credit: Win McNamee, Getty Images News

For context, the conversation started with me asking about opt-in versus opt-out product releases — which means, do you first ask your customers whether they want to use something new, or do you give it to them and let them decide if it’s useful or not. Opt-out has been the preferred choice of many companies, perhaps most notably Facebook, because it cuts out the friction of requiring additional permission.

Liz Gannes: What do you anticipate being the FTC stance around opt-in going forward? Is it reasonable to interpret the framework as pushing the industry towards opt-in policies?

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz: We’ve laid out some areas where we think opt-in is more appropriate. With financial information, in healthcare, when dealing with vulnerable populations like children. And if cable or phone companies want to do something analogous to deep-packet inspection, there should be opt-in.

I think we’re pretty balanced. You want to have better privacy notices, give consumers more choice, and give opt-out on tracking. When you’re talking about more sensitive populations, you might want to flip that and make it an opt-in.

We also think when you engage in best practices, what we hear from companies is consumers trust the Internet more, and they want to do more commerce.

How do you expect newer companies, for instance growing social media players like Tumblr or Pinterest, to interface with the FTC? How can they proactively avoid investigations and settlements like what you had with Google and Facebook?

We think our report strikes the right balance between privacy and innovation. I think if you’re a new company, make sure you’ve seen our cases. A large number are about making privacy commitments and not honoring them. So if you commit to something, follow through.

Leibowitz, by the way, will be appearing at our D10 conference in May.

Now, as the company prepares to answer the questions put to it by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, it’s hoping to set the record straight, once and for all, by publishing a definitive report (embedded below) on the functionality of its software, including an in-depth analysis of the video that inspired the allegations against it.

In an exclusive interview with AllThingsD, Carrier IQ CEO Larry Lenhart, and Andrew Coward, the company’s VP of marketing, discuss that report, why its software isn’t opt-in, and how it handles law enforcement requests.

John Paczkowski: Tell me about the new document you’re publishing. This is your third official statement on this debacle. Why is it necessary?

Larry Lenhart: I think over the last few weeks we’ve learned a lot about transparency. And we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, how we can reach out to everyone — consumers and carriers — and help them understand in more depth what we do and how our software works. This is an ongoing document. It took a lot of time and effort, based on meetings with industry experts, security experts, and Trevor Eckhart, who published the video that brought this issue to everyone’s attention. Of course, we also knew that we were going to have some conversations on Capitol Hill, and drafting the answers to the questions that were asked of us helped inform the document, as well.

Andrew Coward: Well, from our perspective, some of what was shown in the video was erroneous and wrongly attributed to Carrier IQ, so we obviously wanted to correct those misperceptions, and that took some effort. And, of course, there’s been a continuing clamor for understanding more about what Carrier IQ does. So we thought we’d put together a definitive document that says “Look, this is what we do, and we do want you to understand it and how we do it.”

You folks have been relatively transparent about this whole thing, once it blew up in the press. Your carrier partners have not. Do you feel the carriers have done you a disservice by not clearly disclosing their relationship with you to their customers?

Coward: Many of our customers have gone out on the record and described how they use our technology, and we have worked on this document with our carrier customers.

You say your software doesn’t keep a log of location, keylog and SMS information, yet Trevor Eckhart’s video appeared to show that. What was going on there?

Coward: What he was looking at there was an Android log file. And to be blunt, there was information there that shouldn’t have been. In order for Carrier IQ to get information off a device, we work with the manufacturers to deliver that information through an API. That information shouldn’t show up in an Android log file. We don’t read from Android log files; we don’t see Android log files. That info just shouldn’t be there. And, ultimately, what goes in that log file is up to the manufacturer.

So that’s not your log file in the video?

Coward: No. It’s just an Android system log file. And one of the problems with that video, and something we’ve been working to clear up, is that, while you could see that information had been passed to Carrier IQ, there was no video of what happened to that information afterwards. Was it actually captured by Carrier IQ; was it stored or taken off the device? No. And that’s really what we’re trying to clarify with the document we’re publishing.

The document you’re releasing today says that a bug in your software may have caused some SMS messages to be unintentionally collected. Can you talk about this a bit? Should we worry?

Coward: As we went and did a deep dive into our technology to prove to consumers that there is nothing untoward in it, we found a bug. We found that if an SMS was sent simultaneously while a user is on the phone, the SMS would be captured by our software. Obviously, this is something that doesn’t happen very often, but we discovered that it could happen, and we caught it. Now, that information was never used. It wasn’t decoded. It sat on a server in encoded format, and no one could really get to it.

Lenhart: We didn’t even know the data was being captured. The actual information is in nonreadable format. And our customers didn’t know it was there. So it was never looked at. Over the past few weeks, we worked with our customers to resolve the issue.

In the document you’re publishing today, you describe three scenarios for how your software gets on user’s phones: Preloading, where manufacturers install it on devices prior to shipment at the carrier’s request, and it has access to no more data than any other app on the device; aftermarket, where the consumer downloads and installs it at the carrier’s request; and embedded, which requires actual integration work by a device manufacturer, again at the carrier’s request. You say carriers more often than not choose the embedded option over the others you provide. Why do you think that is?

Coward: Really, it’s because embedded was the first option we offered. We’ve only added the others this year.

Why isn’t Carrier IQ opt-in? Shouldn’t it be?

Lenhart: Our technology is defined to do either opt-in or opt-out. But it’s the carrier’s call on whether or not they’re implemented.

Okay. But shouldn’t they be implemented?

Lenhart: Well, the carriers have the privacy relationships with the end user. But we’re certainly supportive on the dialogue going on around this issue.

