“All your Tweets are belong to us… with a court order. Twitter’s second transparency report reinforces what many already know: governments want online user data, and to yank select content from the Internet. Twitter’s first two transparency reports cover the entirety of 2012, so there’s not a deep historical record to mine for insight. Nonetheless, that year’s worth of data shows all types of government inquiry—information requests, removal requests, and copyright notices—either on the increase or holding relatively steady. Governments requested user information from Twitter some 1,009 times in the second half of 2012, up slightly from 849 requests in the first half of that year. Content-removal requests spiked from 6 in the first half of 2012 to 42 in the second. Meanwhile, copyright notices declined a bit, from 3378 in the first half of 2012 to 3268 in the second.” http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/01/28/2027200/twitters-new-transparency-report-governments-still-want-your-data?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
Google pledges fight over government access to users’ email
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Google will lobby Washington in 2013 to make it harder for law enforcement authorities to gain access to emails and other digital messages. In a blog post on Monday, linked to Data Privacy Day, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said the tech giant, in coalition with many other powerful tech companies, will try to convince Congress to update a 1986 privacy protection law. He cited data showing that government requests for Google’s user data increased more than 70 percent since 2009. In 2012, Google said, it received 16,407 requests for user data affecting 31,072 users or accounts, more than half of them accompanied by a subpoena. “We’re a law-abiding company, and we don’t want our services to be used in harmful ways. But it’s just as important that laws protect you against overly broad requests for your personal information,” Drummond said in the post. The U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in the early days of the Internet, does not require government investigators to have a search warrant when requesting access to old emails and messages that are stored online, providing less protection for them than, say, letters stored in a desk drawer or even messages saved on a computer’s hard drive. The current system also makes complex distinctions, many disputed in courts, between emails saved as drafts online, in transit, unopened or opened. Some of them are to be released with subpoenas, which have a lower threshold than search warrants as they often do not involve a judge. A warrant is generally approved by a judge if investigators have “probable cause” to believe that their search is likely to turn up information related to a crime. Google, Microsoft Corp, Yahoo and popular social media site Twitter – among others – have resisted turning over customer data. They have put in place policies, based on the constitutional protection from unreasonable searches, that require search warrants for access to content of private communications. Privacy activists say the outdated law should be reformed to extend the constitutional right to privacy online, but legislation limiting government requests will not face an easy road. Last year, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill that would have updated the current law. It triggered a wave of concerns from the police and FBI that new restrictions would impede crime investigations and possibly endanger victims. “After three decades, it is essential that Congress update ECPA to ensure that this critical law keeps pace with new technologies and the way Americans use and store email today,” Leahy said in a statement on Monday. His privacy legislation died in Congress last year after his counterpart in the House of Representatives, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Republican, drafted another version of that bill, which also tackled other issues but stripped out privacy reform language. Last year, Goodlatte said he was willing to consider the privacy law reform, but that the timeline then was too short for a “thorough examination.” Leahy has now included the change of privacy laws as one of his top priorities this year. http://news.yahoo.com/google-pledges-fight-over-government-access-users-email-234520748–sector.html
App.net Adds 10 GB of Storage for Users
We’ve reported in the past about App.net, the little subscription based social media platform that could, and as of Monday the site has added 10 GB of storage on top of Alpha, the ad-free Twitter-like service. Use of App.net comes at a price of $5 a month, or $36 for a year.
Most enticing to hear, Jon Mitchell of ReadWrite speculates that App.net may in fact start offering the social media portion of the site for free, now that the cloud storage business model can support it.
The prospect of a privacy-respecting social media platform had me think of this article on Gizmodo. Will there ever be a day when the dominant social media platform isn’t the one that sells off our information to the highest bidder? A platform where the focus isn’t so much on advertising and deception but on straightforward social interaction? It’s hard to say if this model will ever take off, but the web 2.0 utopia it aspires to is definitely something worth getting excited about.
Google+ moves up to second place in social networks
Last year, many people dismissed Google’s Google+ social network as a “virtual ghost town.” That was then. This is now. According to GlobalWebIndex, Google+, with 343-million active users, has become the second largest social network globally. As Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior VP of engineering, observed, “That is a lot of ghosts”
Facebook is still the top social network, but Google+ has moved into second place. (Credit: GlobalWebIndex)
Facebook is still the biggest of the social networks by a large margin. By GlobalWebIndex’s count Facebook has almost 700-million active users. The research group defines active users as those who used or contributed to a site in the past monthAll three of the major global social networks, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter are growing by leaps and bounds. “Data collected in GWI.8 (Q4 2012) demonstrates the continued shift in usage from localized social platforms to global ones with huge growth for Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. The fastest growing network in 2013 in terms of “Active Usage” was Twitter which grew 40% to 288m across our 31 markets (approximately 90% of global Internet population). 21% of the global Internet population now use Twitter actively on a monthly basis. This compares to 21% actively using YouTube, 25% actively using Google+ and a staggering 51% using Facebook on a monthly basis.”
Say hello to the new look of Google Plus (screenshots)
Even with Twitter’s growth, however, “Google+, who despite being branded a failure or ghost town by large portions of the media, grew in terms of active usage by 27% to 343m users to become the number 2 social platform. Interestingly for Google, YouTube (not previously tracked by us as a social platform) comes in at number 3, demonstrating the immense opportunity of linking Google’s services through the G+ social layer. This is also a key indication of why Google+ integrated with the Google product set is so key to the future of search and the Internet.”Indeed so, I’ve long thought that Google’s integration of Google Plus into many of its services would lead to massive growth. But, just because people using Google services such as Gmail or YouTube got a Google+ membership didn’t mean they’d actually use the service. So, what I find more interesting is that GlobalWebIndex’s data indicates that Google+s’ members are actively using the social network rather than just their attached Google services.
