the Internet has long been something of a Wild West but that that is starting to change, with regulators in Europe and the United States beginning to pull in the reins.

On both sides of the Atlantic, officials are scrutinizing how companies such as Facebook and Google handle users' personal data, as they draw up plans to protect surfers while ensuring the growth of rapidly expanding social media, search engine and other Web-based businesses.

In the first sign of where Europe may be headed with its privacy regulations, the European Union announced this week that social networking sites and search engines could face court action if they fail to obey new EU data privacy rules.

Under proposals to be fleshed out in the coming months and that will update 16-year-old data-protection laws, the European Commission wants to force companies holding data to allow users to withdraw it from websites, calling it the "right to be forgotten."

Companies would also have to provide more information on what data they have collected from people and why.

"Any company operating in the EU market or any online product that is targeted at EU consumers must comply with EU rules," Viviane Reding, the European commissioner in charge of justice issues, said in a speech this week.

"To enforce EU law, national privacy watchdogs will be endowed with powers to investigate and engage in legal proceedings against non-EU data controllers," she added.

Reding said that EU-based privacy watchdogs should even be given powers to enforce compliance outside Europe, which could include access to U.S.-based servers and other data sources.

While privacy campaigners and Internet users may be pleased to hear what Reding has to say, her words will cause concern in parts of the United States, where many of the biggest and most successful search engines and social media companies are based.

Europe and the United States have traditionally differed on privacy issues, with the EU taking a stronger regulatory approach and U.S. officials more mindful of the need to balance entrepreneurship and business demands with data protection.

But in recent weeks, as U.S. privacy experts have visited Brussels to try to close the gaps between the two regulatory frameworks, officials have emphasized how closely they are working together to come up with a common set of standards.

"I think our baseline understanding of the rules is very similar," said Fiona Alexander of the U.S. Department of Commerce, who was in Brussels this month to meet EU regulators. "The implementation in the past may have been different."

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

The EU and U.S. already agree on some general concepts, such as the idea that privacy safeguards need to be designed into Web products from the start. They also both want to require Web browsers to offer a "do not track" option to users.

But differences remain on specifics and philosophy.

EU officials are adamant that companies should obtain explicit permission from users before every use of their data -- such as through a pop-up consent box -- while that is not something U.S. regulators are pushing for, EU officials say.

The right to be forgotten is also a concept that goes against the grain for U.S. regulators, who favor a broader definition of freedom of information.

In a sign of where Europe is going and how complex applying the law could become, Spanish data protection authorities ordered Google in January to remove links to more than 80 news articles mentioning people by name, saying it violated privacy.

The case has been referred to Europe's highest court.

Some companies, such as Microsoft, support the effort by the European Union and the United States to align their policies, saying it will result in clearer, more uniform rules.

"Companies need solid, clear rules to be able to continue to invest and to be competitive," said John Vassallo, Microsoft's vice president of EU affairs. "Now, there are too many competing rules."

But even within individual EU countries, privacy rules vary so much that lawyers say it would be almost impossible for a multinational company to be compliant in all 27 EU countries.

That suggests that Reding and her EU regulatory team will have their work cut out if they are to draw up a clear and workable policy in the months ahead, and one that fits well with the rules U.S. regulators are also drawing up.

Do we have the Right to be Forgotten? The internet has made the world a much smaller and more connected planet. Google has been around for 15 years and they have made the subject of Privacy Rights an interesting one. As consumers we must also be careful of regulation as regulation goes both ways. A legal challenge has risen in Madrid, Spain....

MADRID – Their ranks include a plastic surgeon, a prison guard and a high school principal. All are Spanish, but have little else in common except this: They want old Internet references about them that pop up in Google searches wiped away.

In a case that Google Inc. and privacy experts call a first of its kind, Spain's Data Protection Agency has ordered the search engine giant to remove links to material on about 90 people. The information was published years or even decades ago but is available to anyone via simple searches.

Scores of Spaniards lay claim to a "Right to be Forgotten" because public information once hard to get is now so easy to find on the Internet. Google has decided to challenge the orders and has appealed five cases so far this year to the National Court.

Some of the information is embarrassing, some seems downright banal. A few cases involve lawsuits that found life online through news reports, but whose dismissals were ignored by media and never appeared on the Internet. Others concern administrative decisions published in official regional gazettes.

In all cases, the plaintiffs petitioned the agency individually to get information about them taken down.

