SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – If you’re amazed — and maybe even a little alarmed — about how much Google seems to know about you, brace yourself. Beginning Thursday, Google will operate under a streamlined privacy policy that enables the Internet’s most powerful company to dig even deeper into the lives of its more than 1 billion users.

Google says the changes will make it easier for consumers to understand how it collects personal information, and allow the company to create more helpful and compelling services. Critics, including most of the country’s state attorneys general and a top regulator in Europe, argue that Google is trampling on people’s privacy rights in its relentless drive to sell more ads.

Here’s a look at some of the key issues to consider as Google tries to learn about you.

Q: How will Google’s privacy changes affect users?

A: Google Inc. is combining more than 60 different privacy policies so it will be able to throw all the data it gathers about each of its logged-in users into personal dossiers. The information Google learns about you while you enter requests into its search engine can be culled to suggest videos to watch when you visit the company’s YouTube site.

Users who write a memo on Google’s online word processing program, Docs, might be alerted to the misspelling of the name of a friend or co-worker a user has communicated with on Google’s Gmail. The new policy pools information from all Google-operated services, empowering the company to connect the dots from one service to the next.

Q: Why is Google making these changes?

A: The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., says it is striving for a “beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google.” What Google hasn’t spent much time talking about is how being able to draw more revealing profiles about its users will help sell advertising — the main source of its $38 billion in annual revenue.

One reason Google has become such a big advertising network: Its search engine analyzes requests to figure out which people are more likely to be interested in marketing pitches about specific products and services. Targeting the ads to the right audience is crucial because in many cases, Google only gets paid when someone clicks on an ad link. And, of course, advertisers tend to spend more money if Google is bringing them more customers.

Q: Is there a way to prevent Google from combining the personal data it collects from all its services?

A: No, not if you’re a registered user of Gmail, Google Plus, YouTube, or other Google products. But you can minimize the data Google gathers. For starters, make sure you aren’t logged into one of Google’s services when you’re using Google’s search engine, watching a YouTube video or perusing pictures on Picasa. You can get a broad overview of what Google knows about you at http://www.google.com/dashboard , where a Google account login is required. Google also offers the option to delete users’ history of search activity.

It’s important to keep in mind that Google can still track you even when you’re not logged in to one of its services. But the information isn’t quite as revealing because Google doesn’t track you by name, only through a numeric Internet address attached to your computer or an alphanumeric string attached to your Web browser.

Q: Are all Google services covered by the privacy policy?

A: No, a few products, such as Google’s Chrome Web browser and mobile payment processor Wallet, will still be governed by separate privacy policies.

Q: Is Google’s new privacy policy legal?

A: The company has no doubt about it. That’s why it’s repeatedly rebuffed pleas to delay the changes since announcing the planned revisions five weeks ago. But privacy activists and even some legal authorities have several concerns.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group, sued the FTC in a federal court in an effort to force the FTC to exercise its powers and block Google’s privacy changes. A federal judge ruled the courts didn’t have the authority to tell the FTC how to regulate Google. The FTC says it is always looking for evidence that one of its consent orders has been violated.

Earlier this week, the French regulatory agency CNIL warned Google CEO Larry Page that the new policy appears to violate the European Union’s strict data-protection rules. Last week, 36 attorneys general in the U.S. and its territories derided the new policy as an “invasion of privacy” in a letter to Page.

One of the major gripes is that registered Google users aren’t being given an option to consent to, or reject, the changes, given that they developed their dependence on the services under different rules. In particular, people who bought smartphones running on Google’s Android software, and signed two-year contracts to use the devices, may have a tough time avoiding the new privacy policy. They could switch to non-Google services, but those typically don’t work as well on Android software. Or they could buy a different smartphone and pay an early-termination penalty.

Q: What regulatory power do government agencies have to change or amend the privacy changes?

A: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission gained greater oversight over Google’s handling of personal information as part of a settlement reached last year. Google submitted to the agreement after exposing its users email contacts when it launched a now-defunct social networking service called Buzz in 2010. The consent order requires Google’s handling of personal information to be audited every other year and forbids misleading or deceptive privacy changes.

