Tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m. EST, the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will hold a hearing on “The State of Online Consumer Privacy.” West Virginia Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller IV is Chairman of the committee.
According to an official press release, ”the hearing will kick off the 112th Congress’ deliberations on consumer privacy, an issue that is front and center on the Commerce Committee’s agenda, and a top priority for Chairman Rockefeller.”
Quoting the rest of the release:
“Modern technology has connected people with the world and led to new innovations, new products and new experiences,” Chairman Rockefeller said. “But with these new opportunities come new risks. I want to know if the privacy protections we have in place are enough, or whether Congress needs to step in and do more. As Chairman, I’m committed to doing everything I can to protect consumers’ privacy.”
Wednesday’s hearing will examine commercial practices that involve collecting, maintaining, using, and disseminating large amounts of consumer information, some of it potentially very sensitive and private in nature. It comes on the heels of two new reports by the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Commerce calling for greater privacy protections for Americans online.
Chairman Rockefeller has spearheaded Senate efforts to protect consumers’ privacy in our increasingly online world. This is the 2nd in a continued series of hearings examining how users’ information is stored, collected and used and what more Congress can do to protect Americans online.
A number of privacy experts are scheduled to testify before the panel including Jon D. Leibowitz, the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, whose organization would play a large role in enforcing any privacy legislation that Congress passes.
And legislation is certainly on the agenda. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, is expected to ask Congress to “pass a ‘privacy bill of rights’ to protect Americans, amid growing concern about the tracking of Internet users.” A Commerce Department source also said, “the administration will also call for consumers to have a right to access information about them and a right to have the information stored securely” during the panel.
The Commerce Department first proposed the idea of a “privacy bill of rights” in a special green paper report in December. At the time, the Commerce Department asked for feedback on the report from privacy experts, consumer advocates, and businesses. In response, Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik drafted an analysis of the report and submitted it in January of this year. In our report, Reputation.com focused on the importance of baseline consumer privacy protections and the role that private companies can have in spurring the economy by delivering consumer privacy services.
We will be following the senate hearing closely tomorrow, and we encourage you to do the same via Twitter. We will also offer a more detailed recap of the panel, as well as a round-up of some of the press coverage surrounding the event, later in the day here at the Reputation.com Blog.
Twitter celebrates its fifth anniversary this month, and the company looks vastly different than it did five years ago. According to new stats, Twitter processes a whopping one billion tweets per week. It took Twitter three years to get to one billion tweets total. Interestingly, it appears that Twitter can grow even further. A Pew research study showed that only 8% of Americans use Twitter, leaving lots of room for new users to try out the service.
The shopping website Etsy is widely admired for giving shoppers a place to find unique hand-crafted goods online. However, the company’s reputation took a big hit recently after it released a new feature that showed what users had purchased. According to Ars Technica, “The controversy began last week when Etsy flipped the switch on People Search as part of its effort to make Etsy feel more like a social network…Even if users haven’t entered their full names, their profiles are still searchable by username. Even better, people’s Etsy profiles and their purchase histories (via the feedback they leave) are beginning to show up under Google results for their names.”
Worse yet, Etsy didn’t notify users before making this change, meaning people had no opportunity to opt out of the feature. Now, some users’ private purchases are being tied to their Google identities, and it’s having a detrimental effect on their online reputations. Etsy has since addressed the issue, but the temporary snafu is a timely example of how privacy and reputation are inexorably linked.
An Australian teen, who mistakenly set up a public event instead of a private event, was shocked to find that over 200,000 people had RSVP’d to her sweet sixteen birthday party. Although the girl made the mistake of leaving the event open, police were investigating a 17-year-old in relation to the incident. Presumably, the high numbers came as part of an Internet prank. Interestingly, the girl set up a second event, and still kept it open. Over 70,000 people have RSVP’d to the second invitation.
According to new UK studies, many children as young as seven “have their own Facebook pages and some are being cyber-bullied.” Researchers partly attribute the low age of bullying victims to lax parenting. Most social networking websites prohibit anyone under 13 from having a profile and experts recommend respecting those age limits.