Coward: We think there’s a quid pro quo between consumers and operators. Consumers expect their phones to work. They expect that if they have problems with their phones, the carriers will do something about them. They also expect that if they call in for help, the carrier will actually have a clue about why their phone is crashing or their calls are dropping. So there’s an implicit understanding that the carrier knows enough to be able fix the problem.

But wouldn’t it be better to just ask consumers to agree to that quid pro quo right up front?

Coward: Well, that’s a good question for the industry. Should there be opt-in/opt-out? And if there is, what does that mean for customer service; what does that mean for the end-user experience?

Why do the carriers need you? Couldn’t they capture a lot of this information themselves?

Coward: Certainly, the network provides a huge amount of information. But the network can’t tell you why your battery won’t hold a charge or an application is crashing. So there’s a missing piece here in the diagnostic puzzle, and that’s what we provide. And what you need to understand is that this is a technology that’s hard to implement. If you’re a handset manufacturer, it’s much easier to work with an industry player like Carrier IQ.

Who decides what your software does and does not track?

Coward: We work with the carrier to determine that. There is a line in the sand between what we would collect and what we would not collect. And we draw that line at content. We absolutely do not intend to capture content from subscribers. We collect information about their mobile phone experience, and about what happens.

Have you been asked to collect content?

Coward: We’ve not been asked, nor would we do it if we were.

How does Carrier IQ handle the usernames, passwords and other personal information that is embedded in an HTTP’s URLs?

Coward: We’re investigating that issue at the moment. And we recognize that it’s a sensitive one. It is not our intention to capture information that might be confidential.

So you have about two more days before you have to answer the questions put to you by Al Franken and the Senate privacy panel. Can you give me an idea of what you’re going to say?

Lenhart: Well, if you read the document we’re publishing, I think you’ll find answers to most of the questions that Senator Franken asked. … We’re actually in Washington right now, and we’ll be meeting with the folks that have asked for information about Carrier IQ over the next few days.

Are people right to be concerned about Carrier IQ? Could your software be misused?

Lenhart: No. We’re a diagnostic software company. We love diagnostic information. We are not interested in content. And that’s where we draw the line. We don’t want content, and we don’t have the ability to capture it. Remember, the information that’s captured off a user’s device is determined by the carrier, according to their privacy agreement.

You say you are not permitted to analyze, resell or reuse any of the information gathered for your own purposes, or to pass it to any third party, unless required by law. Do you know if law enforcement uses Carrier IQ data, and in what manner?

Lenhart: We have been approached by law enforcement about using our technology, and every time it’s happened, we’ve determined that that’s not an appropriate use of it. A lot of data that we capture is historical, so if you really want to find out where somebody is and what they’re doing, our technology isn’t going to give you that. Remember, this is diagnostic data. And we don’t share it with anyone.

But you do say that you would hand over data if required by law.

Lenhart: We would refer them to the carriers, because the diagnostic data collected belongs to the network operators, not Carrier IQ.

How damaging has this whole ordeal been to Carrier IQ? Or has it been damaging at all? Certainly, a lot more people know who you are today than did a few weeks ago.

Lenhart: Our world has been turned upside down. We love what we do, and we have a lot of passion for it. And to see it misunderstood like this has been painful. We want to make sure people really understand who we are and what we’re doing.

Read Carrier IQ’s report on the functionality of its software:

Understanding Carrier IQ technology final 12 12 11 –

Related Posts on Carrier IQ:

• Exclusive Interview: Carrier IQ Gets Transparent About Its Mobile Monitoring
• Carrier IQ: How to Hack Back Your Phone
  
• Carrier IQ Speaks: Our Software Monitors Service Messages, Ignores Other Data
• Apple: We Stopped Supporting Carrier IQ With iOS 5
• RIM, HTC, Google on Carrier IQ: Blame the Carriers
• Carrier IQ Improves My Wireless Service by Logging My Keystrokes? Please Explain.

Full Carrier IQ Coverage »

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Yesterday Facebook unveiled a plan to let brands turn Facebook users’ online activities into ads. If anyone is complaining, it’s news to me.

Easy enough to see why: There are some very big differences between Facebook’s ill-fated Beacon and Sponsored Stories, the site’s new ad unit.

For starters, Facebook unveiled yesterday’s news in the trade press, not in a high-profile, Apple-aping event. More important is that while the new ads can tell your friends what you’re doing outside of Facebook, they’re mainly focused, for now, on what you do on the site.

Most important: The ads are replicas of the updates your friends are already seeing in their Facebook newsfeeds. So while Starbucks doesn’t pay a cent when this shows up on on the center of your friends’ pages:

It can now pay up and place this on the right side of your pals’ pages, too.

Users can’t opt out of the ads, which seems like a red flag given Facebook’s history. But if a brand wants to shell out money to tell your friends something you’ve already told your friends, who cares? No one, apparently.

Still, recall what Zuckerberg was saying less than four years ago, when he was going to “build a new kind of ad system” based on “social actions” and “information that is shared between friends.” At the time, that sounded wildly ambitious, and maybe a bit creepy.

And look what Sponsored Stories does now. Marketers can purchase ads that tell your Facebook friends when you’ve “liked” something of theirs. Or posted on one of their Facebook pages. Or checked-in to one of their outposts or played with one of their apps.

And they can do it when you’re not on Facebook, too, via “likes” you make on sites that have tied up with the social network.

This is what Zuckerberg was talking about in 2007, right? He just needed time to get there. So did his users.

Remember that when Facebook rolled out Beacon, the site was a big deal, but not the biggest: A mere 50 million users, not 600 million. Many of those people were still trying to get a handle on how the site worked, and what they ought to do with it.

