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Posts Tagged ‘User Information’

Weekly Wrapup: Facebook Privacy, RFID in iPhone, Nexus Review, And More…

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup – our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week – we analyze and challenge Facebook’s sweeping new privacy policies, explore what would happen if RFID chips are integrated into the next generation iPhone, present our hands-on review of Google’s new smartphone the Nexus One, and more. And as usual we check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteStart (our daily resource for entrepreneurs) and ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ trends and products).

Also read on for details about the newly released printed edition of our current premium report, about the Real-Time Web.

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Now Available: Printed Edition of The Real-Time Web Report

At the request of the librarian community and people that just like paper, we have made The Real-Time Web and its Future report available in print.

For those of you that prefer it digitally, you can still download it.

Don’t forget about our Community Management Report. It too is coming in print soon, so watch out for it!

Web Trends

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience this week that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

In a six-minute interview, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook’s privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world’s largest social network – and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.

Why Facebook is Wrong: Privacy Is Still Important

Has society become less private or is it Facebook that’s pushing people in that direction? Is privacy online just an illusion anyway? Below are some thoughts, based primarily on the pro-privacy reactions to Zuckerberg’s statements from many of our readers this weekend. Though there is a lot to be said for analysis of public data (more on that later), I believe that Facebook is making a big mistake by moving away from its origins based on privacy for user data.

iPhone as RFID Tag & Reader: Coming Soon

We began a series called Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things this week, starting with a look at barcode scanning. We wrote that smartphones are increasingly being deployed as readers for barcodes – in particular via apps available on iPhone and Android. However, RFID tags are more functional and flexible than barcodes. While barcodes are cheaper and getting traction in the U.S. with the QR format, the potential for RFID tags is even greater. Apple knows this and if rumors are to believed, RFID will be integrated into the iPhone 4G later this year.

The Evolving Online Finance Ecosystem

Last week we analyzed how the Web is transforming personal finance. This week we took a broader look at the world of online finance, from personal to small business tools. To get an understanding of the online finance space, we spoke to the founder and CEO of one of the most promising startups in online finance, Rod Drury from Xero. Rod told us that he sees four types of markets in online finance: 1) Personal Finance (e.g. Mint, Wesabe, Yodlee); 2)
Small Business Accounting (e.g. Xero, Kashflow); 3)
Cloud ERP (e.g. Netsuite, Salesforce); and 4)
ERP (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle).

Editor’s note: This story is part of ReadWriteWeb’s Online Finance series, a weekly, three-month long look at how the Internet has transformed finance.

iPhone App Piracy Reaches $450 Million? Doubtful

According to an independent analysis performed by investment-watching blog 24/7 Wall St., Apple’s iTunes App Store has lost $450 million due to iPhone app piracy since it opened for business back in July of 2008. Although that number sounds high, they note it is small in comparison to the overall size of the App Store marketplace. However, our sources say that the real number is closer to $15-$20 million instead.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Social Media Secrets and Resources Revealed

Presentation company Slideshare recently released its list of “5 Social Media Secrets for 2010″. While these secrets certainly sound like great suggestions, we thought we’d connect them to some concrete tactics and resources that you can use to improve your social media strategy.

Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Boston

With tourists flocking to the Boston to walk the cobblestone streets of the Freedom Trail and visit various historical landmarks, Boston is often thought of for its ties to the American Revolution. But Boston is also the birthplace of a revolution of a different sort. In 1946, Georges Doriot, a professor at the Harvard Business School, founded the American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) in Boston – one of the very first venture capital firms.

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations.

VMWare, Microsoft and the Battle for the Business Market

VMware’s acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo this week points to a new form of partnership in the tech word. It’s one that could define the big winners in the battle for a major piece of the enterprise market. By packaging Zimbra’s popular, open-source collaboration software, VMware can provide a service that combines virtualization technology with email and calendar applications. It is similar to Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard’s alliance announced today that will package Microsoft technology on HP servers.

Web Products

Google Offers Satellite Images of Haiti, Post-Earthquake

In the immediate aftermath of a 7.0 earthquake that caused an unbelievable amount of destruction to Haiti’s capital, Google has been asked by relief organizations and users to show images of what’s actually happening on the ground. In partnership with geospatial imagery company GeoEye, Google released a new layer for Google Earth showing post-earthquake devastation.