Google met with the FTC before announcing the privacy changes. Neither the company nor the FTC has disclosed whether Google satisfied regulators that the revisions comply with the consent order.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Microsoft Corp. has finally reached a long sought and expensive goal — its Bing search engine now ranks second behind Google in the Internet’s most lucrative market.

Bing and Microsoft’s other websites fielded 2.75 billion search requests in the U.S. during December, catapulting in front of Yahoo Inc. for the first time in the jockeying for runner up to Google Inc., according to statistics released Wednesday by comScore Inc.

Bing’s December volume translated into a 15.1 percent share of the U.S. search traffic, comScore said. Yahoo processed 2.65 billion search requests, representing 14.5 percent of the U.S. market.

Google remained Internet’s go-to place for information, with 12 billion U.S. requests in December. That works out to a 65.9 percent market share.

Other research firms track the Internet search market. But comScore’s numbers matter the most to industry analysts and the companies trying to attract queries so they can make more money from the ads that appear alongside the results. Google’s dominance of online search is the main reason it has established itself as the Internet’s most profitable company.

Analysts have expected Microsoft and Yahoo to flip-flop their positions in Internet search since they announced a partnership in July 2009. The 10-year agreement has enabled Yahoo to save money by relying on Microsoft to provide the bulk of its search technology.

Microsoft wanted the deal so it would have billions more search requests to analyze each year, giving it a better chance to learn about people’s tendencies and preferences.

Pursuing Google has come at a huge cost for Microsoft, which still makes most of its money from the Windows operating software and other software it sells for personal computers. Microsoft’s online division, which is anchored by Bing, has suffered operating losses of about $7 billion since June 2008.

Even though it leans heavily on Microsoft’s technology, Yahoo hasn’t totally abandoned search. It still offers some unique features within its results in hopes of persuading more people to search on its website instead of going directly to Bing. The main reason: Yahoo still gets 88 percent of the ad revenue from searches conducted on its website and receives nothing from queries entered on Bing.

The efforts haven’t been enough to prevent a steady slide in searches at Yahoo. The company’s share of the U.S. search market stood at about 19 percent when it joined forces with Microsoft, according to comScore. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s market share has climbed from roughly 9 percent.

Yahoo’s eroding search share is one of the reasons that its revenue has been falling during the past three years.

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By Ben Parr, Mashable
February 11, 2011 9:59 a.m. EST | Filed under: Social Media

(Mashable) — Facebook has begun rolling out a full redesign of Facebook Pages. The changes will make the Pages look and operate more like user profiles.

The new Pages redesign was first seen in December, when Facebook accidentally launched it and quickly took it down. The update not only removed tabs, but it gave page admins the ability to post and comment on other Facebook Pages through a “Login as Page” feature.

Those prototype features have made the cut for today’s launch. As Facebook’s Rohit Dhawan, the lead product manager for Facebook Pages, explained to me earlier today, the company has wanted to redesign Facebook Pages ever since it launched the profile redesign.

“We strongly believe you should have consistent experiences when possible,” Dhawan said.
The big difference everyone will notice will be the new layout. The left-hand menu for editing pages has been removed in favor of a new navigation menu that replaces the old tabbing system.

And like the Facebook Profiles redesign, the left-hand “Information” box is also gone. However, page admins can now add info about their brand at the top of the page under the main title.

The right-hand menu has also been tweaked. There is now a section that features the page’s admins (if you so choose) as well as a section that shows users how many of their friends have also “liked” that particular page.
Finally, just like profiles, a page can now feature relevant photos at the top. This could lead to some very creative uses for Facebook Pages.

There are some other notable differences between the new Facebook Pages and the old version, especially for page admins.
The “Login as Page” feature gives admins the ability to interact with the rest of Facebook as a page, not an individual. For example, I could log in as Mashable and start commenting and “liking” things on Facebook Pages that have “liked” Mashable.
Admins will also see a different News Feed if they are logged in as their page; It will display the most important news from the pages you’ve “liked.”

“A page can now use Facebook as if they were an individual with the ability to interact with other pages,” Dhawan said. “It provides interesting content when people are visiting the page. ”

Pages can’t do everything a user can, though. Most importantly, they cannot post on a user’s wall or comment on his or her status. The lone exception is for a user who has opted for the “everybody” privacy setting; Pages can comment on status updates for those individuals.

