The letter, addressed to CEO Larry Page and signed by eight members of the bipartisan Privacy Caucus, asks Google whether it plans to use facial recognition technology in conjunction with Glass, what proactive steps Google is taking to protect non-Glass-wearing bystanders and what privacy policy changes Google might make for Glass, among other topics.

The group, led by U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, seeks answers by June 14.

Glass, at this point, has a fairly limited range of abilities such as taking pictures, getting directions and performing a search. Developers can build simple apps using a programming interface called Mirror. However, Google announced on Thursday that it is readying a broader Glass Development Kit giving developers deeper access to the Glass hardware.

A Google representative was not immediately available for comment.

Update: At a fireside chat with developers, Google Glass product director Steve Lee said that the Glass team takes privacy seriously.

“From the beginning, the social implications … of Glass, of people wearing Glass, has been at the top of our mind,” Lee said, adding that the team extended its concern not just to those wearing Glass but those around them.

He noted that to take a picture requires pressing a button or issuing a voice command. Also, the Glass screen lights up when the device is active.

Lee said that Glass is operating by Google’s existing privacy policy in terms of what data it collects.

“We’re not really deviating from that,” Lee said.

As for face recognition, Lee said that “we’ve definitely experimented with it but it is not in the product today,” Lee said. “I can imagine that existing.”

Letter to Google From Congress re: Glass Privacy

Noting massive changes in technology, Goodlatte said he wanted to evaluate whether copyright law is still working in the digital age.

“Contrast how American citizens kept up with the latest news in Boston last week to when Paul Revere rode nearby to warn the local communities of the British advance in 1775,” he said.

Goodlatte didn’t describe his aims in great big flashing antipiracy lights, though he did specify that the issues to discuss may include compensation for copyright owners, historical access, statutory licenses and damages for infringement. He said the hearings would occur “in the months ahead.”

The company on Sunday said it sent tens of millions of emails urging its active U.S. sellers to push for changes to a bill now before Congress that would allow all states to collect sales tax from online merchants, whether they have operations in that state or not. eBay said the bill’s sales threshold for triggering the tax is too low.

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Zatko joined DARPA, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense in 2010 and was a program manager in its Strategic Technologies Office, where he oversaw research intended to help government agencies fend off cyber attacks.

Here’s the original tweet:

Given what we all pulled off within the USG, let’s see if it can be done even better from outside.Goodbye DARPA, hello Google!

April 12, 2013 8:28 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@dotMudge

.mudge

Zatko first came to fame as a member of the Cambridge, Mass.-based hacking group The L0pht, a sort of unofficial think tank for hackers whose members at the time included people who went on to distinguished careers in computer security, like Chris Wysopal, Joe Grand, and Christien Rioux. He was also a member of The Cult of the Dead Cow, another hacker collective known for mixing hacking prowess with an ability to get media attention.

In the mid-1990s he did some of the early fundamental research on a type of computer security vulnerability known as a buffer overflow, and published some of the first papers on the topic. He later was the principal creator of some important security tools, including L0phtcrack . In 1998 he and other members of L0pht testified before the U.S. Senate, a session in which the group famously proclaimed that with its combined expertise, it could “bring down the Internet in about 30 minutes.”

After that, he and other L0pht members were occasionally summoned to Washington whenever senior officials, including President Clinton (he’s the long-haired guy in the picture), wanted to be seen discussing computer security issues.

In 1999, L0pht went legit and joined with the Cambridge-based computer security firm @Stake, which in 2004 became part of Symantec. In 2005 Zatko joined BBN Technologies as a research scientist.

Inside DARPA, an agency known more for its secrecy and occasionally for the cool things it does, Zatko created a Cyber Fast Track Program, through which hackers working outside government with good security ideas could get funding to work on projects that could help secure Defense Department systems.

Zatko didn’t specify what he’ll be doing at Google, and he didn’t immediately answer an email from me asking for a little more detail, though its a pretty sure bet it will involve doing some kind of research on security. I’ll add more if I hear back from him.

He’ll be the second high-profile DARPA manager to join Google in recent memory. Last year the agency’s former director, and D9 speaker Regina Dugan, joined the search giant.

Former Vice President Al Gore took to the stage at the SXSW interactive festival today to tell a packed auditorium at the Austin Convention Center about the future.

No, really, “The Future,” which is the name of his new book, with the heavy-duty subhead “Six Drivers of Global Change.”

Among these drivers are — no surprise for him — severe environmental damage, as well as overpopulation and changes in biology via technology, and all the problems that come with that. Among the other critical issues, Gore also noted money politics, the ever-more-sophisticated antibiotics for livestock, and the reliance on supercomputers for stock market trading.

Gore told AllThingsD editor Walt Mossberg in an interview that some of these global developments were both a “peril and opportunity.”

But, in all, it’s a pretty depressing picture overall that he is painting, despite pointing out that knowing you have a problem is the first step.

“Our country is in very serious trouble,” he said. “But that does not mean I am not optimistic.”

Which is right before Gore started reeling off the problematic pressure that money has put on politics. “Our democracy has been hacked,” he said.

“American democracy has never been perfect, but more often than not, the will of the people did drive policy,” he added. “Congress today is utterly incapable of passing any reform of any significance unless they get permission from special interests.”

For example: “The NRA is a fraud,” about the National Rifle Association and its links to gun manufacturers.

“I wish I could get you to be more outspoken,” joked Mossberg.