Nexus One and Android 2.1: Apple Better Watch Out

Less than a week ago, Google introduced its own Android phone, the Nexus One. Over the weekend, we got a chance to take the phone through its paces and while we aren’t quite ready to give up our iPhone yet, the Nexus One is a formidable challenger. In terms of features, the Nexus One is already on par with the iPhone platform and beats it in many areas. When it comes to the overall user experience, the iPhone is still a step ahead of the Android platform – but that could easily change in the near future.

Going Mainstream: eMusic Signs Deal with Warner Music

EMusic, the popular subscription-based music service, this week announced that it has signed a deal with Warner Music – the world’s third-largest music company. This is eMusic’s second deal with a major record label. In its early days, eMusic mostly focused on featuring music from independent labels. Since the middle of 2009, however, eMusic has worked on expanding its reach by bringing more mainstream music to its catalog.

Facebook Blocked at Work? Use Your Email Instead

In our continuing obsession with all things Facebook, we looked at a new feature that was announced by the social networking behemoth that will further enmesh the site into our every waking breath: replying to comments through email. Before now, email notifications from Facebook contained a link that you had to follow, which logged you into Facebook where you could reply. You’ll now notice that the email contains a line reading “New Feature: Reply to this email to comment on this link.”

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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E-Trade acquires, shutters social investing startup Cake Financial

Cake Financial, a site where you could import your investment data from multiple brokerages and share that information with other users, announced today that it has been acquired by financial services company E-Trade.

In his note on the Cake site, the San Francisco startup’s chief executive Steven Carpenter says “aspects of the Cake service will be incorporated into the E-Trade website” and that “E-Trade can make the vision we had for all investors a reality.”

Unfortunately for Cake fans, E-Trade only appears to be interested in Cake’s technology and staff, not its user base — the Cake site has been shut down. Instead of offering users any kind of transition to a new service, Carpenter instead says user information will be deleted and destroyed, and that people who paid for Cake’s premium services will be reimbursed.

Cake never provided us with numbers on the total funding it has raised, but investors include KPG Ventures and Alsop-Louie. TechCrunch reports that there was a bidding war for Cake, with The Motley Fool also trying to acquire the startup. Carpenter isn’t sharing any details with TechCrunch, and he hasn’t responded to my email either.

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Google Defends Against Large Scale Chinese Cyber Attack: May Cease Chinese Operations

Google is releasing information about a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” on their corporate infrastructure that occurred last month. The attack originated in China and resulted in the “theft of intellectual property from Google.” In light of the attack Google is making sweeping changes to its Chinese operations.

Google is releasing some information about these attacks to the public. The company says that a minimal amount of user information was compromised, but has come to the alarming discovery that the attacks were targeting the information of Chinese human rights activists. Google found that these attacks were not just going after Google’s data, but were also targeting at least twenty other major companies spanning sectors including Internet, finance, chemicals, and more. Google has also discovered that phishing attacks have been used to compromise the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.

In light of the attacks, and after attempts by the Chinese government to further restrict free speech on the web, Google has decided it will deploy a fully uncensored version of its search engine in China. This is a major change: since January 2006, Google has made concessions to the Chinese government and offered a censored (and highly controversial) version of its search engine at Google.cn. Google isn’t playing that game any longer. Should the Chinese government decide that an uncensored engine is illegal, then Google may cease operations in China entirely.  We have included Google’s blog posts about the decision in their entirety below.

Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users. In terms of individual users, we would advise people to deploy reputable anti-virus and anti-spyware programs on their computers, to install patches for their operating systems and to update their web browsers. Always be cautious when clicking on links appearing in instant messages and emails, or when asked to share personal information like passwords online. You can read more here about our cyber-security recommendations. People interested wanting to learn more about these kinds of attacks can read this U.S. government report (PDF), Nart Villeneuve’s blog and this presentation on the GhostNet spying incident.

We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

Here’s a second post, from the Google Enterprise Blog:

Many corporations and consumers regularly come under cyber attack, and Google is no exception. We recently detected a cyber attack targeting our infrastructure and that of at least 20 other publicly listed companies. This incident was particularly notable for its high degree of sophistication. We believe Google Apps and related customer data were not affected by this incident. Please read more about our public response on the Official Google Blog.