According to the Washington Post’s Cecilia Kang, “the Federal Trade Commission said Monday that it settled with online advertising provider Chitika for allegedly tracking online activities of users who had opted out of the company’s service.” The FTC was investigating Chitika over complains that “the company allegedly placed cookies on the Web browsers of consumers who had explicitly asked to bar the tracking service from collecting information to be used for behavioral advertising.” The FTC’s investigation into Chitika demonstrates the possible shortfalls of a self-regulated system among Internet advertisers.
In today’s Quick Hits, another teacher is in trouble for Facebook, politicians duke it out over privacy, and the FTC issues a settlement against Twitter.
The founder of the controversial website 4Chan, Christopher Poole (aka moot) appeared at the South by Southwest technology conference this weekend to speak on the subject of online anonymity. Poole, who advocates for extensive anonymity online, opposes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of an Internet where everyone is tied to a single identity. 4Chan, which spawned the collective hacker movement Anonymous, has been criticized and/or celebrated for using anonymous accounts to police the web as hacker vigilantes.
A Brooklyn fifth-grade teacher may be fired after school administrators discovered several messages on her Facebook account that they deemed inappropriate. The teacher, who claims she was venting over an unruly class, wrote, “After today, I’m thinking the beach is a good trip for my class. I hate their guts.” When a friend commented, “Wouldn’t you throw a life jacket to little Kwami?” the teacher responded, “No, I wouldn’t for a million dollars.” That last message is what prompted the six-month investigation.
According to Facebook’s terms of service, users must be at least 13 years old. However, children under 13 still use Facebook regularly, with some studies showing that 38% of 12-year-olds use the popular social networking website. This feature article in the New York Times discusses the safety concerns involved with underage social networking and whether websites like Facebook are doing enough to prevent underage users from signing up for the website. The article also discusses the concept of lying, and why kids and some parents think it’s okay to lie to a website, but not to a person.
After hackers accessed the accounts of several high profile users on Twitter, including President Barack Obama’s official account, the FTC launched an investigation against the company. The investigation recently came to a close, with the FTC declaring that, “Twitter will be barred for 20 years from misleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy, and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information, including the measures it takes to prevent unauthorized access to nonpublic information and honor the privacy choices made by consumers. The company also must establish and maintain a comprehensive information security program, which will be assessed by an independent auditor every other year for 10 years.”
With privacy becoming a hot issue among voters, several politicians are looking to become the go-to leader on the issue of data security. Now, some politicians are drawing a line in the sand. According to The Hill, “Commerce chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and ranking member Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) took the unusual step of writing to the Senate Judiciary Committee expressing their opinion that the Commerce Committee is the natural home of any online privacy legislation.” The letter comes in response to the creation of a Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and Law. Whomever ultimately spearheads privacy legislation has a major job ahead of them.
In January, Reputation.com rolled out the first version of uProtect.it, an innovative new Facebook privacy application praised as a “delete button for the Internet.” Today, at the celebrated South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, Reputation.com is rolling out uProtect.it 2.0, a new and improved iteration of our product that offers even better privacy control for Facebook users.
Reputation.com will be demoing uProtect.it to members of the press and interested South by Southwest attendees at Stubb’s BBQ (8th & River) from 4:00pm-8:00pm today.
With uProtect.it 2.0, Facebook users have complete control over their messaging. You can determine exactly who sees your message, how they see it, where they see it, and when they see it. Better yet, your messages are never hosted on the Facebook network, meaning that your messages can’t be used or sold for advertising, protecting your personal info. Reputation.com’s uProtect.it also offers the possibility to set an expiration date on messages, causing them to disappear from the Web completely. With time, uProtect.it will expand beyond Facebook to offer even more protection for users on the social Web.
Why does uProtect.it matter?
With uProtect.it, Reputation.com has taken a massive step forward in delivering usable and intuitive privacy solutions for social media users. By and large, social networking websites make money by selling targeted marketing campaigns based around their users. While social networks are “free” to use, they actually represent a significant cost in personal data. Simply quitting social networks is impossible, however, especially for those who’ve come to rely on social networking as an important means of staying in touch with family and friends, or require social media tools to help promote their personal brand.