“Timidity has always been an issue with me,” joshed Gore back.

Gore, who often likes to talk in full and very extended paragraphs, slowly worked through the rest of the list, before he got to the issue of spider goats.

Indeed, spider goats, which are created using genetics to mix the genes of spiders and goats.

“You can’t farm spiders for a number of reasons, so people are talking the genes from spiders and splicing them into goats,” explained Gore. “They look like goats, then these spider goats secret silk through their udders. ‘Everyone okay with that?’”

Um, no.

Still, Gore added that there are “blessings” that come with genetic engineering, including the elimination of a range of devastating diseases.

Gore soon moved onto the issue for which he is best known — global warming — after his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” gained worldwide attention.

“It’s not me saying it — I’m delivering the message. Every single national academy of science on the planet agrees with this, he said, before moving onto the recent devastation of Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast. “Mother Nature has the most powerful voice in this debate.”

But Mossberg and Gore soon parried over the sale of Gore’s media company, Current, to Al Jazeera.

You sold your network to Al Jazeera, which is owned by a government that’s a big oil producer,” asked Mossberg. “How could you do that?”

While hemming and hawing about that, Gore then came back with a good one: “I don’t ask you why you continue working for Rupert Murdoch.”

This meant war, since this site is owned by News Corp. “Last I checked, he’s not in the oil business,” countered Mossberg.

“He’s also not strictly in the news business, either,” said Gore.

Oh dear, time to get back to global warming, because it’s getting hot in here.

It was then onto a short Q&A, with one question about the Internet — an issue near and dear to Gore’s heart. In truth, despite all the jokes, he was critical when a senator to turning the Internet over to the people, from its origins as a government project.

And in this Gore finally pointed to a bright glimmer of hope. “The future of democracy,” he said, “may well depend on the continued freedom and independence of the Internet.”

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Such a sale would of course be illegal under U.S.-imposed trade sanctions against that country. A report from Reuters says that didn’t appear to stop an executive connected to a Huawei partner company, Hong Kong-based Skycom, from trying anyway.

Reuters says Huawei’s CFO, Cathy Meng, daughter of Huawei’s founding CEO, Ren Zhengfei, sat on Skycom’s board for a little more than a year, ending in 2009. Skycom, which Huawei has previously described as a “major partner,” was apparently the entity through which the proposed sale was to take place, though no deal was ever done. And HP, for its part, was never involved in any of it.

Huawei says Skycom is a “normal business partner,” and requires all its partners to stick to its trade compliance system.

Huawei’s operations in Iran over the years have been part of the litany of complaints leveled against the company in a congressional report earlier this year. The other worry is that Huawei gear might be used in some way to spy on American companies and government agencies. A review of the company ordered by the Obama administration found no evidence of spying, but didn’t exactly allay any of those fears, either.

Nicolas Raymond / Freestock

According to comScore’s final tally for the November-December shopping season, spending for the two-month period totaled $42.3 billion, a 14 percent increase over 2011.

“This year’s growth rate is essentially on a par with last year’s,” said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni. “But despite many positives for the online sector, this year’s season did not quite perform up to our initial expectation for growth rates in excess of 16 percent as we fell a billion dollars short of our expected total of $43.4 billion.”

The research firm, which tracks online shopping habits over broadband connections in the U.S., said a slowdown occurred after Thanksgiving due to low consumer confidence.

“As it turns out, this December swoon coincided closely with a significant decline in the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index that was attributed in large part to consumers’ fiscal cliff concerns. You might say that had it not been for Congress, every other indicator suggested it would have been an even merrier Christmas for online retailers,” Fulgoni said.

This season’s high points included some particularly outstanding days for online retailers, including Cyber Monday, Nov. 26 ($1.5 billion); Monday, Dec. 17 (up 76 percent to $1.013 billion); and Christmas Day (up 36 percent to $288 million). But those good days could not make up for three solid weeks in which the growth rates failed to surpass 12 percent.

Here’s a week-by-week breakdown of spending this season. A noticeable lull is present during the middle weeks:

This softness may have been expected based on preliminary results that some retailers released this morning. The figures indicate that sales may have been soft for many in December, not just online retailers.

For instance, Target said sales in December were flat; and Wet Seal, Macy’s and Kohl’s either cut their fourth-quarter outlooks or said quarterly results will be at or near the low end of their previous guidance range, according to MarketWatch.

Online sales are still growing at a much faster clip than retail as a whole. For instance, overall, December same-store sales, excluding drug stores, rose 4.8 percent, according to data from Retail Metrics.

While comScore’s report may be disappointing to some, it won’t affect all online retailers evenly.

For one thing, comScore’s results don’t include purchases made over mobile phones. Mobile commerce, which includes orders placed on tablets and phones through mobile browsers or applications, were a highlight for many retailers this holiday season. Second, there will be some retailers that overperformed and others that lost share.

As an example, Baird Equity Research’s Colin Sebastian raised eBay’s price target earlier today to $60, up by $2, based on evidence that eBay and PayPal excelled during the holiday season. The company’s full results will be out on Jan. 16.

And the one to watch closely will be Amazon.

Many brick-and-mortar companies resolved to fight the giant e-tailer by guaranteeing to match online prices. Whether that had any impact is still not known. Additionally, there was some question earlier this holiday season if Amazon was performing as well as expected.

