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Google, Facebook go retro in push to update 1986 privacy law
Nicole Ozer from the ACLU of Northern California, demonstrating what cell phones looked like in 1986.
(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET)
WASHINGTON--For a few hours on Capitol Hill yesterday evening, it was October 1986 again, complete with legwarmers, an Apple IIc, pop rocks, Duran Duran, and cell phones the size of a cat.
The companies sponsoring this night of nostalgia include Google and Facebook, which are hoping to visibly highlight how out-of-date a law enacted 25 years ago today has become in an age of cloud computing, gigabit networks, and terabyte storage.
The law in question is the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a statute written in the pre-Internet era of telephone modems and the black-and-white Macintosh Plus. A coalition of groups, which include liberal, conservative, and libertarian non-profit organizations as well as companies, hope to convince the U.S. Congress to update the law to include location privacy and to protect documents stored on the Web through services like Google Docs, Flickr, and Picasa. (CNET was the first to report on the creation of this Digital Due Process coalition last year.)
Their not-so-subtle intent of yesterday's back-to-the-future blast: to woo congressional staff. That meant convening this privacy-law bacchanal, probably the first the nation's capital has ever experienced, a few blocks from the Senate and House offices at Top of the Hill on Pennsylvania Avenue, which describes itself as a "World War II-era lounge" featuring "an extensive wine, champagne and martini list."
The mood of the festivities received a last-minute boost when Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary committee, announced he was planning a committee vote to revise the 1986 law by the end of the year.
"Today this law is significantly outdated and outpaced by rapid changes in technology and the changing mission of our law enforcement agencies after September 11," Leahy said. "At a time in our history when American consumers and businesses face threats to privacy like no time before, we must renew" our commitment to privacy.
ECPA is notoriously convoluted and difficult even for judges to follow. The groups hope to simplify the wording while requiring police to obtain a search warrant to access private communications and the locations of mobile devices--which is not always the case today.
Another argument for updating ECPA: Internet users currently enjoy more privacy rights if they store data locally, a legal hiccup that could slow the shift to cloud-based services unless it's changed.
To Jobs, Microsoft and Google 'just don't get it' (video)
As producer Graham Messick points out, these recordings were made on walks and in Jobs' own home. If you listen closely during the "60 Minutes" broadcast (this Sunday at 7 p.m. ET/PT) you can hear birds chirping, doors slamming and kids playing.
Rogue Google engineer: Google trying to make me happy
Many of you will have been understandably concerned about the personal safety of Steve Yegge.
He's the Google engineer who, last week, accidentally posted a public disquisition on Google+about, well, Google's vast and many failures. Its Google+ platform, for example, which he described as "a pathetic afterthought."
Could it be that Messrs. Page and Brin would consider that same phrase for Yegge? Could it be that they would have him thrown off a peak in Mountain View, cackling as his career crashed somewhere down below?
Please fear not. Because after midnight last night, Yegge posted again to Google+ to inform the world that Google loves him to smithereens and is already working to address his vast and fundamental concerns.
(Credit: Screenshot: Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)
"Amazingly, nothing bad happened to me at Google. Everyone just laughed at me a lot, all the way up to the top, for having committed what must be the great-granddaddy of all Reply-All screwups in tech history," he wrote.
But wait. Whatever you might have been told, especially by Sergey Brin--who said this week that he had stopped reading Yegge's lengthy rant "after the first thousand pages or so"--Yegge is possibly maybe something of a hero.
For he declared of his employers: "They also listened, which is super cool. I probably shouldn't talk much about it, but they're already figuring out how to deal with some of the issues I raised."
We all have things that we probably shouldn't talk much about. Especially at Yegge's length. He knows this well. His new Google+ tagline is "Someday my foot won't fit in my mouth." But he is clearly excited that his original 5,000 words-ish screed didn't fall on fallow ground.
He does, though, end this new (and still lengthy) post with some thoughts about how brilliant, polymathic, astounding, PowerPoint-averse and genius-like his former employer, Amazon's Jeff Bezos happens to be.
It's all going so well until he offers this florid flow of fulmination: "People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs."
Oh dear. And I thought that phrase would cover almost 100 percent of engineers working at Google.
Was Jobs' next big thing an integrated Apple TV?
Is Apple working on its own TV set?
Is Apple working on its own Internet-connected TV? According to The Washington Post, which is reviewing an advanced copy of the authorized biography of former CEO Steve Jobs, Apple has been working on such a device.
Tidbits from the biography written by Walter Isaacson have been trickling out the past couple of days before the book's debut on Monday. These latest cited passages describe how Jobs hoped to change the TV industry in much the same way he transformed the computing, music, and telecommunications industries.
The Washington Post article quoted Isaacson's book:
"He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant."
Isaacson continued: "'I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,' he told me. 'It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.' No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. 'It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.'"
Related stories:
• Steve Jobs bio: Behind the cover (roundup)
• Apple working on a TV set for 2012?
• Apple kills TV rentals, subscription offer not coming
• Steve Jobs bio: Behind the cover (roundup)
• Apple working on a TV set for 2012?