And recall that the newsfeed itself–more or less the core of today’s service–was still a relatively new idea too, introduced just a year earlier. (Another controversy, and another Zuckerberg apology.)

Now, I think, just about everyone who uses Facebook knows, more or less, what they’ve signed on for: A place that wants you to share as much of yourself, with as many people, as you can.

Letting advertisers help you share that much more? No big deal. This is isn’t 2007, you know.

The move is a response to a call by the Federal Trade Commission for a “do not track” mechanism to let users decide not to allow advertising cookies to track their online movements for the purposes of personalizing the ads they see on the Web.

The Keep My Opt-Outs add-on installs easily enough in Chrome, though a few people who have installed it are complaining of problems with the Chrome browser in comments on the add-on’s Web site.

Given Chrome’s relatively small share of the browser market, on its face this is a marginal move. Google however says there will be more to come. It wants to make its add-on available for other browsers and will share the code with the rest of the world on an open-source basis.

BoomTown motored on down to the Microsoft campus in Silicon Valley on a fabulously sunny day to liveblog the latest Bing event.

The software giant is updating its search service, announcing deep integration–part of a deal announced last year–with Facebook.

The theme, according to Microsoft (MSFT) SVP Yusuf Mehdi, quoting the Beatles, was search with “a little help from your friends.”

Let’s hope it’s not: “Help, I need somebody.”

11:35 am PT: Mehdi kicks off the show, announcing the line-up, which includes Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Well, it just got 100 percent more interesting here in this nondescript auditorium.

Mehdi talks a little bit about the future of search and making it better. He talks about social being an important part of it.

While I’d have gone with Barry Manilow, he quotes the Beatles.

Mehdi is followed by Microsoft Online Services Division President Qi Lu, who throws more love bombs at Facebook.

“With the partnershop of Facebook and Bing, we will be able to unlock…how people in a social relationship can be first-class citizens in a search experience,” said Lu.

It sounds so lofty, even though it is mostly trading movie review recommendations or good places to take the kids on a rainy Sunday.

Lu thanks Zuckerberg effusively and invites him onstage.

11:54 am: No hoodie.

Zuckerberg is also “honored to be here,” giving us a little history lesson about the origins of the social networking giant and its various and sundry efforts.

I’ll be honest, the lack of donuts is making me distracted.

He’s not actually saying more than bromides about “what would social search look like.”

And looking around at who would be the right partner in the arena. Microsoft! Of course! That giant investment way back when was nice too!

“They’re really the underdog here,” said Zuckerberg in the first interesting comment, noting that overdogs–that would be Google (GOOG), which he does not mention by name–never innovate much.

His take: Underdogs are the best.

12:01 pm: Mehdi is back to show off the wares in a demo.

First, what’s there. Web search in Facebook and Facebook status updates on Bing.

Zzzzzzzz. Get to the good stuff!

First, a module that brings in a Like module from Facebook into the search, with all the other information provided by Bing.

It is, said, Mehdi, particular for a person.

“This is going to profoundly change how we search,” he said of personalized experiences.

Mehdi also shows off a way to differentiate your friends who have names of famous people, who are the ones who come up on search first.

Interesting, but people search is not the biggest problem I have.

He also says more is coming, such as friend experts surfacing in search and Like in every result on a page that it was possible. Yipes!

Also, thank the Lord, the ability to turn it off.

12:15 pm: Now Facebook exec Dan Rose comes up and starts talking about the Facebook-Microsoft bromance.

Apparently, four years is an eternity in Silicon Valley in terms of a relationship.

Actually, four weeks is long, so congrats you two crazy kids!

I’d celebrate with a donut if they were here.

“More and more” social in Bing, said Rose.

It’s a match made in digital heaven!

12:22 pm: Q&A time!

So what more? The press is so unsatisfied! Yes, we are.

Zuckerberg takes the lead. New interfaces! More!

A privacy question. “This is Instant Personalization,” said Zuckerberg, who said that Facebook has five partners in that effort.

He explains Instant Personalization, saying he wants to clear up misconceptions.

It’s private enough, you oversharers!

“Just because it is all public information about you, this is really good,” he said.

But is it by default? Of course, it is. That’s Facebook modus operandi!

Opt-out should be tattooed on employees at Facebook as a requirement.

Bing does put up a warning at the top of the page, but only five times. Then, you need to go foraging to turn it off.

Next: Does Bing search queries get sent back to Facebook? Not necessarily.

But, “everything is going to be social eventually,” said Zuckerberg, as long as it is public.

Public is apparently the new black.

More questions about new Facebook Groups and other deets, none of which is that bracing.

Apropos of nothing, I am considering asking a question about the ever-exciting Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) scandal, just to jack up the volume.

I try to ask a question about Zuckerberg’s underdog comment, but no more time.

But Zuckerberg sort of addresses it, going on about why he has picked Microsoft as the favorite.

While he does not say it, it’s because Facebook is the overdog here and, as you know, every overdog needs an underdog.

Speaking of cartoon heroes, here is the opening of that classic television show:

Harvested from publicly available information held in Facebook’s open access directory, the torrent is essentially a list of users with a cavalier attitude towards privacy and a reminder of just how easily the personal information we post online can be gathered for whatever purpose–large-scale data mining, for instance–unless we explicitly take steps to prevent that from happening.

If you didn’t make some thoughtful opt-out decisions in your Facebook profile, chances are you unwittingly opted in to this torrent. And that’s troubling because there are 100 million such people.

“Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life,” the site promises. But not always just the ones you’ve invited. As the torrent’s creator notes, “Once I have the name and URL of a user, I can view, by default, their picture, friends, information about them, and some other details. If the user has set their privacy higher, at the very least I can view their name and picture. So, if any searchable user has friends that are non-searchable, those friends just opted into being searched, like it or not! Oops :).”