Wells Fargo Analyst Matt Nemer said that for the first time in years, Amazon was giving some customers coupons for 10 percent off their orders. But it was unclear whether Amazon was only trying to reactivate old customers or if it was doing it because sales were short. Another plausible reason was that customers were procrastinating. Amazon allowed some customers to order as late as Dec. 21 with the promise of delivery by Dec. 24, which may have delayed some purchases.

The bad news: Netflix went through the same exercise a year ago, but the bill never made it out of Congress.

So it’s way too early for CEO Reed Hastings and company to celebrate. Still, it shows that the company’s lobbying effort, designed to tweak the 1988 “Bork Law”* that prohibits disclosing movie-rental information, has gotten some traction.

In many countries outside the U.S., Netflix already has an integration with Facebook that lets users tell their pals what they’re watching. Hastings, who is also a Facebook board member, has wanted to do the same thing for American Facebook users for the last couple years.

*The earlier law stemmed from Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s confirmation hearings, in which his video-rental history surfaced. The Senate ultimately blocked Bork’s appointment; he died Wednesday morning.

In a letter to key lawmakers this week, the High Tech Spectrum Coalition (HTSC) — which includes Apple, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, Nokia, Qualcomm, RIM and Samsung — asked that Congress consider expanding an upcoming spectrum auction to include bands used by federal agencies.

“Now is the time to ensure the incentive auctions are as robust and successful as possible at liberating spectrum,” the HTSC wrote. “We should also turn our collective attention on ways to reap the economic benefits of underutilized federal spectrum assets.”

The HTSC’s point: Demand for mobile data is growing far too quickly for anyone to be sitting on under-utilized or unused spectrum. And while new spectrum-efficient technologies might temper that demand a bit, they’re really not a long-term solution.

“As technology companies, we joined this debate because policymakers need to know that we cannot simply engineer our way out of this problem,” the HTSC wrote, adding that federal agencies need to be incentivized to “become more efficient, to share with one another, to vacate, or to lease their spectrum.”

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl are seeking language in a legislative package during the lame-duck session that would expand some forms of online gambling and limit others.

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There aren’t a lot of specifics to get excited about in the 52-page report, though there are presumably some items of interest in classified portions of the report not released to the public. Huawei has had a difficult time showing to the satisfaction of Western sensibilities that its ties to China’s People’s Liberation Army are severed. If ordered, the thinking goes, Huawei gear could be turned into a valuable espionage tool in the event of war with the U.S. or another country.

The concerns on the part of U.S. lawmakers and the national security establishment are certainly valid, but not for the reasons you think. While Chinese actors have certainly been among the most active when it comes to attacking the networks of large U.S. corporations and stealing their secrets, the U.S. and its allies fret about letting Huawei in because they know from their own experience how imported electronics can be turned into a weapon of espionage and outright sabotage.

Remember that it was intelligence agencies of the U.S., in partnership with Israel, that turned deep knowledge of the numerous variants of Microsoft’s Windows operating system combined with specialized knowledge of industrial control systems to create the Stuxnet worm that damaged the Iranian nuclear research program. Later discoveries included other U.S.-Israeli cyber weapons called Flame and Gauss. Taken together, they amount to evidence that the countries had mounted a less-than-covert military campaign against Iran that could in time have significant unintended consequences.

Prior efforts include a largely forgotten 1982 campaign of electronic sabotage against the natural gas pipeline being built by the Soviet Union that caused so large an explosion that U.S. military forces briefly thought it was an early sign of a nuclear attack. The episode was documented in the book “At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War” by Thomas Reed, the late former secretary of the Air Force under President Reagan.

Another incident, this one not as well documented but the subject of a great deal of informed speculation, concerns a 2007 Israeli air strike against what was at the time a suspected nuclear weapons research facility in Syria. A report by the IEEE Spectrum the following year traced reports that a French chip company that supplied the manufacturer of Syrian radar defense gear included a “kill switch” that allowed Israeli bombers to carry out their attack undetected.

So it’s not from out of nowhere that such national security concerns arise about a Chinese telecom concern.

One fundamental failure of all this official hand-wringing is that it neglects the fact that many if not most of the components, with the exception of certain higher-value chips like those from Intel, are manufactured in China. Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks in the U.S., Alcatel-Lucent in France and Ericsson in Sweden, all use Chinese-made parts and carry out at least some portion of the final assembly of their equipment in China.

Huawei certainly hasn’t done itself any favors. While its most senior U.S. employee described the company as “an open book” in a surprisingly short segment on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last night (see the video below), its founder and chief executive, Ren Zhengfei, has never sat for an interview with a Western media outlet. And the precise ownership of the company’s shares are murky. U.S. regulators have prevented it from making certain acquisitions, and in Australia it was blocked from bidding on portions of a project to build a national broadband Internet network.

It hasn’t gotten to be the world’s largest telecom equipment concern for nothing. Wireless phone networks in Africa rely heavily on inexpensive gear sold by Huawei. There are suspicions about its dealings in this area too, though they are mostly economic. Huawei has a history of undercutting Western rivals in competitive bids by as much as 5 percent to 15 percent, raising suspicion that it is the benefactor of state-sponsored subsidies. However, it’s also to the benefit of these rivals to stoke the national security concerns as much as possible.

All told, it’s not as though there is no reason to be suspicious of Huawei, if only because the U.S. and its allies know too well from their own actions in recent years about the potential for electronic espionage, surveillance and warfare.