This attack may understandably raise some questions, so we wanted to take this opportunity to share some additional information and assure you that Google is introducing additional security measures to help ensure the safety of your data.

This was not an assault on cloud computing. It was an attack on the technology infrastructure of major corporations in sectors as diverse as finance, technology, media, and chemical. The route the attackers used was malicious software used to infect personal computers. Any computer connected to the Internet can fall victim to such attacks. While some intellectual property on our corporate network was compromised, we believe our customer cloud-based data remains secure.

While any company can be subject to such an attack, those who use our cloud services benefit from our data security capabilities. At Google, we invest massive amounts of time and money in security. Nothing is more important to us. Our response to this attack shows that we are dedicated to protecting the businesses and users who have entrusted us with their sensitive email and document information. We are telling you this because we are committed to transparency, accountability, and maintaining your trust.

Posted by Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook’s privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world’s largest social network – and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.

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Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to Arrington’s question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the web. The question was referencing the changes Facebook underwent last month. Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable. I’ll post Zuckerberg’s sentences on their own first, then follow up with the questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00.

Zuckerberg:

“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’

“And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

That’s Not a Believable Explanation

This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is “the vector around which Facebook operates.”

I don’t buy Zuckerberg’s argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient. Perhaps Facebook’s pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable, though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook.

This major reversal, backed-up by superficial explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook’s changing philosophies about privacy are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to exert control over the future of the web.

Facebook’s Different Stories

First the company kept user data siloed inside its site alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people.

Now that it has 350 million people signed up and connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before – now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large, and incidentally (as Facebook’s Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told me in December) that it’s time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue, too.

The Flimsy Evidence

What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging “and all these different services that have people sharing all this information.” That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It’s made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook.

Facebook’s Barry Schnitt told us last month that he too believes the world is becoming more open and his evidence is Twitter, MySpace, comments posted to newspaper websites and the rise of Reality TV.

But Facebook is bigger and is growing much faster than all of those other things. Do they really expect us to believe that the popularity of reality TV is evidence that users want their Facebook friends lists and fan pages made permanently public? Why cite those kinds phenomena as evidence that the red hot social network needs to change its ways?

The company’s justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren’t credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they “just went for it,” to use Zuckerberg’s words from yesterday.

(Why didn’t Arrington press Zuckerberg on stage about this? The rise of blogging is evidence that Facebook needs to change its fundamental stance on privacy?)

This is Very Important

Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutia of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos – if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples’ lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that’s old news, that people are changing. I don’t believe it.

I think Facebook is just saying that because that’s what it wants to be true.

Whether less privacy is good or bad is another matter, the change of the contract with users based on feigned concern for users’ desires is offensive and makes any further moves by Facebook suspect.

See also: A Closer Look at Facebook’s New Privacy Options

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Twitter 2.0: API Rate Change Could Lead to a World of New Apps & Features

One of the best things about Twitter is its wildly creative ecosystem of applications built by people outside the company. Those apps have been constrained, though, by technical limits imposed on retrieving data from Twitter. Those limits are just about to be raised much higher and developers tell us that a whole new world of applications and features may become possible.

Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver followed up on earlier public announcements this weekend with an email to developers explaining plans to raise the limit on the number of times an application can request information from Twitter for a single user to 10 times what it is today (from 150 req/hr to 1500/hr), and to offer everyone the same kind of paid access to the full “fire hose” of user updates that Google and Bing enjoy. People who build cool Twitter apps say this is very big news.

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The Twitter API gets hit every time an application wants to look up a user’s friends, their updates, their bio information and more. If you’re building an application that analyzes, cross-references and offers useful and fun insights and features based on those types of information, then current API limits are a constraint on how much analysis you can perform, bake-down and present to your users. Raising the limits on developer access to user information will enable more processing to be done behind the scenes and more magic to be presented to end-users of Twitter apps.

We spoke to some of our favorite developers about both the API limit increase and the fire hose access. Here’s what they had to say.

Iain Dodsworth, Tweetdeck

“Not wishing to overstate the case but these changes will allow for the next generation of Twitter app. So far the ecosystem has mainly concentrated on providing numerous new UIs onto Twitter (with pretty good success I might add). Potentially the 10x API will signal a shift towards richer functionality & service development: Twitter 2.0. [emphasis added]

“We’re already working on functionality which mines and analyses Twitter data within the application layer which wouldn’t be possible without a 10x API limit. I’m interested to see how the API scales with these new API limits.”