Oops, indeed.

In the case of Apple (AAPL), that means reading the new 45-page privacy policy that comes with the iOS 4 update and finding the section about cookies.

Actually, you don’t have to do that–iLounge already highlighted it for us:

Apple and its partners use cookies and other technologies in mobile advertising services to control the number of times you see a given ad, deliver ads that relate to your interests, and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns. If you do not want to receive ads with this level of relevance on your mobile device, you can opt out by accessing the following link on your device: http://oo.apple.com. If you opt out, you will continue to receive the same number of mobile ads, but they may be less relevant because they will not be based on your interests. You may still see ads related to the content on a web page or in an application or based on other non-personal information. This opt-out applies only to Apple advertising services and does not affect interest-based advertising from other advertising networks.

So that’s pretty much the same tack that Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and other big Web ad players (not Facebook, though) have taken to ad targeting and privacy: If you don’t want to see targeted ads, you don’t have to see targeted ads. But you’re still going to see ads. And figuring out how to opt out of targeting will take a little bit of doing (here are the opt-out pages for Google and Yahoo, which they describe as ad “managers”).

Note that this deals only with Apple’s homegrown ad network, not third-party outfits like Medialets or Millenial Media. Then again, Apple isn’t giving the biggest mobile ad network, Google’s AdMob, access to targeting data at all.

As others have noted, Apple’s same privacy policy doesn’t give iPhone users any choice when it comes to location data on their phones–it is tracking their location and reserves the right to share it with “partners and licensees.”

Whether or not that creeps you out likely depends on your attitude toward services like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter: If you spend your time broadcasting your status to the world, it’s hard to get riled up about Apple keeping tabs on you, too.

But if you’re a private soul, Apple offers this promise: “This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services.”

Feel better? Okay, how about this–Steve Jobs at D8, promising to protect users’ privacy:

We’ve always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleagues in the Valley. We take privacy extremely seriously. That’s one of the reasons we have the curated apps store. We have rejected a lot of apps that want to take a lot of your personal data and suck it up into the cloud.

Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for. In plain English, and repeatedly, that’s what it means. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data.

That’s a pretty straightforward, simple proposition, much more so than Apple’s confusing legalese. If Apple really wants to appease privacy worriers, the company ought to update its policy with words that sound like the ones Jobs spoke earlier this month.

The senators in particular criticized the way Facebook rolled out its instant personalization feature, which currently gives three sites access to Facebook users’ data when the person visits the site and is logged in to Facebook, so that the sites can customize the visit.

“Although we are pleased that Facebook allows users to opt-out of sharing private data, many users are unaware of this option and, moreover, find it complicated and confusing to navigate,” the Democratic senators–New York’s Charles Schumer, Colorado’s Michael Bennet, Mark Begich of Alaska and Al Franken of Minnesota–wrote in the letter. They asked Facebook to make instant personalization an opt-in feature instead.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

And who knows? That may still happen. But Google (GOOG) isn’t slowing down. Instead, the search giant is taking its “remarketing” program out of beta and opening it up to all of its advertisers. Here’s Google’s description of the process:

Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on your tickets page on your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who visits that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In the same way, you can run ads across the Google Content Network to everyone who visits your brand channel on YouTube or who clicks on your YouTube homepage ad (if you have either of those).

That will sound fairly innocuous to many people.

And it’s certainly fairly common–remarketing is pretty much standard practice on the Web these days. But the fact that Google makes it very difficult to opt out of remarketing (good luck finding this page*, which gives you that choice) is telling. If this stuff is truly no big deal, it should be no big deal if you don’t want to play along.

*Google notes that each of its ads contains a link that will lead you to its preferences and opt-out page. So noted. But unless you know in advance what Google is up to, it won’t occur to you to look for it.

[Image credit: ogimogi]

If you follow the media-versus-Google meme, you know this instinctively. But here are some numbers that spell it out: Of the 25,000-plus sources cataloged by Google News, “less than 100″ have opted out of the index, says Google’s Josh Cohen, who runs the service.

It is theoretically possible, of course, that more publications have opted out of Google’s main search results than out of the narrower Google News product. But I doubt it.

I also doubt that we’re going to see a significant number of publishers opt out of Google (GOOG) in the future, despite noisy saber-rattling from media outlets–most notably the Associated Press and News Corp. (NWS), which owns this site.

That said, if we are going to see some movement, it will be in the next few months. The AP, for instance, has a licensing deal with Google that runs out in the very near future.

I chatted Friday with Cohen (see video interview below) about the negotiations, and he gave me the polite equivalent of a “no comment.” But from what I can tell, the two sides remain pretty far apart on just about every point of contention.

Some other items of note from my conversation with Cohen:

• A reminder that even publishers that put their stuff behind a paywall don’t want to cut themselves off from Google, which is absolutely true. Just ask News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal, which has gone through considerable effort and expense to boost its presence in search results.
• Even though Google is already integrating “real-time” search results from Twitter (with Facebook and MySpace on the way), those results have not worked their way into Google News, and Cohen and his team are still trying to figure out the best way to do that.
• I got an English-language explanation of the “Living Stories” project Google is working on with the Washington Post (WPO) and the New York Times (NYT).