• Apple kills TV rentals, subscription offer not coming
This isn't the first time someone has brought up Apple's supposed plans to develop a slickly designed TV. Rumors have floated around since 2009 that Apple had a TV in the works. In August the rumors surfaced again when anonymous sources were cited mentioning the project and Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told Venture Beat that he predicted Apple would produce a TV set by the end of 2012 or early 2013.
Munster has long believed that Apple is developing a TV. In 2009, he predicted the company would announce the new product by the end of 2011. When Apple announced its new iCloud service, Munster said that the Internet-based storage service could work as a perfect vehicle for delivering content for the Net-enabled Apple TV.
Apple already offers a set-top box called Apple TV, which plugs into a TV and allows people to rent or buy digital videos from the iTunes store. The product has never been a big success. But it certainly reflects Apple's desire to break into the streaming video and TV markets.
From a hardware and software perspective, integrating the existing Apple TV functionality into an elegantly designed TV seems doable. If Apple modeled the TVs after the design of its large iMac screens, the product would almost certainly be a hit, even if didn't add additional functionality.
It's clear that if Apple were going to enter a new highly competitive and commoditized market, like the TV set industry, it would have to offer something different. And that something different would be content. But getting the content isn't easy.
It's likely that Apple hasn't introduced a TV not because it can't get the technology right, but because it doesn't have the necessary business relationships worked out yet. When Apple decided to make the iPod digital music players, it didn't just start making digital music players, it created the iTunes store and ecosystem to make it easy for people to buy music legally and load their new devices with music.
And when Apple created the iPhone, it didn't just create a new cell phone, it also created another online store, the App Store, to offer content like games and apps to fill those devices. Aside from the cool design of the iPad, it's really the apps and the App Store where users can discover and download those apps that make that such a popular and useful product.
In the process of creating the iTunes music store and the App Store, Apple disintermediated the music industry that distributed its own content on its own terms as well as the telecommunications industry, which until that point had controlled what apps could get on a phone. As a result of Apple's own business ambitions, these industries had to change how they functioned. In other words, Apple swooped in and changed the game for them entirely.
So it would only make sense that Apple would need a similar type of ecosystem for a connected Apple-branded TV. And it would also make sense that the TV networks and movie studios would be leery about striking deals with Apple, given the company's history with other content creators. And from what we can see publicly, Apple hasn't had the best relationships with the Hollywood movie studios and large TV networks.
Apple's strained relationship with the TV networks, in particular, was evident this summer when the company was unable to keep its 99 cent TV show rental business afloat. Despite Apple's best efforts, the TV networks weren't willing to offer their shows at the 99 cent price point. Andafter only a year, Apple gave up and reverted back to a purchase-only model.
So is an Apple integrated TV coming? Without content deals from all the major TV networks and movie studios, it would be a difficult feat. Let's just say I'm not holding my breath.
Facebook Ireland accused of creating 'shadow profiles' on users, nonusers
Logo from Facebook page for data privacy advocates in Europe
(Credit: euro v. facebook.org)
Facebook Ireland is under fire for allegedly creating "shadow profiles" on both users and nonusers alike.
The startling charges against the social-networking giant come from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (IDC), which, Fox News reports today, is launching a "comprehensive" investigation against Facebook Ireland for extracting data from current users--without their consent or knowledge--and building "extensive profiles" on people who haven't even signed on for the service.
Names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, work information, and perhaps even more sensitive information such as sexual orientation, political affiliations, and religious beliefs are being collected and could possibly be misused, Irish authorities claim.
Interestingly, Facebook users living outside of the United States or Canada are contracted with Facebook Ireland. Facebook users living inside the United States and Canada are contracted with Facebook Inc., headquartered in California. Running afoul of privacy laws is much more likely for companies operating outside of the United States, especially in Europe, where privacy laws are much more stringent.
On August 18, the IDC received a formal complaint against Facebook Ireland made by Max Schrems, a 24-year-old Austrian law student. In June, after attending a talk by a Facebook executive at Santa Clara University in California, while on a study abroad program, Schrems apparently asked Facebook for his data. To his surprise, the company sent him a CD with 1,200 pages--three years worth--of highly personal "deleted" material ranging from friend requests to his history of "Pokes" to lists of people he had "defriended" to entire chat messages.
Schrems, in turn, filed 22 discrete complaints about Facebook to the IDC. That has led to an official "statutory" audit of Facebook Ireland that's going to get underway next week and could possibly lead to "immediate charges" if Facebook is found to be in violation of data protection laws, a representative for IDC told Fox News. Facebook could also be fined up to $137,000 (U.S. dollars) according to the U.K.-based Guardian.
"I'm not saying there was anything criminal or forbidden there, but let's just say that, as someone wanting to work in law, there was stuff which could make it pretty impossible for me to get a job," Schrems was quoted as saying in The Guardian. "By holding on to data its users assumed was deleted, Facebook was acting like 'the KGB or the CIA,' said Schrems.... It's frightening that all this data is being held by Facebook."