For its part, Huawei defended itself and attacked the report in a response today (read it in full here). The company said the committee’s report, an 11-month effort, “failed to provide clear information or evidence to substantiate the legitimacy of the Committee’s concerns” and “appears to have been committed to a predetermined outcome” and “employs many rumors and speculations to prove non-existent accusations.”

Without having read the classified portions of the report, which are said to contain more specifics — it mentions only vague instances of “beaconing,” which is intended to mean sending data back to China — it’s hard to argue with Huawei’s position.

Nor is it easy to dismiss the committee’s fears out of hand. Which brings us to the possible unintended result of all this: Might China respond with its own restrictions against U.S. telecom firms like Cisco and Juniper? Is this the first shot of a telecom trade war? We’ll see.

If that happens, expect Cisco to be hurt more than Huawei. U.S. sales account for only 4 percent of its overall revenue, whereas Cisco’s operations in Asia, the Pacific Rim and China account for more than 16 percent, and China was its second fastest-growing market in that region after Japan.

Huawei-ZTE Investigative Report (FINAL)

House passage of its measure, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, came on a 248-168 vote Thursday and was supported by both Republicans and Democrats.

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The deadline to respond to that request — sent by ranking members of the Energy and Commerce Committee — was April 12.

The location app Banjo got in touch with us to share its response. Basically, Banjo is willing to draw attention to itself on this issue because it says it didn’t do anything wrong — it never transmitted or stored users’ contacts, and it is designed around adherence to users’ location data privacy settings on various networks.

Banjo CEO Damien Patton says his app was included in the inquiry only because it had been on the list of social networking apps in Apple’s iPhone Essentials category during the week the congresspeople got interested. Banjo is a location aggregation app with one million users.

I’ll forgive a little privacy grandstanding on Banjo’s part, because I think it’s interesting to see the reply. If others of the 34 apps want to share their responses, I would probably publish them as well.

120412 Banjo Response to Waxman_Butterfield

The provision, part of the bill passed by Congress and expected to be signed by President Barack Obama this week, would enable companies to submit confidential drafts of their initial-public-offering documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission before they file publicly.

Critics say that measure would allow a company like Groupon, which had well-publicized disagreements with the SEC over its accounting last year, to resolve such issues under the radar, without investors learning of them until later although still before any IPO.

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I’m here attending the Brussels Forum, which has been described to me — I think accurately — as a D: All Things Digital conference for people who care about transatlantic cooperation. It’s put on by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a policy organization that promotes “better understanding and cooperation between North America and Europe on transatlantic and global issues.” It’s about the same size, has similarly high-impact speakers and panels — it even has red chairs on the stage for those speakers.

I’ve never been to the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, but people at Brussels Forum compare it to Davos — but without the annoyance of celebrities trying to be photographed trying to look serious. “We’ve been to Davos, but we prefer this,” observed former Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, who was having breakfast with his wife at the table next to mine in the hotel restaurant.

Bennett was only one of the people I recognized here: There’s a handful of people attending from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives: Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire was on a Friday panel about Europe’s place in the world; Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida has been impressing everyone — including me — with his frank and forceful views on the humanitarian crisis in Syria. I’d quote him, but the session was off the record. More on that later.

Syria was top of mind during Friday’s main event here, an address by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark who is now the Secretary General of NATO. He made news by saying that NATO has no intention of intervening in Syria. (See the first video, below.) Meanwhile, there are a pair of Washington-based Syrian activists here (one of which you’ll see in the second video, below), basically pleading for the international community to do something, anything, to help them out just a little.

Syria is a big topic here. The newspapers are buzzing about the sanctions imposed by the EU on Asma al-Assad, the British-born wife of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. While he’s been on a determined campaign over the last year of systematically killing pretty much anyone in his country who thinks he ought to leave power, she’s been saddled with sanctions that ban her — personally — from entering all EU member states except the U.K. (she was born there, after all). Her taste for luxury shopping and travel amid the outrageous slaughter that is taking place in that country has finally proven too much to bear for the EU.

There has also been a lot of chatter about the leaking of some 3,000 personal email messages to and from the Assad household, showing that while the Syrian president is carrying out his campaign to stay in power, he’s concerned about his inability to buy songs on iTunes, and has sought the help of a friend in Lebanon.

The Brussels Forum is not a technology conference, by any stretch of the term. People here are discussing world-changing ideas such as food security, the Iranian crisis, the Arab Spring and President Obama’s strategic “pivot to Asia.” Yet technology hangs in the backdrop of many of the discussions.

Access to technology and the ability to share information and organize has been a core feature of the many changes that have shaken the Middle East during the past year. When Egypt tried to cut itself off from the Internet, it made headlines around the world.

On that topic, I made the acquaintance last night of two people with interesting views. I made Twitter friends with Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament. She serves on the EU Parliament’s committee on Foreign Affairs, and is also a founder of its Intergroup on New Media and Technology. I hope to chat with her about her ideas on making sure that people in Iran — despite the many economic sanctions imposed on that country — still get access to tech tools they need to express themselves and organize politically. She has also been tweeting like crazy about the Brussels Forum proceedings.

My neighbor at dinner last night was Jovan Ratković, the foreign policy adviser to Serbian President Boris Tadić. Ratković was a founder of Otpor!, a Serbian resistance movement that stood against the nationalist government of Slobodan Milosevic. Had Facebook and Twitter existed during the heyday of Otpor!, they would have been excellent tools for that group. As it was, Otpor! — the word means “resistance” in Serbian — used the Internet early and often to organize and get its message out.