The other update Facebook is adding is an “Everyone” filter that brings the most interesting and engaging posts from a page’s community to the top of the page. This makes it easier for users and admins to easily find the most “liked” and commented-on conversations on a particular page.

The new Facebook Pages are also smart enough to filter out posts that are not in a language you speak.

The new design launches today as a preview for Facebook Page admins. Before switching, they can check to see what their page will look like and tweak elements of the design before launch.

The company is also releasing a Page Tour and a manual to explain the new design. Admins will have until March 10 to switch over though, before Facebook automatically updates every page to the new design.

© 2010 MASHABLE.com. All rights reserved.

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Posted by Kim Peterson on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 3:47 PM

The battle between Google (GOOG) and Skype just ratcheted up a notch with Facebook’s entry into the fray.

Recall that Google recently launched voice calling from Gmail, allowing (through the end of the year, at least) people to make free calls from their Gmail page. I’ve been using that feature daily to make free long-distance calls from my computer.

Some thought the new service was the death knell for online calling service Skype. But Skype showed Wednesday that it’s very much in the game with an alliance with Facebook (also known as Google enemy No. 1).

The Wall Street Journal has news of a nascent partnership that will allow people to access Skype through their Facebook Connect accounts. If the plan goes through as reported, users will eventually be able to call and video chat with friends on the Facebook page, using Skype.

The new Facebook abilities are expected to be included in Skype’s newest version, due out in the next few weeks, the Journal reported. Post continues after video:

“The partnership will more tightly link Skype’s 560 million registered users — 124 million of whom use it at least once a month — with Facebook’s 500 million members,” writes Scott Morrison.

The move shows that Facebook wants to be exactly where Google is in the future, particularly as Google starts expanding to become more of a social media and communications hub. And the news is good for Skype as well, which is looking for a $100 million IPO at some point.

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(CNN) — Concerns over Facebook’s new privacy policy and the online social network’s recent efforts to spread its information across the Web have led some of the site’s faithful to delete their accounts — or at least try to.
On Wednesday’s episode of a podcast called This Week in Technology, host Leo Laporte, a well-known tech pundit, said he had to search wikiHow, a how-to site, to figure out how to delete his Facebook account permanently.
After finding the delete button, which he said is hidden deep within the site’s menus, Laporte proceeded to delete his account during the online broadcast.

“That’s it. It’s gone,” he said during the show. “And I think that’s the right thing to do.”

Read entire article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/05/13/facebook.delete.privacy/index.html?hpt=T2

Internet Explorer losing grip on browser market

Many people complain about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. There have even been campaigns to kill old versions of the Web browser.

But despite the haters, IE has always remained way on top. In June 2002, 95 percent of computers accessed the Internet through the product, which comes installed as the default web-surfing tool on Microsoft Windows computers.

IE remains dominant today. But, compared to its heights in the early 2000s, it’s slipping. This week, the market researcher NetApplications released a report saying IE has fallen to less than 60 percent of the browser market.

Meanwhile, alternative browsers like Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox are catching up a bit.

Firefox makes up nearly a quarter of the browser market; and newer Chrome is at about 7 percent, up from about 2 percent a year ago in May.

A new version of Internet Explorer – IE9 – is expected to debut soon.

Gartner analyst Jeffrey Mann tells the BBC that alternatives to IE continue to catch consumer attention:

“There are more viable alternatives now. Google has been advertising and there are more people using Macs and Apple’s Safari. There is just a great awareness that there are alternatives,” he says.

That’s impressive, considering there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that many Web users don’t know what a browser is. (If you’re one of them, don’t feel bad. It’s the program you open in order to access the internet. It’s what you’re using to view this story.)

What do you make of IE’s slipping market share? Which browser do you use and why?

Advertising will fail for three reasons:

There are three problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast or online:

Consumers do not trust advertising. Dan Ariely has demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source have much lower credibility and much lower impact on the perception of product quality than the same message attributed to a rating service. Forrester Research has completed studies that show that advertising and company sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and online reviews from customers are the highest.

Consumers do not want to view advertising. Think of watching network TV news and remember that the commercials on all the major networks are as closely synchronized as possible. Why? If network executives believed we all wanted to see the ads they would be staggered, so that users could channel surf to view the ads; ads are synchronized so that users cannot channel surf to avoid the ads.

