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Google has agreed to pay a record $22.5 million civil penalty to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it misrepresented to users of Apple’s Safari Internet browser that it would not place tracking “cookies” or serve targeted ads to those users, violating an earlier privacy settlement between the company and the FTC. In addition to the civil penalty, the order also requires Google to disable all the tracking cookies it had said it would not place on consumers’ computers.
Google did not admit to violating the law. The FTC said Google broke the terms of a 2011 settlement over privacy missteps related to the now-defunct Buzz, a social networking tool. FTC Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch filed a dissenting statement because he said the FTC should not have accepted Google’s denial of liability, which he called “inexplicable.” Google has said its actions were unintentional and had resulted from a change in Safari of which Google was unaware. When the issue was brought to the company’s attention, it said, it stopped using the cookies and showing personalized ads on Safari browsers. David Vladeck, the director of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said he had little patience for Google’s explanation, and referred to other privacy violations about which Google has also said it was unaware, like collecting personal data with its Street View cars.
FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said the penalty is meant to send a message that “No matter how big or small, all companies must abide by FTC orders against them and keep their privacy promises to consumers, or they will end up paying many times what it would have cost to comply in the first place.”
Google Will Pay $22.5 Million to Settle FTC Charges it Misrepresented Privacy Assurances to Users of Apple's Safari Internet Browser FTC Fines Google $22.5 Million for Safari Privacy Violations (NYTimes) In Fight Over Largest Fine Ever, FTC Commissioners Disagreed Over Whether Google Should Admit Fault (Wall Street Journal) Google settles FTC privacy case for $22.5 million, agency’s largest penalty (Washington Post) Google hit with record $22.5-million fine for Safari tracking (LA Times) Google will pay $22.5M for Safari cookies (The Hill) Google to pay biggest FTC fine ever for tracking Safari users (ars technica) FTC hits Google with $22.5 Million fine over Safari hacks (GigaOm) Google hit with $22.5M fine for privacy misstep (Politico)
The long slide of T-Mobile USA continued in the latest quarter, as the country's No. 4 cellphone company lost subscribers and struggled to sign people up for smartphones.
The subsidiary of Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG said that it lost a net 205,000 subscribers in the second quarter, a record for the period. Among phone subscribers under contract, it lost 557,000 subscribers, also the highest number of the second quarter. Phone subscribers on contract-based plans pay the most, and are the bread and butter of large wireless carriers. T-Mobile's revenue from monthly fees on contract service fell 9 percent from a year ago. The larger wireless carriers — Verizon, AT&T and Sprint — all managed to increase this number in the second quarter. Thanks to job cuts, T-Mobile continued to be profitable, with a second-quarter net income of $207 million, nearly flat compared with $212 million a year ago.
Overall revenue fell 3 percent from a year ago to $4.9 billion.
T-Mobile loses subscribers, smartphone sales fall flat Post AT&T tryst, T-Mobile’s decline continues (GigaOm)
A new Super PAC, Friends of Democracy, which is critical of the Super PAC money spent on political ads targeting candidates, has just bought $700,000 worth of TV time in four states for political ads targeting four incumbent Republican House members. The incumbents in the Super PAC's sites are Reps Dan Lungren (R-CA), Chip Cravaack (R-MN), Sean Duffy (R-WI) and Charlie Bass (R-NH). That means broadcasters in the districts in California, Minnesota, Wisconsin and New Hampshire represented by the congressmen not only benefit from the Super PAC money, but from the dollars targeting all that other Super PAC spending.
Friends of Democracy Super PAC Makes First TV Buy
Belo will offer the "It's Your Time" program, free airtime for congressional and gubernatorial candidates, for the ninth consecutive election cycle this fall. The company also announced election coverage plans: Belo's news-producing stations will televise at least one hour of political coverage each week in the six weeks prior to the general election on Nov. 6. The company's election coverage in 2012 may include debates, issue- and ad-watch programming, and interviews with local, state and federal candidates which will be streamed and archived on Belo websites through Election Day. Belo stations will also expand their election coverage this year by broadcasting several runs of debates and "It's Your Time" spots on their multicast channels and publishing political coverage on their enhanced smartphone and iPad apps. Candidates participating in "It's Your Time" each receive five minutes of free airtime — four minutes to tell viewers why they should be elected and one minute to answer a question specific to the candidate's individual race.