Otpor! led directly to the foundation of CANVAS, the Belgrade-based Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies, which has had a direct influence on the protests in Egypt that led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. CANVAS, I’m told, has been so influential on the various youth uprisings around the world that it is soon to be the subject of a profile on the CBS TV news program “60 Minutes.” In short, having Ratković walk me through all this made for an interesting dinner conversation, with a not-inconsequential tech theme.

So the question you’re probably have is, what the heck am I doing here in the first place? I’ve been asked to moderate a Sunday morning panel entitled “The Future of Privacy in the Digital Economy”; the panel participants are Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy for Product Engineering at Google, Erika Mann, Head of EU Policy for Facebook, and Alexander Alvaro, vice president of the European Parliament.

Like most of the other panels here — except for those held in the main ballroom — the proceedings will be conducted under “Chatham House Rule,” which is a polite way of saying the discussion will be off the record. I hope to talk about with the panelists in an on-the-record setting, as well, though probably not all together.

The subject of consumer data privacy is certainly heating up on both sides of the Atlantic. On Monday, the U.S.S Federal Trade Commission is expected to lay out a new, wide-ranging policy framework on the subject. Expect lots of references to “do-not-track” mechanisms. And earlier this year, the EU unveiled a draft of a new European Data Protection Regulation. In Europe, the view of privacy is very government-centric, and data privacy is considered a key piece of human rights law. In the U.S., there’s a lot more willingness among policymakers to let companies regulate themselves. One question I’m definitely going to ask my panelists: How do the different legal approaches change how they do business in Europe versus the U.S.? I’ll bring you what on-the-record answers I can.

So, anyway, that is what I’m doing here in Brussels.

(Image is of the Grand Place, one of the primary tourist attractions in Belgium that I hope to visit.)

More than 60 percent of social media users said last year that they deleted people from their friends lists, up from 56 percent in 2009; and 26 percent of users who keep their profiles private say they apply additional privacy settings to limit what some friends can see.

Profile “pruning” — deleting comments friends leave and untagging photos — is also on the rise, the report says.

Women are significantly more likely to keep their profiles private, and are more likely to unfriend people than men are, with 67 percent of women saying they’ve removed friends, compared with 58 percent of men. Young people are more likely to manage their social media presences by deleting comments and untagging photos.

Some 48 percent of social media users say they experience some level of difficulty managing privacy controls on their profiles — but 49 percent say the process is “not difficult” at all. A tiny sample of those surveyed say it’s “very difficult.”

The report highlights a divide between those who may care about privacy when it comes to social networks and those who seemingly do not. As Pew notes, it could be interpreted that avid users of social networks, who share lots of personal details, have abandoned any expectations of privacy, or are “uniquely unconcerned” about online privacy.

On the other side, Pew says, privacy advocates say the public still “cares deeply about their privacy online but those sensitivities have been ill-served by technology companies.”

The report comes just as the White House has moved to create a privacy bill of rights, aimed at governing online data tracking. One of the issues at hand is a “do not track” tool which Web companies like Google have just agreed to support. Last week, Google was reported to be using deceptive practices to track Web users in certain browsers.

As The Wall Street Journal notes, though, a “do not track” button would allow for some Web data collection — such as the data gathered through Facebook’s “Like” button.

Pew is careful not to point to Facebook directly throughout the report, but notes that Facebook is by far the most popular U.S. social network (in its recent S-1 filing, Facebook showed that its user base has ballooned to more than 845 million). Pew’s report says that the term “privacy settings” — as well as “unfriend” — are part and parcel of the Facebook experience.

The Pew survey on Internet usages was conducted between April and May of last year, and sampled more than 2,200 U.S. adults 18 and older. The survey found that two-thirds of U.S. Internet users had profiles on social networking sites, up from just 20 percent in 2006.

In terms of who was more likely to post things on social networks that they later admitted they regretted, males were almost twice as likely to do so, with 15 percent copping to it, than were females, at 8 percent. Young adults, age 18 to 29, were also more likely to post content that they’d later regret on social networks.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr/Oli Dunkley)

The reversal is being announced as part of the White House’s call for Congress to pass a “privacy bill of rights,” that will give people greater control over the personal data collected about them.

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Cisco appears to have continued its recovery following a painful restructuring. Sales are up and setting records, earnings beat the consensus of analysts, and Cisco’s outlook for the coming quarter is positive, too. Cisco’s even reached a point where it’s at least close to fitting into its old skinny jeans. What a difference a year makes. Last year it was all about gloom and doom and some irritable investors were calling for Chambers to lose his job.

Since then the company has undergone a painful but necessary restructuring, shed thousands of jobs, shut down marginal business units and refocused on its core businesses, and as yesterday’s quarterly earnings report proved, the results are not only starting to show, but starting to stick.

So is the work done? Definitely not. Yes, Cisco is showing some return to its strengths, but there’s still a long way to go. We talked about that, the troubles Cisco’s competitors are facing, his long-held view that companies like Cisco should get a tax holiday to repatriate their cash held outside the U.S. and many other things.

Also Chambers, remembering that I dedicated “How Ya Like Me Now” to Cisco last quarter as it turned the corner on its troubles, asked me what song I might use to characterize its results this quarter. Taking inspiration from the headline of my first story and from his cautiously optimistic tone, I settled on “It’s Getting Better All The Time,” the Beatles track, performed by Paul McCartney and embedded after the Q&A. Enjoy.