Apologies: I still have not mastered vagaries of audio for Web video, or at least for our Web video publishing system. You’re probably going to want to turn the volume down during the introduction in this clip and then turn it back up once the interview starts.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091221/a-very-short-list-publishers-whove-actually-told-google-to-take-a-hike/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091207/yahoo-adds-new-privacy-tool-for-users-just-as-ftc-privacy-hearings-start-today-and-microhoo-regulatory-approval-is-pending/ http://allthingsd.com/20091207/yahoo-adds-new-privacy-tool-for-users-just-as-ftc-privacy-hearings-start-today-and-microhoo-regulatory-approval-is-pending/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:03:01 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=21569

Yahoo announced a new consumer tool this morning, called “Ad Interest Manager.”

BoomTown is going to ignore the could-it-be-duller name for the feature, which–Yahoo (YHOO) said in a press release you can see below–gives users a “central place where Yahoo! visitors can see a concise summary of their online activity and make easy, constructive choices about their exposure to interest-based advertising served from the Yahoo! Ad Network.”

What fortuitous timing, since the first of three of the Federal Trade Commission’s “Exploring Privacy: A Roundtable Series” begins this morning in Washington, D.C.

And, of course, the bigger backdrop is the pending regulatory approval of the massive search and advertising partnership with Microsoft (MSFT). Yahoo and Microsoft announced Friday that they had completed the definitive agreement for the deal.

Among the key issues for regulators, of course, are the privacy implications of combining the search and online ad technologies of the No. 2 and No. 3 players.

Today’s day-long agenda is chock-full of academics and privacy group folks, but there is a Microsoft lawyer on a panel. (The next roundtable in the series takes place at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, Jan. 28, 2010.)

Said the FTC on its site:

The Federal Trade Commission will host a series of day-long public roundtable discussions to explore the privacy challenges posed by the vast array of 21st century technology and business practices that collect and use consumer data. Such practices include social networking, cloud computing, online behavioral advertising, mobile marketing, and the collection and use of information by retailers, data brokers, third-party applications, and other diverse businesses. The goal of the roundtables is to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation.

There will surely be lots to discuss, since privacy groups are wary of self-regulation by the very companies that link consumer data to advertising.

And they have a point.

Visiting my Ad Interest Manager page is kind of freaky, to be honest. It shows I am interested in entertainment, technology and travel, checking in most on the finance and television pages. Correctomundo!

Also, it has detailed data about my computer, including its color depth, as well as my age and gender.

If I want, it is pretty easy to opt-out of the whole “interest-based” ad categories completely or by category, with on-off switches, which is a good thing.

If you want to know more, here is the Yahoo press release:

YAHOO! INTRODUCES AD INTEREST MANAGER

PROVIDES CONSUMERS WITH GREATER TRANSPARENCY AND CONTROL OVER THEIR ONLINE ADVERTISING EXPERIENCE

Today Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) released a beta version of a new consumer tool called Ad Interest Manager, which takes transparency in online advertising to a new level for building user trust. Ad Interest Manager http://privacy.yahoo.com/aim is a central place where Yahoo! visitors can see a concise summary of their online activity and make easy, constructive choices about their exposure to interest-based advertising served from the Yahoo! Ad Network.

“Ads tailored to users’ interests make online experiences more compelling and user-focused, and the new tool Yahoo! is launching today will provide transparency into how Yahoo!’s interest-based advertising works,” said Yahoo! Vice President of Policy and Head of Privacy, Anne Toth. “Yahoo! is committed to providing consumers with increased transparency and control when they are online. Ad Interest Manager will show users what interests we think they have, and also let them edit and change those interests to reflect the most up-to-date information.” Anne Toth also pointed out: “Importantly, users who don’t want interest-based ads can turn them off completely.”

Yahoo!’s new Ad Interest Manager tool:

• Provides a central point where Yahoo! visitors can assert even greater control over their online experience.

• Gives visitors an unparalleled view into the information used to deliver interest-based advertising.

• Shows the visitor both Yahoo!’s educated guesses about their interests and a summary of observations, along with other information they have provided.

• Provides a list of specific interest categories that Yahoo! has placed a user into and lets people turn those categories off.

• Allows people who don’t want to see interest-based ads to turn them off entirely.

“Yahoo! has long provided its users with products and services for free, thanks to a business model based almost entirely on advertising, and we’ve found that consumers are more likely to click on advertising that speaks directly to them and their interests,” said Yahoo!Vice President and General Manager of Display Advertising, David Zinman. “With the introduction of Ad Interest Manager, users can not only get a better understanding of how the process works, but they can also communicate better with Yahoo! and our advertisers about what most interests them.”

Yahoo!’s Ad Interest Manager is currently available in beta in the U.S. and will soon be made available to UK and European users. Planned future enhancements to the Ad Interest Manager will also let users add categories of interest that Yahoo! may have missed.

To see what the new Ad Interest Manager looks like and how it works, please visithttp://privacy.yahoo.com/aim.

Yahoo! was one of the first companies to implement a layered privacy center http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/details.htmlmodel more than eight years ago, which provides people with a central place to understand and control their privacy online, as well as their options when it comes to the use of personal data. This information is coupled with our industry-leading data-retention policy http://ycorpblog.com/2008/12/17/your-data-goes-incognito/, which anonymizes most Web log data within 90 days. The policy also strives to ensure that Yahoo! retains data only long enough to serve the business and create the highest-quality user experiences, while simultaneously maintaining the ability to fight fraud, secure systems, and meet legal obligations.

And here is the consumer privacy groups’ press release on the FTC hearings:

Consumer and Privacy Groups at FTC Roundtable to Call for Decisive Agency Action

Washington, DC, December 6, 2009–On Monday December 7, 2009, consumer representatives and privacy experts speaking at the first of three Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Exploring Privacy Roundtable Series will call on the agency to adopt new policies to protect consumer privacy in today’s digitized world. Consumer and privacy groups, as well as academics and policymakers, have increasingly looked to the FTC to ensure that Americans have control over how their information is collected and used.