Mind you, I don’t find this much of a surprise. I’m a member of most of the popular social networks and Google+ is easily my favorite of them.
Where is Google+’s growth coming from? It’s not at the expense of Facebook or Twitter. Instead, like them, Google+ is cannibalizing smaller, local social networks. “The growth in the large, global social platforms is coming broadly at the expense of local services like MeinVz, Hyves, Copains d’Avant. Even more interestingly, we are seeing a large decline across the board in local Chinese services with Tencent Weibo, Kaixin, Sina Weibo and QZone all declining substantially, up to 57% in the case of Tencent Weibo.”
Looking ahead, it appears that the global networks, led by Facebook, Google+, Twitter and YouTube, will all continue to grow at the expense of the local social networks. Will Google+ eventually catch-up and pass Facebook? Possibly, but it won’t be soon. Even with privacy concerns and annoying notifications, Facebook is continuing to maintain its dominant position.
via Google+ moves up to second place in social networks | ZDNet.
Facebook legal notice could get you cash, so don’t trash it
Facebook recently sent a legal notice to users that may appear daunting at first glance, but before you relegate it to the trash bin you ought to take a look at it – it could mean cash in your pocket.
The notice is meant to notify some of its U.S. members that their names, profile pictures, photographs, likenesses, and identities were unlawfully used to advertise or sell products and services through Sponsored Stories without obtaining those members’ consent.
“Sponsored Stories” is targeted advertising that uses information about your friends to sell stuff to you.
To settle a class action lawsuit (Angel Fraley v. Facebook) resulting from those allegations of unlawful use of its members’ content, the social network is proposing to pay $20 million into a fund to be used to pay members who appeared in the sponsored stories.
If you received the legal notice from Facebook, you may be paid up to $10 as part of the settlement.
There’s no guarantee you will get the money, however.
As the notice points out: “The amount, if any, paid to each claimant depends upon the number of claims made and other factors detailed in the settlement. No one knows in advance how much each claimant will receive, or whether any money will be paid directly to claimants.”
Since as many as 100 million Facebook members may be affected by the settlement, and the fund would be exhausted after paying $10 to 2 million members, there’s a good possibility that the alternative distribution scheme outlined in the settlement will be implemented.
That alternative would divvy up the money among a number of non-profit organizations involved in educational outreach that teaches adults and children how to use social media technologies safely, or are involved in research of social media.
According to the long form of the legal notice [PDF], those organizations include the Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Harvard Law School), Information Law Institute (NYU Law School), Berkeley Center for Law and Technology (Berkeley Law School), Center for Internet and Society (Stanford Law School), High Tech Law Institute, (Santa Clara University School of Law), Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood, Consumers Federation of America, Consumer Privacy Rights Fund, ConnectSafely.org, and WiredSafety.org.
You can fill out a claim form and see what happens.
The Fraley case began winding its way through the courts in March 2011, when five Facebook members, including two minors, maintained they claimed to represent a class of people injured by the Sponsored Stories.
In June 2012, Facebook and its opponents in the litigation announced a $10 million settlement in the case in which all the money would go to social service organizations and advocacy groups involved in the protection of children in the context of social media.
About a month later, the federal judge presiding over the case — Judge Lucy Koh, who also presided over Apple’s successful intellectual property case against Samsung in the U.S. — recused herself from the case without an explanation.
Judge Richard Seeborg, who took over the case from Koh, subsequently rejected the $10 million settlement . In denying the proposed settlement, the judge maintained that Facebook did not adequately justify the size of the final deal.
A deal with a new settlement amount was hammered out in October and received preliminary approval from Seeborg in December.
Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution
When Page took office, his first directive was clear. “Larry said ‘hey everyone, we’re going to redesign all of our products,’” recalls Jon Wiley, lead designer on Google Search. Wiley and co had just two months to give Google a fresh coat of paint, and to start thinking holistically about how Google as a whole was perceived. “We had a mandate to make this all look good,” Wiley says.
It wasn’t the first time that Google’s designers had tried to unify the design language across multiple products, but it would turn out to be the most successful by far. “Historically at Google there were pockets of designers that said ‘let’s bring all of Google together into one beautiful, amazing design,’ but because of the way Google is set up — for speed — […] it was hard for any one team to push that Google-wide,” says Wiley. It’s not that there weren’t designers at Google before, it’s just that they weren’t moving in the same direction and they didn’t have as much authority as they needed.
“When I joined Google five years ago, there was no such thing as a common design language for our platform,” says Andrey Doronichev, Senior Product Manager for YouTube Mobile, “we always wanted to create beautiful applications, but our priorities were different.” A Google-wide design initiative “required the vision of a CEO,” says Wiley, “who could rally the entire company to make it happen.” Wiley codenamed Google’s new design direction Kennedy — a reference to Page’s now-famous “moon shot” strategy for thinking up new products.
Google’s senior designers gathered to decide how a few design principles would be applied evenly and tastefully to dozens of products used by over a billion people. There was also some “outside help” from Google Creative Lab, as Wiley described in a 2011 talk entitled “Whoa, Google has Designers!” Google Creative Lab is a collection of top-tier designers in the company’s New York offices, mostly known for creating unique and emotionally compelling marketing projects like a tear-jerking Super Bowl ad or the innovative Arcade Fire music video. Page tapped Creative Lab to work with the rest of Google’s designers on creating the new vision. Unlike Apple, Google is willing to work with outside parties on design, and that played a role in the creation of Kennedy. “What might a cohesive vision for Google look like?”, Page asked them.
Read the rest at the Verge: Redesigning Google: how Larry Page engineered a beautiful revolution | The Verge.