AllThingsD: John, I don’t know if you saw the headline I wrote earlier, but I said you fit into your skinny jeans again. Is that fair?

John Chambers: [Laughs] I think it’s fair. We were up about four or five inches there so I think we have an inch or two to go, but we’re getting close.

So let me ask about the quarter. It looks like a solid quarter where a lot of the troubles were starting to get behind you. In broad brush strokes, where were Cisco’s strengths? I know some of your competitors were having their own troubles, but where were you strong in particular?

The strengths were that we appear to be executing on the market transitions that are going on, and we appear to be reinventing ourselves, not just in terms of how we control our costs, but in terms of the productivity we’re getting out of our employees. So if you look at the major transitions going on in the industry from an economic point of view, to how customers buy, to where the high tech industry is going, which I would argue is all connected to intelligent networks, that all appears to be playing out as we had hoped. The other transitions that you think about, like data centers and the cloud, we saw 90 percent growth in an industry that is growing at best in the teens. Our ability to move in collaboration, where we grew 10 percent though I think we could do better — it remained solid for us. In video with set-top boxes up 23 percent to new video technologies growing well and seeing improvement in the margins. There are things we need to do to reinvent Cisco. I think I said this at your own conference a decade ago [Chambers spoke at D5 in 2007, but that is not where he made this comment. -Ed.] that voice will be free. It’s almost there. You could see the trend, and what it meant is that once voice would become a smaller part of the network load, that would be given away in order to make way for the video and the entertainment. The same trends are taking place all over again at multiple speeds and multiple gears, which if we’re right, they all play together. Everything from mobility to cloud to the intelligent network, to wireless to security, to video being pervasive, all of those are coming together at tremendous speed. And we’re pulling them all together pretty well for our customers. Now, this is just the beginning if we execute right, and we have plenty of hurdles in front of us, but this may be the voice-will-be-free trend times 10 in terms of the impact of the transitions going on. We appear to have managed them well; we did what we said we would do, turned in record earnings and record revenues, and earnings per share were up 48 percent. We’ve realigned ourselves and reinvented the company, which I think you have to do every five years. Sometimes it takes a crisis to reinvent. … It’s a journey and we’re just getting started.

What’s the number one hurdle that you want to get over this year, that’s in front of you right now and keeping you up at night?

I want to build deeply into our capabilities, a continued focus on gross margins and effectiveness, from product design to sales all integrated together. You probably know this, but we’re the only company who’s anywhere near this profitable with $45 billion in sales with open standards. It isn’t a mainframe business where everything is proprietary or like in Apple’s situation where it’s a wonderful company but it has an architecture. We do it entirely with open IP, so we can be challenged by a 10-person start-up or a by the biggest giants like Dell or IBM or Hewlett-Packard to come at us. With this type of margin but so low a barrier to entry, we’re doing relatively well. But we still have to reinvent ourselves at a faster pace. We have to do what I call the basic blocking and tackling to participate in the new capitalism that we’re heading into. That’s the attention to gross margins, getting the market transitions right, tying the products together so you can get the price premium on them. But what really keeps me up at night this last year was the realization that this has to be constant reinvention. Average is over. An average high-tech company is headed down. Those above-average companies are going to head down in 3 to 5 years. If as a company you can’t reinvent yourself every 3 to 5 years, you have a problem coming at you.

Does that then imply that Cisco had become complacent or even average? It was and is the biggest networking player, but did Cisco lose its way and try to do too much?

Well, I could give you a long list of things we have to do better. We’re a healthily paranoid company so we always have things we could do better. I do think we were fat. Four to five inches, not just one or two. We’re not back in our skinny jeans yet, as you put it, but we’re within an inch or so of getting there. We missed market transitions at the speed at which they occurred. We should have seen the drop-off in public spending coming at us sooner. Everyone else has still run off the turn, even though they saw what happened to us two to four quarters ago. We should have seen it sooner and reinvented ourselves before it hit us, and made the turn much more effectively, and I’m committed to doing that, and the leadership team is, too. It would have been easy to just cut a billion dollars in expenses, reorganize sales and how customers buy. We realized that gross margins can deteriorate not just because of what competitors do but what we do to ourselves, like what we did on switching. We should have been smarter there.

On the conference call you mentioned the possibility of getting back into the mergers and acquisitions game. Any hints on where you might go or whom you might buy?

I think it’s a fair question. Part of the reason we said that was to explain why we’re building up cash in the U.S. Part of it was for share buybacks because the price was attractive. A lot of people don’t realize that we use M&A deals to gain leadership. We were a routing company, we acquired three switching companies. We were an enterprise and commercial company, we acquired a service provider company in Stratacom. If you look at where it’s going to be, it’s probably in data center, collaboration and video, and combining those with security, bring your own device and mobility. A large part has to do with our government allowing us to bring money back to our country.

That’s always been a big issue of yours. You made some comments about it on the conference call as well. Care to elaborate?

I think that it’s going to happen in the next presidential administration whether the president is re-elected or someone else is. I’ve been disappointed that we haven’t been able to get our message out about this more effectively. Ironically, I was in Europe, the government leaders there look you right in the eye and ask what they need to do to bring jobs to their country and keep the ones they have. They are partnering with business. I think we’re following Europe in the wrong way and following more of what they did to get them in trouble in the first place.

There’s a bit of a disconnect, however, to anyone who sees on one hand a company that wants to bring cash back in a tax-advantageous manner in the name of creating jobs, while the same company just fired so many people in the restructuring. Can you connect those dots for the person who sees the apparent logical disconnect? If it’s about jobs, then why are you firing people in the first place? If you were having lunch with President Obama or any other political leader, they might be confused, so how do you explain it?