Loic Le Meur, Seesmic

“The increased API limits allow apps to come up with new interaction models for Twitter, and also to catch up on all the new features Twitter added (new RTs, lists), which couldn’t be supported properly with 150 requests per hour. ”

Justyn Howard, SproutSocial

“On the 10x increase – Not too many people bump into the authorized limit today unless they run multiple apps, but that was by design. All of us developers built in controls to limit the calls, which has left power users constantly slamming the refresh button. So this does a couple of things: 1. It allows developers to loosen the logic throttling API calls which will create a closer to real-time experience for the end-users. 2. Also opens some new opportunities on cool things we can do which require the user API vs. Search (some things you can’t get from the open API’s, you need to use the user’s account to do them). 3. Will open the doors for more secondary apps, where users previously couldn’t have more than one or two [different Twitter apps] open without hitting rate limits, you’ll see more people using niche apps in the background if they provide some capability beyond what Seesmic, Tweetie and Tweetdeck offer.”

On Access to the Firehose for Everyone

Kevin Marshall, co-founder of innovative social graph parsing application provider Wow.ly, builds apps that have a clear need for increased rate limits. “This is great,” he told us, “because the 150 per hour limit in conjunction with various API features (for example, the social graph API) makes it very difficult to pull off some more ‘advanced’ features I would like to build.”

On offering the Firehose to everyone, Marshall had an unusual and interesting response that demonstrates the maturity that this ecosystem is developing. It’s not a simple matter of everyone chasing thoughtlessly after the real-time stream.

“The more I do with and around social data, the less interested I seem to become in ‘realtime’ and the more interested I become in ‘over time.’ When I first started hacking on Twitter (and Facebook) apps, I was in love with the idea of parsing and analyzing data in real-time and I was very link/content focused. But the more I build and use these tools, the more I see the value in the history and the trails of the data set – especially when you consider that we are all living in a more asynchronous world then ever before thanks to things like blogs, Tivo, Hulu, iTunes, and other media-on-demand stuff. I don’t think it’s really so much about ‘what are you doing right now’ as it is ‘what have you done that’s interesting to me right now?’…and I think you get that by aggregating and analyzing.”

None the less, many developers will welcome the opening of previously selective fire hose access. Mailana founder Pete Warden says even his seed-funded company is looking forward to ponying up some cash.

“This may sound counter-intuitive as a starving entrepreneur,” he told us, “but the best guarantee the API will stay open and available is if Twitter makes money from it.”

“It gives developers the chance to move from being charity-cases to paying customers, and so gives Twitter a lot more reasons to listen to what we want. Anyone who wants to deal with the flood of data from the firehose already has to invest in some beefy hardware, (my server and bandwidth bills are thousands of dollars a month) so reasonable fees from Twitter shouldn’t raise the barrier to entry by much.”

These changes are expected to go live soon and we look forward to seeing what they enable new and old Twitter apps to do.

You can find and follow the RWW team on Twitter here.

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Apple rejects Unity games on the App Store

Filed under: Gaming, Apple, Developer, iPhone, App Store, SDK

Touch Arcade has the news that the long-awaited Ravensword and a number of other games built on the Unity game engine have been rejected by Apple from the App Store. The problem appears to be a number of API calls in the engine (though not specifically the game themselves, as I understand it) that allow the games to access the iPhone’s number and send it back to the developer’s servers.

Apple considers these to be private APIs, and they also got games developer Storm8 in trouble earlier this week; their games were pulled from the store in response to a lawsuit alleging that they were collecting data from users without their knowledge.

Chillingo, publishers of Ravensword, contacted us about this story, and they said that while the Unity engine does allow developers to use these calls, they did not use them or collect any user information. We’re also told that the problem APIs “have been removed,” and Chillingo has resubmitted the game for App Store approval.

As I understand it, this is the same type of issue that came up with Google a while back. It’s not the same APIs (Google was using the proximity sensor back then), but now as then, it’s Apple’s call whether they will allow developers to use these private and undocumented calls. Obviously some apps on the iPhone have to access the address book from time to time, but it’s Apple’s call whether they can use APIs like that or not. This time, it appears, they said no.

TUAWApple rejects Unity games on the App Store originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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