In his "Shadow Profiles" complaint, Schrems explains how Facebook goes about eliciting data from users and nonusers:
"This is done by different functions that encourage users to hand personal data of other users and nonusers to Facebook Ireland (e.g., 'synchronizing' mobile phones, importing personal data from e-mail providers, importing personal information from instant-messaging services, sending invitations to friends, or saving search queries when users search for other people on facebook.com)."
"Even commercial users that have a 'page' on facebook.com have the option to import their costumers' e-mail-addresses to promote their page."
"By gathering all this information, Facebook Ireland is creating extensive profiles of nonusers and it is also enriching existing user profiles. This is done in the background without notice to the data subject ('shadow profiles'); the user or nonuser is experiencing only some of the result of these shadow profiles: there are "friend" suggestions by Facebook Ireland based on the information, or nonusers get invitations showing many users that they actually know in real life."
"This means that Facebook Ireland is gathering excessive amounts of information about data subjects without notice or consent by the data subject."
Here is a link to europe v. facebook.org, ironically, a Facebook page devoted to Schrem's attempt to challenge Facebook Ireland. As of this writing, it has only 600 fans.
"The allegations are false," Andrew Noyes, Facebook's manager of public policy in Washington, D.C, said in a statement replying to CNET's request for comment. He elaborated on the company's handling of deleted information, a key aspect of the data infractions cited in the complaint.
"We enable you to send e-mails to your friends, inviting them to join Facebook. We keep the invitees' e-mail address and name to let you know when they join the service. This practice is common among almost all services that involve invitations--from document sharing to event planning--and the assertion that Facebook is doing some sort of nefarious profiling is simply wrong. In addition, Facebook offers more control than other services by enabling people to delete their e-mail address from Facebook or to opt-out of receiving invites."
"Also, as part of offering people messaging services, we enable people to delete messages they receive from their inbox and messages they send from their sent folder. However, people can't delete a message they send from the recipient's inbox or a message you receive from the sender's sent folder. This is the way every message service ever invented works. We think it's also consistent with people's expectations. We look forward to making these and other clarifications to the Irish DPA."
HTC Amaze 4G (black, T-Mobile)
The good: The HTC Amaze 4G features a premium chassis, a sharp Super LCD touch screen, and a dual-core processor. It's equipped with an 8-megapixel camera with a number of advanced shooting modes and settings. T-Mobile's HSPA+ 42 speeds were impressive.
The bad: The smartphone is heavy and expensive. The camera still struggled in low-light environments.
The bottom line: The HTC Amaze 4G is a beautifully designed and fast Android smartphone, with some advanced camera features, but don't go ditching your point-and-shoot camera just yet.
Review:
It was only four months ago that T-Mobile and HTC released the MyTouch 4G Slide, touting the Android handset as having the most advanced camera of any smartphone, but it appears the Slide's reign was shortlived. Now, the new HTC Amaze 4G holds that claim to fame, bringing some new tricks to help create and highlight the best images. On top of that, the Gingerbread-based phone boasts a dual-core processor, a gorgeous Super LCD touch screen, and impressive data speeds. All of this makes the Amaze 4G one of T-Mobile's best Android smartphones
Samsung Galaxy S II
The good: The Samsung Galaxy S II supports T-Mobile's faster HSPA+ network and has a dual-core 1.5GHz processor and an NFC chip. The Android Gingerbread smartphone also has a spacious and vibrant Super AMOLED Plus touch screen, 16GB of internal memory, and great camera performance.
The bad: The smartphone is high-priced and on the larger side, and you can't remove bloatware.
The bottom line: The Samsung Galaxy S II ranks as one of T-Mobile's most powerful and feature-rich Android smartphones, but it's somewhat pricey.
Review:
Editors' note: Portions of this review were taken from our evaluations of the other Samsung Galaxy S II models.
Just like Sprint and AT&T customers, T-Mobile customers now have the opportunity to pick up the popular Samsung Galaxy S II. T-Mobile's model of the Android Gingerbread smartphone is slightly different from the other versions in that it features a different dual-core processor, an NFC chip, and support for the carrier's faster HSPA+ 42 network. It's also slightly more expensive at $229.99 with a two-year contract and after a $50 ...
Apple iPhone 4S
The good: Apple's iPhone 4S has a faster processor and an upgraded camera, all the benefits of iOS 5, and a useful and immensely fun voice assistant. Call quality on the Sprint model is admirable, and the data speeds, while certainly not 4G, get the job done.
The bad: It's about time we get a larger screen.
The bottom line: The iPhone 4S isn't the king of cell phones, but it's part of the royal family nonetheless. Even without 4G and a giant screen, this phone's smart(ass) voice assistant, Siri, the benefits of iOS 5, and its spectacular camera make it a top choice for anyone ready to upgrade.
Review:
For the first time since the iPhone was born four years ago, a new model didn't arrive in June this year. The wait set the iPhone 5 rumor mill frothing to overflow, so when the iPhone 4S arrived as an incremental upgrade, fanboys commenced an Internet-wide rending of garments. Some critics grumbled that they didn't get more, and I sympathize...kind of. Yes, the lack of 4G is disappointing. And yes, a totally new design would have been fun. But this is hardly the first time that Apple has chosen to make a subtle
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