They’re related. The first thing you’ve got to do when you hit bumps in the market is find out how much of the damage was self-inflicted and how much was the result of the conditions of the market. It would be a cop-out to say it was all the general market. We had to look at what we were doing internally. Every government leader in the world who’s adding to government payrolls and adding government debt is going in the wrong direction. We have to use technology to deliver services better. You do see most government leaders saying they want to get their own houses in order. The second thing they do is look at ways to generate private sector jobs. I’m a strong Republican, but I think President Clinton got it right with business and knocked the ball out of the park. He partnered with business, he was critical where appropriate, but in six years he generated 22 million jobs, grew GDP on average by 4 percent per year, and he was America’s champion on the Internet. I think that’s a more practical example. He grew private sector employment versus government employment by a ratio of 9 to 1, and created a positive climate for business, and when business got out of line he’d whack ’em. I think it would be a major mistake not to let companies repatriate their cash because whoever is in the Oval Office next year is going to want to get private sector jobs growing again, and there really aren’t very many levers left to pull. We’ve never had this slow a recovery after this deep a recession.
–

Getting Better – Paul McCartney

The position of the anti-SOPA activists is antithetical to the principle of protection — for authors, that is — mandated in the Constitution of the United States. Our nation’s founders recognized that furthering the rights of creators is in the national interest, to “promote the progress of science and useful arts” by “securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Over the centuries, copyright protection has been codified in an expanding body of federal law in an attempt to implement the protection outlined in the Constitution.

The SOPA debate is emblematic of the growing tension between the copyright creator — the authors, composers, lyricists and artists who have contributed so much to the socio-economic fabric of American life — and the “interests” of the public in having free access to the works of others. However, the creator/public dichotomy is a false paradigm. What is truly at stake are the competing interests of the creators and the corporations who have acquired and are exploiting their works.

It is the rare creator who has the luxury to create simply for the sake of creating. As history has shown (every Renaissance artist worth his canvas had a patron), in order for creators to enjoy the benefits of their creations, it is necessary for them to cross over into the world of commerce, and to seek the patronage of publishers, record labels, and film and television producers. Sadly, the relationship between creator and corporate sponsor is seldom equal, as evidenced by the scores of documents executed by authors, songwriters and other creators, granting the rights in their works to corporate entities in perpetuity, often in exchange for modest compensation.

Congress attempted to include in the Copyright Act a series of provisions to give the creator (or the heirs of a deceased creator) the opportunity to terminate even perpetual grants of copyright, and “recapture” rights to their works in the U.S. These provisions, known as the “termination provisions,” were first introduced as part of the Copyright Act of 1976, and later modified as part of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act of 1998.

The intent of Congress in enacting the termination provisions was clear: To give creators, or their heirs, the opportunity to escape inequitable deals, or simply to revise the terms of their deals in order to share proportionately in the success of their creations. And, indeed, the opportunity to recapture rights is a potentially valuable asset for creators and their statutory successors. Yet, outside the music industry, the termination right is significantly underutilized, while even songwriters and recording artists are often thwarted in their attempts to recapture rights in a process made unduly complicated in response to pressure from corporate lobbyists.

Like the termination provisions, the real value of SOPA and other copyright enforcement legislation is its role in safeguarding the interests of the intended beneficiaries of copyright protection. Whether or not SOPA is the most effective means of curbing piracy in the online arena is a matter that should be thoroughly examined. However, the SOPA debate should not be commandeered as a vehicle for furthering the position of those who seek to write authors out of the copyright law and the Constitution.

Lisa A. Alter is a partner in the firm of Alter & Kendrick, LLP, in New York City. Her practice is focused primarily in the area of copyright law, with a particular emphasis on domestic and international music copyright issues. Ms. Alter has lectured frequently at law schools and professional meetings on copyright matters, and has represented clients on legislative matters impacting their copyright interests. She is the author of “Protecting Your Musical Copyrights,” which has recently been released in its second edition.

Poor Chris Dodd — he just got the top media lobbying job in Washington, D.C., at the very moment that the strong-arming-pols, scare-the-children, Jack Valenti era in media lobbying is now decidedly over.

It’s obviously a very confusing time for big media these days, on a lot of fronts. But any of the consummate insider moves once used by the legendarily pugnacious Valenti (pictured here onstage at our first D: All Things Digital conference in 2003) had a hard time this past week, as Internet players went very public in protesting two Congressional bills aimed at combating piracy online.

Not that Dodd didn’t try to cope.

The former Senator — who is now the chief lobbyist for the once much more powerful Motion Picture Association of America — gave a can’t-we-all-get-along interview to the New York Times on Thursday, in which he called for a meeting with techies to come to some acceptable compromise.

Wrote the Times:

“In an interview Thursday, Mr. Dodd said he would welcome a summit meeting between Internet companies and content companies, perhaps convened by the White House, that could lead to a compromise … ‘The perfect place to do it is a block away from here,’ said Mr. Dodd, who pointed from his office on I Street toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

But on Friday, after politicians quickly moved to delay both the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s PROTECT I.P. Act (PIPA) — after successful protests pointing out that the legislation could lead to censorship — Dodd went to the full Valenti again:

“We applaud those leaders in Washington who have chosen to stand with the millions of hard working Americans all across this nation whose livelihoods are threatened by foreign criminal websites designed to steal. As a consequence of failing to act, there will continue to be a safe haven for foreign thieves; American jobs will continue to be lost; and consumers will continue to be exposed to fraudulent and dangerous products peddled by foreign criminals.”

