In today’s Quick Hits, we look at how social media sites ranked in the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, how Facebook is celebrating its half a billion users, the world’s first anonymous ISP, and what happened to the British Columbia’s online gambling site.
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Facebook is among the Web’s worst in customer satisfaction, according to a recent survey by ForeSee Results and the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Facebook was given one of the lowest scores in its category, with 64 out of 100 points. According to ForeSee Results CEO Larry Freed, the low rating is due to “privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website, and commercialization and advertising.” Google received a score of 80 (seven points lower than last year’s score), Bing and Wikipedia both got a 77, Yahoo scored a 76, and YouTube managed a 73. Twitter was excluded from the survey due to its heavy involvement with third party applications.
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As of this morning, 500 million people are actively using Facebook. To celebrate, Facebook is launching a new application called Facebook Stories, where users can share the impact Facebook has had on their lives. In addition, Diane Sawyer is set to interview CEO Mark Zuckerberg tonight on ABC’s “World News”. This milestone also has company watchers asking if Facebook could surpass Google’s 800 million users and hit 1 billion.
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The Swedish Pirate Party is looking to refashion Internet privacy regulations by launching the world’s first anonymous ISP. By hiding online activities, they hope to further their belief that citizens’ rights to privacy should be respected. Though the Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau is insisting that police requests for Internet activities from ISPs must be fulfilled, the new ISP will not be keeping logs of online activities to give out.
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The British Columbia government’s online gambling site was shut down due to a privacy breach. When PlayNow.com was relaunched last week as the first government-sanctioned online casino in North America, 134 accounts were left exposed and open to any other player to access. According to company officials, twelve accounts had “a measure of sensitive personal information viewed by another player.”
1 comment so far ↓
Are you people kidding me? http://www.yauba.com has been up and running an anonymous ISP for almost a year. I got in (by a lucky accident) 8 or 9 months ago, and I have had only one problem, and that was when the site went down for repairs for a day or two. Did you folks perform a ‘due diligence’ search?
From the site:
“Yauba is a new, experimental, Indian search engine that seeks to transform the way people find information online, while providing maximum protection for their safety, security and privacy. Launched in “early beta/late alpha” mode on March 2009 after stealth development in Bangalore, Delhi, and London, Yauba is based on over 25 years of cutting edge research from the Indian Institutes of Technology, the University of Delhi, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the University of California at Berkeley. As a result, Yauba offers some of the most advanced Internet technologies, features, and innovations in the world. At Yauba, we completely reject the view that search engines somehow need to keep mountains of data on their own users. Instead, we take the exact opposite approach. We do everything we can to protect the privacy of our users.
* This is why we do not keep any record of any of your search terms, browsing habits or any other personally identifiable information.
* This is why we automatically delete any and every piece of personally identifiable information from our servers on a continuous basis.
* This is why we can have the shortest privacy policy (9 words) of any major Internet service in the world.
* This is why you can visit almost every Internet site through the main Yauba service on a completely anonymous basis (with the only exception of file types that use other external third party software or plug-ins for downloading or playing). ”
Maybe I got it all wrong. Maybe I just can’t read.
But one thing I do know for certain: India beat the Swedes to the punch.
Or is there another reason this blog has no date posted? Hmmm…..
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