That’s where uProtect.it comes in. With uProtect.it, you can post and share messages on your own private network, while still using social media technology platforms. Currently, your Facebook posts and messages across the Web can be read by anyone. It’s not just your friends or your friends’ networks; you’re also highly visible to advertisers, insurers, healthcare providers, employers and other decision-makers. When you make comments or put information online, those words can last indefinitely. UPI makes it possible to self-select how long the message will persist and exactly who sees it. Essentially, UPI allows you to enjoy all the good things about social networking without any of the privacy dangers that come along with it.
How Does uProtect.it Work?
Once users install the uProtect.it Facebook plugin, they can select to use it sometimes or always. When you use it, the status updates or photos you post will initially appear to your Facebook friends as only “[Your name] made a protected post.” You select which of your friends you would like to share the encrypted message with. If users have the application installed and they are allowed by the poster to see the post, then it becomes readable. If they don’t have the app, they see a link that enables them to download it. If they install the app but aren’t on the sender’s list to view the update, they remain out of luck.
You can use uProtect.It either as a bookmarklet or a browser plug-in that is compatible across all browsers, including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari.
What’s new about UPI 2.0?
Previously, UPI was designed to function on the Facebook API. Now, UPI is completely platform agnostic. The tool requires no third-party support or approval and can function across the Web. Best of all, it can’t be shut down based on the priorities of a network, meaning your data stays safe no matter how badly the network wants to share it.
In addition to the platform change, UPI now offers an improved dashboard that allows users to better organize and view all of their messages and content. All UPI messages are stored on the individual’s dashboard. From the dashboard, users can manage their messages, choosing when to delete them, and also having a record and reminder of what they’ve said.
To check out uProtect.it in action, watch this demo video.
If you cannot make it to our special SXSW event today, feel free to contact us with your questions about UPI or any our other services via our contact form. For more updates on uProtect.it, follow Reputation.com on Twitter.
In today’s Quick Hits, we talk about one social media manager’s costly Twitter mistake, how Google is improving its social features, and whether ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt might take the job of Commerce Secretary under President Obama.
Earlier this week, an employee manning Chrysler’s official ChryslerAutos Twitter account accidentally confused his personal and professional accounts and tweeted a message saying “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to (expletive deleted) drive.” The tweet was quickly deleted, but not before others picked it up. The social media strategy firm fired the individual responsible for the mix-up, but Chrysler held the entire firm accountable and has dumped them in favor of someone new.
Photo sharing is an important part of the social web, and it seems like Google is finally acknowledging that with several improvements to its Picasa photo product. Perhaps the most important change Google made to Picasa was the incorporation of Picasa photos into a Google user’s Google profile, which users must make public by July 31st, or else have them deleted. Adding photos to the new-look Google profiles is likely one step in Google’s ongoing efforts to build a social product to compete better with Facebook.
The Charlie Sheen Machine has taken over the Web, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down, which is why resourceful scammers are using the actor’s popularity (or infamy) to push malware across social networking websites. This article from Switched details the recent Sheen-themed scams hitting the web, including a death hoax, and how to avoid them.
Could ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt potentially become the next Commerce Secretary under President Obama? That’s what some reports are suggesting, and it may not be that far-fetched considering that Schmidt has consulted with Obama on economic strategy in the past. However, as PC World points out, Schmidt’s high-profile position at Google and his somewhat cavalier comments about privacy protections may make him too much of a liability for the important government position.
Former Vice Presidential candidate and current reality TV show star Sarah Palin has had troubles with Facebook in the past, as have her daughters Willow and Bristol. Now, Bristol’s new boyfriend is bringing drama to the Palin clan through his Facebook profile. According to the Daily Mail, among other publications, the 20-year-old’s Facebook page contained racist and homophobic language, and even mocked Sarah Palin’s TLC reality show. After reports came out about the page, much of the content was removed, but not before screenshots appeared online.
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