Foreign criminals! Foreign thieves! Is it just me, or does Dodd sounds like Cher, singing, “Gypsies, tramps and thieves”?

(Let’s be clear, that utterance could never top Valenti’s most infamous quote: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”)

To be fair, Dodd is hindered by strict restrictions on his lobbying Congress until next year. That said, this is not an old-timey, private Capitol Hill fight, but a modern-era, social-media-charged one.

And it’s pretty clear that the old scare tactics used by big media will no longer work as well, as consumers — as much as they like their movies — seem to love their Internet more.

Thus, what has happened is that — at least for now — the MPAA and media companies have lost and lost big, after the typically fractious Web powers decided to lock arms for once and cooperate with a creative, take-it-to-the-people approach of showing a disabled Internet.

Dramatic? Yes. Effective? Certainly. (That Facebook and Google agree on anything? Astonishing!)

Where it goes from here is unclear — the MPAA and its constituents could certainly rally and put forth their own protest. Ironically, the most effective way to do that is not via the airwaves or other former means of broadcast to the public, but on the Web.

Which is controlled by Dodd’s foes. (You see the problem here.)

The answer, in the end, might have to be the cooperation he first suggested.

As he told the Times:

“The companies, Mr. Dodd said, are ‘rethinking everything,’ not just about the bills, but about their relationship with an estranged Silicon Valley. That need for rapprochement, he said, ‘has come home in a way that no rhetoric of mine could express.’”

Much more to come, obvi.

Oh, just peruse it:

One thing that was particularly fantastic from the protests over the two bills in Congress that most of the Internet was protesting over yesterday, was the plethora of creative videos that were released.

Here are two that I liked a lot — a comic one from Jest, called “Wikipedia/SOPA Survival Kit”; and a very cogent argument against the legislation, from Clay Shirky on the TED Web site, titled “Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea)”:

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook:

The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.

The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.):

The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life precisely because it has been an open-to-all land of opportunity where entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators are free to try, fail and then try again. The Internet has changed the way we communicate with each other, the way we learn about the world and the way we conduct business. It has done this by eliminating the tollgates, middle men, and other barriers to entry that have so often predetermined winners and losers in the marketplace. It has created a world where ideas, products and creative expression have an opportunity regardless of who offers them or where they originate.

Protect IP (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are a step towards a different kind of Internet. They are a step towards an Internet in which those with money and lawyers and access to power have a greater voice than those who don’t. They are a step towards an Internet in which online innovators need lawyers as much or more than they need good ideas. And they are a step towards a world in which Americans have less of a voice to argue for a free and open Internet around the world.

Legal Team, Red Hat Software:

In a single generation, the Internet has transformed our world to such an extent that it is easy to forget its miraculous properties and take it for granted. It’s worth reminding ourselves, though, that our future economic growth depends on our ability to use the Internet to share new ideas and technology. Measures that block the freedom and openness of the Internet also hinder innovation. That poses a threat to the future success of Red Hat and other innovative companies.

The sponsors of SOPA and PIPA claim that the bills are intended to thwart web piracy. Yet, the bills overreach, and could put a website out of business after a single complaint. Web sites would vanish, and have little recourse, if they were suspected of infringing copyrights or trademarks.

The good news is that there is growing opposition from many quarters to these bills. Just this past weekend, the White House expressed serious concerns, opposing legislation — like SOPA and PIPA — that “reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.

Lanham Napier, CEO, Rackspace:

In my last blog post on SOPA and PIPA, I explained why Rackspace — along with much of the Internet community — opposes these bills in their current form. They are well-intentioned, but would do more harm than good. Their enforcement provisions could be easily evaded, and they would undermine the security and stability of the Internet.

Since then, I and other Rackers have been working with key lawmakers to fix the bills so that they will (a) actually be effective in fighting online piracy, and (b) avoid disrupting the Internet or imposing unreasonable costs on Internet users and service providers.

We at Rackspace are on the front lines of the battle against copyright infringers and other online criminals. We employ dedicated teams that take enforcement actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as our own strict Acceptable Use Policy every day. We agree that better tools are needed for this fight but SOPA and PIPA do not fit the bill.

Gary Shapiro, President and CEO, Consumer Electronics Association:

“It is increasingly clear that bills causing collateral damage to innovation in the guise of fighting piracy are not politically viable. Now that unreasonable solutions to piracy have been shown not to work, it is time to explore reasonable ones. We urge policymakers to join CEA in support of the OPEN Act — a bicameral, bipartisan and narrowly targeted approach to fighting foreign “rogue websites.”

Paul Hortenstine, Motion Picture Association of America, which supports the bills:

The legislation targets criminals: foreign thieves who profit from pirated content and counterfeit goods. These foreign rogue websites are operating freely today while legitimate American businesses are opposing legislation that would block these criminal websites from the American market.

The Pirate Bay, a site that links visitors to pirated content and would arguably fit someone’s definition of “foreign rogue Web site”:

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.

To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

Ben Greenman, Contributor, The New Yorker:

Dear Spanish speakers, I was only joking when I said you think we’re all protesting soup. Geez: People are so touchy on blackout days

January 18, 2012 8:44 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

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Ben Greenman