The groups have asked the Commission to issue a comprehensive set of Fair Information Principles for the digital era, and to abandon its previous notice and choice model, which is not effective for consumer privacy protection.

Specifically, at the Roundtable on Monday, consumer panelists and privacy experts will call on the FTC to stop relying on industry privacy self-regulation, because of its long history of failure. Last September, a number of consumer groups provided Congressional leaders and the FTC a detailed blueprint of pro-active measures designed to protect privacy, available at: http://www.democraticmedia.org/release/privacy-release-20090901.

These measures include giving individuals the right to see, have a copy of, and delete any information about them; ensuring that the use of consumer data for any credit, employment, insurance, or governmental purpose or for redlining is prohibited; and ensuring that websites should only initially collect and use data from consumers for a 24-hour period, with the exception of information categorized as sensitive, which should not be collected at all. The groups have also requested that the FTC establish a Do Not Track registry.

Quotes from Monday’s panelists:

Marc Rotenberg, EPIC: “There is an urgent need for the Federal Trade Commission to address the growing threat to consumer privacy. The Commission must hold accountable those companies that collect and use personal information. Self-regulation has clearly failed.”

Jeff Chester, Center for Digital Democracy: “Consumers increasingly confront a sophisticated and pervasive data collection apparatus that can profile, track and target them online. The Obama FTC must quickly act to protect the privacy of Americans,including information related to their finances, health, and ethnicity.”

Susan Grant, Consumer Federation of America: “It’s time to recognize privacy as a fundamental human right and create a public policy framework that requires that right to be respected. Rather than stifling innovation, this will spur innovative ways to make the marketplace work better for consumers and businesses.”

Pam Dixon, World Privacy Forum: “Self-regulation of commercial data brokers has been utterly ineffective to protect consumers. It’s not just bad actors who sell personal information ranging from mental health information, medical status, income, religious and ethnic status, and the like. The sale of personal information is a routine business model for many in corporate America, and neither consumers nor policymakers are aware of the amount of trafficking in personal information. It’s time to tame the wild west with laws that incorporate the principles of the Fair Credit Reporting Act to ensure transparency, accountability, and consumer control.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091207/yahoo-adds-new-privacy-tool-for-users-just-as-ftc-privacy-hearings-start-today-and-microhoo-regulatory-approval-is-pending/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20091124/ad-industry-works-on-ads-about-ads/ http://allthingsd.com/20091124/ad-industry-works-on-ads-about-ads/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:11:46 +0000 Emily Steel http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=18345 Madison Avenue has joined forces with Internet companies in a last-ditch attempt to stop privacy regulations over the $29 billion online-ad industry.

The industry is finalizing an ad campaign to educate consumers about how digital advertising works, creating an icon that would appear on Web pages or ads alerting consumers if their activity is being tracked and deploying new technologies to police the Web for illegal activities. At issue is the practice of tracking consumers’ Web activities–from the searches they make to the sites they visit and the products they buy–for the purpose of targeting ads.

The efforts follow calls from the FTC earlier this year for Web advertisers and Internet companies to do a better job explaining how they track and use information about consumers’ Web activities and creating a simple way consumers can opt out of being tracked.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091124/ad-industry-works-on-ads-about-ads/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091111/europe-approves-new-cookie-law/ http://allthingsd.com/20091111/europe-approves-new-cookie-law/#comments Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:27:14 +0000 Marisa Taylor http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=17733 The Council of the European Union has approved new legislation that would require Web users to consent to Internet cookies.

Cookies, small programs that can be used to track Web movements, have come under fire as consumer groups, including the Federal Trade Commission, have sought to regulate companies that engage in targeted behavioral advertising.

While the current EU telecom law states that cookies are allowed if Internet users are notified of them and have an opt-out option, in practice, the law has been interpreted more loosely. In the United Kingdom, for example, the information commissioner’s office issued a directive emphasizing that sites should clearly direct users to a page where they can opt out.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091111/europe-approves-new-cookie-law/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090623/congress-readies-an-opt-in-privacy-bill-and-the-web-industry-cringes/ http://allthingsd.com/20090623/congress-readies-an-opt-in-privacy-bill-and-the-web-industry-cringes/#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:41:30 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8522 Here comes the battle the online ad business has been dreading: Congress is drawing up a bill that would require users to sign up to let advertisers track their online behavior–and, if you believe online publishers, more or less destroy the online ad business.

Simulmedia founder and CEO Dave Morgan told an industry conference today that Rep. Rick Boucher, the Virginia Democrat who has become the loudest voice in Congress in the advertising/privacy fight, is prepping a bill that will force publishers to let Web surfers “opt in” before they’re served with any third-party tracking cookies.

Not a huge surprise: Boucher laid out the case for the bill last week at a Congressional hearing. It’s unclear just exactly what that would mean for the business: Could Google (GOOG) not send cookies out if you, say, played a YouTube video embedded on a third-party site (like the one the White House runs)?

But right now the details of the proposed bill don’t matter: The industry has already started arguing against it via promotions that explain just how valuable Web advertising is to the country (and by extension, the targeting/tracking that cookies enable it). From MediaFlect’s Dorian Benkoil:

“Congress’ position is that consumers are not appropriately aware of what is being done on their machines, and the use of cookies delivered by a third party is something consumers have not been appropriately informed of,” said Morgan, who oversees privacy initiatives for the Internet Advertising Bureau [and who] was in Washington last week talking to FTC officials and congressional staff, he said. “Congress’ default position is that that will require an opt-in,” to serve a third-party cookie.