And while Spain is backing the individuals suing to get links taken down, experts say a victory for the plaintiffs could create a troubling precedent by restricting access to public information.

The issue isn't a new one for Google, whose search engine has become a widely used tool for learning about the backgrounds about potential mates, neighbors and co-workers. What it shows can affect romantic relationships, friendships and careers.

For that reason, Google regularly receives pleas asking that it remove links to embarrassing information from its search index or least ensure the material is buried in the back pages of its results. The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., almost always refuses in order to preserve the integrity of its index.

A final decision on Spain's case could take months or even years because appeals can be made to higher courts. Still, the ongoing fight in Spain is likely to gain more prominence because the European Commission this year is expected to craft controversial legislation to give people more power to delete personal information they previously posted online.

"This is just the beginning, this right to be forgotten, but it's going to be much more important in the future," said Artemi Rallo, director of the Spanish Data Protection Agency. "Google is just 15 years old, the Internet is barely a generation old and they are beginning to detect problems that affect privacy. More and more people are going to see things on the Internet that they don't want to be there."

Many details about the Spaniards taking on Google via the government are shrouded in secrecy to protect the privacy of the plaintiffs.

Who doesn't have a cell phone nowadays? Just about everybody and their kids have one. Our cell phones say a lot about us and we have multiple companies and organizations tracking our usage and location data. And yes, you gave consent to this when you signed up for an account or when you bought your phone.

This is just a quick example of how your wireless carrier is tracking your every move.

"Deutsche Telekom is tracking its customers' locations and saving the information: '.... as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts. The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin. Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones."

“We are all walking around with little tags, and our tag has a phone number associated with it, who we called and what we do with the phone,” Sarah E. Williams, a graphic information expert at Columbia University tells the Times. “We don’t even know we are giving up that data.” In the United States, even less is known about what level of surveillance wireless companies are conducting on their customers because these companies are not required to divulge what information they collect.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, that information is extensive, and is only getting more so. One of the reasons carriers are collecting the data is for market research purposes. Another, perhaps more troubling reason, is for the benefit of law enforcement, like the FBI and CIA. In contrast to the installation of “cookies” by websites, which are used to gather information about a person’s online browsing habits, it is currently impossible — or at least incredibly difficult — to opt out of cell phone surveillance in the US.

A variety of “do not track” services, from companies like Google and Mozilla, are now available, which prevent websites from automatically installing cookies on users’ computers.

Perhaps that will change if customers start suing their carriers, as Mr. Spitz did in Germany. But in this age when many of us have already opted out of personal privacy by publishing a wide range of aspects of our lives online, such a fight seems unlikely.

This is interesting. Before Steve Jobs was with Apple, he worked at Atari and was assigned to design a prototype for for a single player Pong game called Breakout. Breakout was a game where you had to use a ball to deplete a wall of bricks without missing the ball on its rebound. Sound familiar? Of course, it's BrickBreaker. BrickBreaker has been preloaded on BlackBerry as far back as some of the first color screen devices.

It's hard to trace the origins of BrickBreaker and which device was the first to load it, but we remember it being on a 7100 and possibly the 7510 in 2004 when RIM had only around 2 million subscribers. Today, there are over 50 million BlackBerrys sold, and BrickBreaker has been installed on probably an equal number of devices.

This makes Steve Jobs the creator of the most popular BlackBerry game and maybe the second most popular mobile game in history. The only mobile game with more installs is probably Snake, which became a standard install on Nokia devices in 1998. While everyone is giving RIM flack for copying Apple, it must suck to know that the first and most popular BlackBerry game was created by Steve Jobs.

Like it or not, social networking is here to stay and is getting further ingrained in your lives. I'm seeing more instances where people are negatively affected by their posts on sites like Facebook. Facebook was one of the safe havens (my opinion) on the internet where we can express our thoughts to our chosen network. Some people use social networks to share random thoughts and others share their deep seeded beliefs. But what happens when your posts reach much farther than your network? 

