Marc Rotenberg

Viral Radio: Facebook Flap

Kara Swisher in News on October 21, 2010 at 1:18 am PT

Here’s a radio interview BoomTown did earlier this week on San Francisco’s KQED “Forum” show, hosted by Michael Krasny. The topic was a report in the The Wall Street Journal that certain third-party apps on Facebook were grabbing information about users in ways that violated the social networking site’s privacy guidelines.

Germany Questions Google’s Data “Mistake”

John Paczkowski in News on May 18, 2010 at 3:59 am PT

With its admission last week that its Street View cars unwittingly captured data sent over unsecured wireless Wi-Fi networks, Google appears to have run afoul of regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. Sources familiar with the matter say the Federal Trade Commission is considering an inquiry into the matter, and the panel of European privacy regulators that advises the European Commission is calling for a full investigation to determine exactly what information was collected and whether the manner of collection was a violation of privacy law.

Chrome OS, Huh? Will It Be Based on a Google Analytics Kernel?

John Paczkowski in News on July 8, 2009 at 7:35 am PT

So Google has finally copped to developing an operating system–Chrome OS, a software platform “created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and…designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” It is an extraordinary market play. And an unsettling one. For it seeks to place Google, which already collects vast amounts of data about our Internet use, at the very center of our information experience. The privacy implications of that are, of course, horrendous.