That’s a perfectly sensible position from a consumer’s perspective: Why should advertisers and their proxies track what you’re doing on the Web without your consent? But from the advertising/publisher perspective, an opt-in plan means a plan no one will ever agree to, which means no more cookies/tracking, period, which means Web advertising becomes as imprecise and clumsy as good-old TV and print ads.

Which is why the Web guys prefer a bill that allows surfers to opt out–or preferably, no bill at all.

I still like my Solomon-like solution, which I’ve thrown out before: Let consumers opt in, but give them a reward for doing so.

It doesn’t have to be much–consumers say they care about privacy, but in reality, they’re very happy to trade personal info for trinkets and geegaws. Maybe you get “privacy points” every time you visit a site for the first time and sign away your right to complain about tracking. And if you earn enough you get a bag of Cheetos, etc. Sure we can work something out.

[Image credit: rpongsaj]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090623/congress-readies-an-opt-in-privacy-bill-and-the-web-industry-cringes/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090429/a-google-book-search-for-antitrust-law-ought-to-come-in-handy-here/ http://allthingsd.com/20090429/a-google-book-search-for-antitrust-law-ought-to-come-in-handy-here/#comments Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:27:46 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=16591 Google’s gone and run afoul of the Department of Justice again. Its interest piqued by the growing outcry over the company’s proposed book-search settlement with authors and publishers, the agency has opened an inquiry.

Sources briefed on the matter say DOJ attorneys have contacted Google (GOOG) as well as the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild about the antitrust implications of the agreement. Presumably at issue here are concerns over the settlement’s opt-out terms–authors and publishers who don’t opt out have effectively opted in–and the fate of orphan works, books still in copyright but whose copyright owners are unknown.

Orphan works number in the millions and the fear is that this settlement gives Google a powerful blanket license for them. As Pamela Samuelson, director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, recently noted:

An estimated 70 per cent of the books in the Book Search repository are in-copyright, but out of print. Most of them are, for all practical purposes, “orphan works,” that is, works for which it is virtually impossible to locate the appropriate rights holders to ask for permission to digitize them….The proposed settlement agreement would give Google a monopoly on the largest digital library of books in the world….Google will also be the only service lawfully able to sell orphan books and monetize them through subscriptions….Virtually the only way that Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo!, or the Open Content Alliance could get a comparably broad license as the settlement would give Google would be by starting its own project to scan books. The scanner might then be sued for copyright infringement, as Google was. It would be very costly and very risky to litigate a fair use claim to final judgment given how high copyright damages can be (up to $150,000 per infringed work). Chances are also slim that the plaintiffs in such a lawsuit would be willing or able to settle on equivalent or even similar terms.

Samuelson concludes that the Book Search agreement as written is essentially a major restructuring of the book industry and an anticompetitive one at that. If that is indeed the case–and Google maintains that it is not–it’s worrisome indeed. Certainly, it’s reason enough for the DOJ to give the agreement a good once-over.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090429/a-google-book-search-for-antitrust-law-ought-to-come-in-handy-here/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090429/a-google-book-search-for-antitrust-law-ought-to-come-in-handy-here-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20090429/a-google-book-search-for-antitrust-law-ought-to-come-in-handy-here-2/#comments Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:27:46 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=16591 Google’s gone and run afoul of the Department of Justice again. Its interest piqued by the growing outcry over the company’s proposed book-search settlement with authors and publishers, the agency has opened an inquiry.

Sources briefed on the matter say DOJ attorneys have contacted Google (GOOG) as well as the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild about the antitrust implications of the agreement. Presumably at issue here are concerns over the settlement’s opt-out terms–authors and publishers who don’t opt out have effectively opted in–and the fate of orphan works, books still in copyright but whose copyright owners are unknown.

Orphan works number in the millions and the fear is that this settlement gives Google a powerful blanket license for them. As Pamela Samuelson, director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, recently noted:

An estimated 70 per cent of the books in the Book Search repository are in-copyright, but out of print. Most of them are, for all practical purposes, “orphan works,” that is, works for which it is virtually impossible to locate the appropriate rights holders to ask for permission to digitize them….The proposed settlement agreement would give Google a monopoly on the largest digital library of books in the world….Google will also be the only service lawfully able to sell orphan books and monetize them through subscriptions….Virtually the only way that Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo!, or the Open Content Alliance could get a comparably broad license as the settlement would give Google would be by starting its own project to scan books. The scanner might then be sued for copyright infringement, as Google was. It would be very costly and very risky to litigate a fair use claim to final judgment given how high copyright damages can be (up to $150,000 per infringed work). Chances are also slim that the plaintiffs in such a lawsuit would be willing or able to settle on equivalent or even similar terms.

Samuelson concludes that the Book Search agreement as written is essentially a major restructuring of the book industry and an anticompetitive one at that. If that is indeed the case–and Google maintains that it is not–it’s worrisome indeed. Certainly, it’s reason enough for the DOJ to give the agreement a good once-over.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090429/a-google-book-search-for-antitrust-law-ought-to-come-in-handy-here-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071206/ddv20071206/ http://allthingsd.com/20071206/ddv20071206/#comments Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:00:58 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071206/ddv20071206/

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071206/ddv20071206/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20071205/fiascobook-redux/ http://allthingsd.com/20071205/fiascobook-redux/#comments Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:32:05 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071205/fiascobook-redux/ What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lacks in foresight, he certainly makes up for in disingenuous hair-shirt remorse. After two weeks of hue and cry over Facebook’s month-old Beacon advertising system and its disregard for member privacy, Zuckerberg today apologized for the company’s misstep and announced some of the fundamental changes to Beacon that users have been calling for.