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A bank worker was fired for her Facebook post comparing her £7-an-hour wage to Lloyds boss's £4,000-an-hour salary. The new Lloyds chief was set for a £13.5million pay package this year. A bank worker got the sack after she criticised her boss's £4,000-an-hour salary on Facebook. Stephanie Bon, 37, from Colchester, Essex, was working as a £7-an-hour as an HR assistant for Lloyds Banking Group when she heard about her new chief executive's mammoth salary. Miss Bon went on Facebook and posted 'LBG's new CEO gets £4,000 an hour. I get £7. That's fair.' But after her bosses heard about the comment she was marched from the offices and fired. 'That's fair': Lloyds bank worker Stephanie Bon, right, was sacked after she criticised chief executive António Horta-Osório's pay deal on Facebook Last week it was revealed that the taxpayer-owned bank offered António Horta-Osório as much as £13.5million in salary, bonuses and other benefits this year to poach him from Spanish bank Santander.

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I realize this is not a US company but it's disturbing none the less. I hope the victim sues the company and wins in order to set a precedent against this type of corporate behavior. Heck, If I was a lawyer, I'd do it for free. Has anybody seen or heard of this on US soil?

Google has bid $900 million for the patent portfolio of Nortel Networks, the Canadian telecom equipment maker, as part of a strategy to defend itself against patent litigation. The bid, which could grow even larger in Nortel's bankruptcy auction, would be the third-largest purchase by Google, smaller only than its payments for YouTube and DoubleClick.

The amount of money involved signals how fierce the patent wars have become, particularly in Silicon Valley, where even the largest and most powerful companies like Google are besieged by dozens of patent infringement suits. It also underscores Google's frustration with the state of the patent reform legislation in Congress.

Though Google could potentially use some of the technology in the Nortel patents in future research, the company said it wanted to buy them to defend against patent litigation. By building a large portfolio of patents, Google keeps them out of competitors' hands.

"The only reason Google's spending $900 million is because they feel the risk of those patents being in the hands of someone like Apple or a nonpracticing entity is much greater than $900 million," said Daniel Ravicher, executive director of the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law Public Patent Foundation.

Some of you may not even know what a Femtocell is.  Let me explain and explain why this is significant.

At first that may seem like a huge deal but there are currently around 256,000 cellular towers in the US compared to femtocells which now number at about 350,000. These femtocells are called different things by each carrier with Verizon going with Network Extender, AT&T choosing MicroCell, and Sprint with its Airave. The one thing these all have in common is that customers are dishing out $150+ to install and use a mini cellphone tower in your house which uses your broadband internet and your electricity bill to provide you service the carrier was supposed to offer in the first place. I simply feel like we have this equation wrong. Carriers should be paying us to install these devices!

Either way sales of femtocells is not slowing down anytime soon. Carriers are being flooded with connections that their infrastructure can barely handle. Some are turning to Wi-Fi to offload heavy data usage but all of these solutions seem like a bit of a cop out. I am truly hoping that LTE will alleviate some of these pain points but my conversations with experts in LTE do not suggest it will be any easier without a huge influx of additional frequency bandwidth for carriers.  Experts in WiMax feel strongly that it will not have problems handling the seemingly exponential demands on their networks. In fact, many WiMax experts are puzzled at the global movement and accpetance of LTE in their 4G arsenal. 

I was curious how many of you have a femtocell in your home? I've been using the Sprint Airave in my home because there are rooms that are basically wrapped in concrete and reception has always been spotty in these corners. After the Airave we all have 5 full bars of signal and better battery life.  However, we sometimes experience a delay as is common in VoIP communications.

Internet privacy is a hot topic but our government is doing a great job of keeping it under wraps. Government intervention in internet privacy can have global repercussions. This won't be pretty! Online regulation will violate our privacy and our rights... and the government will do it in the name of safety.

There are at least five US government efforts underway to regulate data and online privacy, according to a new US government internet policy official, who sees some kind of privacy regulation as likely. Ari Schwartz, who left the Center for Democracy and Technology two months ago to become senior internet policy advisor at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, says issues like Facebook's never-ending privacy concerns are making some kind of a national law or regulation more and more likely. He thinks segregating identity from data isn't enough; the data must then be aggregated after identity is stripped out. He also called for objective measures of privacy compliance.

This will be a sticky subject but for me it's similar to gun control. While I don't exactly care for guns, I know that if my right was taken way to own one, many other rights go along with it. The internet is part of our culture and the future, be aware of what your government is doing and act when your rights are in jeopardy.

From the Wall Street Journal.  Here is one indicator of the allure of Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial culture: Diane Keng just launched her third start-up -- and she is still in high school.  