And mostly consumers do not need advertising. My own research suggests that consumers behave as if they get much of their information about product offerings from the internet, through independent professional rating sites like dpreview.com or community content rating services like Ratebeer.com or TripAdvisor.

Read rest of article at TechCrunch

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Dispatch/market-dispatches.aspx?post=1619799&_blg=1,1620847

More people in the United States are falling victim to identity fraud.

A study by Javelin Strategy & Research showed that the number of victims jumped by 12% to 11.1 million adults in 2009, the biggest increase since the survey began in 2003.

“Identity fraud continues on the upswing and we believe it will continue to rise if consumers fail to take proactive steps to prevent fraudsters from taking advantage of their offline and online transactions and their increasingly exposed personal information on social networks,” said Michael Stanfield, CEO of Intersections (INTX), one of the survey’s sponsors.

“The findings of this Javelin report reinforce what we’ve been telling consumers for more than a decade — be vigilant with whom you are sharing your personal information and where you are sharing it. Protect your computer and only transact on confirmed legitimate websites,” Stanfield said in a press release.

The study said that total overall fraud rose by 12.5% to $54 billion.

Payment-card-related fraud is the most common type of crime, according to the study, with someone opening up a new account in the victim’s name. The perpetrator is often someone the victim knows, such as a family member or presumed friend, according to Javelin founder James Van Dyke.

The number of new credit card accounts opened fraudulently rose 39% in 2009, with new online accounts more than doubling, and the number of new e-mail payment accounts rising 12%.

Fraud on existing accounts rose 12%, with the vast majority occurring with credit cards.

The study also found that 29% of identity-fraud victims said that mobile phone accounts were fraudulently opened in their names.

One good thing in the report: less time to resolve identity crime. It takes 21 hours on average, down from 30 hours reported the year before.

The mobile ad space continued to heat up last week with Amobee’s acquisition of RingRing Media, a 2-year-old London-based startup, for an undisclosed sum. The move surely isn’t anywhere near the magnitude of Google’s $750 million AdMob buy or even Apple’s $275 million pick-up of Quattro Wireless, but it’s the kind of smaller-scale deal we’re likely to see many more of this year as the segment consolidates.

Mobile ad startups are hot commodities once again thanks largely to in-app marketing, which has given the segment a much-needed lift over the last year. Established Internet companies and software development companies alike are scrambling to gain a foothold in the space, much like in 2007, which saw a flurry of activity including AOL’s acquisition of Third Screen Media, Yahoo’s pick-up of Actionality, the Microsoft ScreenTonic buy and Nokia’s tie-up with Enpocket. While 2010 may not see as many blockbuster deals, the number of tie-ups could end up surpassing that of three years ago, Rich Wong of Accel Partners told me last week:

Brand managers now are spending in this medium. It’s real, and it’s genuine. I do think it’s going to be hard to have a quarterly earnings call as a major Internet company and not have an answer to the question, ‘What’s your mobile strategy?’

The landscape is far different now than it was just three years ago, though, when a handful of startups were quick to emerge in the nascent space. Recent figures from IDC indicate that Millennial Media is clearly the largest startup left on the field (see chart); the mobile search firm JumpTap is the second-largest potential acquisition despite a mere 4 percent market share. Yahoo and Microsoft claim a combined market share of only 19 percent — which may prompt the high-profile players to make an acquisition or two this year in order to build their mobile businesses.

The field also teems with smaller player that specialize in targeted areas such as search or that serve specific geographic regions. And recent growth in the space has given rise to a host of startups that play supporting roles by providing analytics and other tools. Flurry, which pocketed $7 million on the heels of its recent tie-up with Pinch Media, may be especially attractive to ad companies that don’t have their own mobile analytics operations.

So while we may see one or two more big-budget acquisitions in mobile advertising this year, most of the M&A activity will center on smaller startups. Entrenched firms with deep pockets will look to fill out the holes in their mobile ad businesses, and independent players will forge alliances to better compete with their larger counterparts. Those deals won’t make headlines, but they will reconfigure the landscape of mobile advertising in 2010.

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