“Once every 100 years, the way that media works fundamentally changes,” Zuckerberg stated … (kidding ….)

“We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it,” he wrote. “…When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. … At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. … It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. … Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better.”

And the company is trying. Today it released a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. Said Zuckerberg, “If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.”

That’s a pleasant assurance, but one that some say doesn’t go nearly far enough. “So essentially he’s saying the information transmitted won’t be stored but will perhaps be interpreted,” writes Om Malik. “Will this happen in real time? If that is the case, then the advertising ‘optimization’ that results from ‘transmissions’ is going to continue. Right! If they were making massive changes, one would have seen options like ‘Don’t allow any Web sites to send stories to Facebook’ or ‘Don’t track my actions outside of Facebook.’ ”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071205/fiascobook-redux/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071204/and-the-zuckerberg-bashing-begins/ http://allthingsd.com/20071204/and-the-zuckerberg-bashing-begins/#comments Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:12:27 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071204/and-the-zuckerberg-bashing-begins/ As inevitable as air, Silicon Valley likes to build them up and then tear them down.

Thus, the bell now tolls for Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg.

We at BoomTown have been consistent and persistent in voicing our various worries about the young entrepreneur, from one of our very first posts, questioning (we think fairly) the unproven business underpinnings of the hot social network, the juvenile nature of its much vaunted third-party widgets, the insanity of its $15 billion valuation, its inane legal fights and the problems with its worrisome ad efforts.

We’ve also taken (we think probably unfairly) shots at those flip-flops he wears. And we did call him a toddler CEO, also a low blow, we have to admit.

But now, it seems, a mob is forming, sparked by the issues around Facebook’s controversial Beacon ad program, which can track your purchases on some external sites and send the information back to your Facebook profile’s news feed.

While it made some changes in Beacon last week, Facebook has not given users a global opt-out of the controversial marketing system in which the social network is seeking to link behavior and advertising more tightly for supposedly bigger payoffs.

The mainstream media and blogosphere, which recently were feting him, have now turned and ire has been growing over Beacon, which seems to be focusing everyone on the inexperience of Zuckerberg and the challenges facing Facebook.

That was clear in a very cogent piece by Josh Quittner on his Techland blog for Fortune today, which was titled “RIP Facebook?”

He writes:

A lot of people say that Facebook has jumped the shark. That’s flat out wrong. In fact, Facebook is now being devoured by the shark. There’s so much blood in the water, it’s attracting other sharks. And if Facebook’s not careful, one of them is bound to come along and finish it off. I’ve never seen anything like it in the annals of fast-rising tech companies that fail.”

As Zuckerberg might say: That bites.

And here is a photo that was put on the Fake Steve Jobs blog, which was using the PhotoCrank service, where users can add captions:

Oh my.

As Quittner writes correctly, right now it is the press that has turned on Zuckerberg, which is sure to be followed by much more important advertisers, who shy away from controversy.

We’ll see how it plays out, but it is surely a flash point moment for Facebook.

Or in the immortal words of actress Joan Crawford: “Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.”

Feel the love, Mark.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071204/and-the-zuckerberg-bashing-begins/feed/ 11 http://allthingsd.com/20071203/ddv20071203/ http://allthingsd.com/20071203/ddv20071203/#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:00:35 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071203/ddv20071203/

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071203/ddv20071203/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20071203/epicurious-has-added-a-privacy-violation-to-your-facebook-profile/ http://allthingsd.com/20071203/epicurious-has-added-a-privacy-violation-to-your-facebook-profile/#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2007 08:01:35 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071203/epicurious-has-added-a-privacy-violation-to-your-facebook-profile/ Facebook may be worth $15 billion after all–not in future advertising revenues (which are apparently suffering at the moment), but in future legal fees.

A CA security researcher reports that the
site’s controversial Beacon online ad system, which transforms member transactions on affiliate sites into product/service endorsements, collects information about member actions on affiliate sites even if they’ve opted out of Beacon and logged off from Facebook. Stefan Berteau, senior research engineer at CA’s Threat Research Group, explained how in a post to the CA Security Advisor Research Blog:

I created an account on epicurious.com and tried saving three recipes as favorites. The first recipe was saved while logged in to Facebook in the same browser session. An alert appeared allowing me to opt out of Facebook’s publishing this as a story on my feed, which I did. The second one was saved after I had closed the Facebook window but had not logged out or ended the browser session. The same alert appeared, and I opted out again, selecting ‘No thanks.’ I then closed the browser entirely and launched a new session. After confirming that I was not logged in to Facebook, I saved the third recipe. No alert appeared.

“I then checked the network traffic logs and was dismayed to find that in all three cases, data about where I was on Epicurious, what action I had just taken, and what my Facebook account name is [were] transmitted to Facebook. The first two cases involve the transmission of user data despite ‘No thanks’ having been selected on the opt-out dialog, and are causes for deep concern. They pale, however, in comparison to the third case, where Facebook was receiving data about my online habits while I was not logged in, and was doing so silently, without even alerting me to the cross-site communication.”

Unsettling, such data collection practices. Though Facebook, of course, claims they are all on the up-and-up and conducted with proper privacy safeguards. “When a Facebook user takes a Beacon-enabled action on a participating site, information is sent to Facebook in order for Facebook to operate Beacon technologically,” the company said in response to Berteau’s report. “If a Facebook user clicks ‘No, thanks’ on the partner-site notification, Facebook does not use the data and deletes it from its servers. Separately, before Facebook can determine whether the user is logged in, some data may be transferred from the participating site to Facebook. In those cases, Facebook does not associate the information with any individual user account, and deletes the data as well.”

(Photo via FSJ)

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