In March, the 18-year-old launched Internet company MyWeboo.com to help teens manage their digital lives and social-network identities in one place. She is now pitching the company to venture capitalists, and earlier this week presented at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Yet each morning, Ms. Keng also heads to Cupertino's Monta Vista High School for a schedule of classes that includes Advanced Placement economics and government. In the afternoons, the high-school senior squeezes in varsity badminton practice.

"My age, my gender and my lack of experience don't deter me from going after what I want for the company," says Ms. Keng, who runs marketing for MyWeboo.com from home and co-founded the venture with her 25-year-old brother, Steven.

Ms. Keng has several advantages in pursuing her entrepreneurial ambitions, including her father, a venture capitalist who splits his time between Beijing and Cupertino and gave her $100,000 in seed money.

Another big advantage is that Ms. Keng is here in Silicon Valley and can tap the region's unique ecosystem of tech resources and experience -- not to mention supportive parents and teachers. Her high school alone is home to about 10 entrepreneurs, including a student who buys and flips websites that he thinks have potential.

The Valley is filled with teen-entrepreneur legends: Gurbaksh Chahal started online ad company Click Agents in San Jose when he was 16, and sold it for $40 million two years later. He then founded ad network BlueLithium, which he sold for $300 million when he was 25.

Kristopher Tate, who five years ago finished high school early and drove his parents' car from San Diego to Cupertino at the age of 16 to launch photo-sharing site Zooomr, says Silicon Valley is a great place for budding entrepreneurs. "Everybody is there, and when you want to step up or feel like your idea is worth a grain of salt, there are people who will take it seriously." Today, Mr. Tate is 22 and runs a portfolio of Internet companies from Tokyo, but isn't involved in Zooomr's day-to-day operation.

Despite the encouraging business environment, teen entrepreneurs have their own set of work-life balance issues.

"For the first two years that it took me from starting Click Agents to selling it, I basically sacrificed my youth," says Mr. Chahal, who dropped out of high school to focus on his start-ups. "I slept and worked in the office."

In addition, many start-ups don't succeed, which can bring some particularly harsh lessons for young entrepreneurs. They are, as a set, more inclined to overvalue their own ideas, according to YouNoodle Inc., which tracks start-ups. In a recent survey, YouNoodle found that founders under the age of 25 expected their companies would be worth about 27% more after three years than other founders (who are, on average, 35 years old).

Ms. Keng co-founded the venture with her 25-year-old brother, Steven.

Other young entrepreneurs end up putting school first. Virtual goods marketplace PlaySpan Inc. was founded in 2006 in the garage of San Jose sixth-grader Arjun Mehta, who wanted a better way to sell items he had won in online games. He created a mock-up of his ideal website, then passed the baton to his dad, who now runs the company while Arjun attends eighth grade.

"In my free time, I test out the commerce side of the site," says Arjun. He says he doesn't demand a salary, but has kept the title of co-founder.

Ms. Keng launched her first venture at age 15, when she started a T-shirt screen-printing business and later began a teen marketing-consulting firm. She says she ended up dropping the T-shirt company because it wasn't making enough money, and the second business because she felt she was spreading herself too thin amid activities, and needed to devote time to prepare for the ACT.

With MyWeboo.com, it helps that Ms. Keng's school encourages entrepreneurial activity and makes allowances for an enterprise's demands. Fiercely competitive Monta Vista offers business classes that include marketing and finance, and brings groups like the Silicon Valley Private Equity Roundtable to workshops on how to write a business plan. Teachers allow Ms. Keng to miss class and make up tests as needed.

"If they're going to fail, they might as well fail when they are young," says Carl Schmidt, Ms. Keng's business teacher at Monta Vista. He teaches students that 90% to 95% of all new products fail, so they must focus on doing their research and solving a real consumer need.

Still, balancing so much requires focus. Ms. Keng, who says she gets As and Bs and will attend Santa Clara University beginning in the fall with a full scholarship, turns off her cellphone and email while at school or doing homework. "If it's a business call, that's what voicemail is for. I will call you back," she says.

And her father, Brian Keng, says he insists academics remain his daughter's top priority. Ms. Keng's parents also ask that she communicate with them about all her business activities.

"She is just in high school," says Mr. Keng, "and sometimes it is very difficult for her to make a judgment."

Even with those boundaries, developing a business is a far cry from traditional high-school diversions like glee club or yearbook. Those activities are still around, but "there needs to be a place for those kids who are entrepreneurs and are a little bit eccentric and are willing to push the envelope," says Mr. Schmidt.