Belo Offers Candidates Free Airtime
Akamai’s latest State of the Internet Report finds:
- A 6 percent increase globally from the fourth quarter of 2011 in the number of unique IP addresses connecting to Akamai, growing to over 666 million.
- The global average connection speed was 2.6 Mbps
- The global average peak connection speed increased to 13.5 Mbps.
- South Korea had the highest average connection speed at 15.7 Mbps, while Hong Kong had the highest average peak connection speed, at 49.3 Mbps.
- In the first quarter of 2012, average connection speeds on known mobile providers ranged from 6.0 Mbps down to 322 kbps.
- Average mobile peak connection speeds during the quarter ranged from 32.2 Mbps down to 2.2 Mbps.
- Mobile data traffic almost doubled from the first quarter of 2011 to the first quarter of 2012 and was up 19 percent quarter-over-quarter.
- In the first quarter, Hong Kong took the top spot for average peak connection speed (49.3 Mbps), dropping South Korea (47.8) to second place. The remaining top 5 included Japan (39.5 Mbps), Romania (38.8 Mbps) and Latvia (33.5 Mbps).
- Globally, high broadband (10 Mbps or higher) adoption increased 19 percent to 10 percent in the first quarter, and South Korea had the highest level of high broadband adoption, at 53 percent.
- Global broadband (4 Mbps or higher) adoption grew 10 percent to 40 percent, with South Korea having the highest level of broadband adoption, at 86 percent.
- Nine of the top 10 countries saw high broadband adoption levels increase quarter-over-quarter, ranging from a 7.6 percent increase in Hong Kong (to 28 percent) to a surprisingly large 63 percent jump in Denmark (to 15 percent). Overall, 42 qualifying countries saw quarterly growth in high broadband adoption, from a massive 149 percent increase in South Africa (to 0.7 percent) to a 3.4 percent increase in Ireland (to 10 percent).
- Nearly 60 percent of US connections are above 4 Mbps while 15 percent of US connections are about 10 Mbps.
Across the planet, broadband is getting faster & faster
According to Akamai’s State of the Internet Report, Delaware is the state with the fastest connection speeds. Delaware had an average connection speed of 10.2 megabits per second in the first three months of 2012. Delaware clocked in nearly 9% faster than the average speeds in New Hampshire, the state with the second-fastest Internet connections. Vermont, Utah and Rhode Island round out the top five U.S. states. At 3.6 Mbps, Arkansas is the state with the lowest average connection speed.
- 18 US states had average peak connection speeds above 30 Mbps in the first quarter, while 31 states had average peak connection speeds above 20 Mbps.
- 19 total states saw high broadband adoption increase between 100 percent and 200 percent year-over-year.
The state with the fastest Internet is...
USA TouchPoints analysis looks at how exposure to radio correlates with a range of life activities throughout an average day of American moms. The cross-section of activities accompanied by radio listening by at least some moms illustrates the extent to which daily life is led to its own soundtrack. Whether talking and chatting with others, commuting, eating, working, doing housework, radio has a presence.
The Whole Story: Moms, Radio And Recency
[Commentary] Like reading, writing, and arithmetic, web literacy is both content and activity. You don’t just learn “about” reading: you learn to read. You don’t just learn “about” arithmetic: you learn to count and calculate. You don’t just learn “about” the web: you learn to make your own website.
As with these other three literacies, web literacy begins simply, with basics you can build upon. For some it can lead to a profession (i.e. becoming a computer programmer) while for most it becomes part of the conceptual DNA that helps you to understand and negotiate the world you live in. Making web literacy the fourth literacy begins with the premise that not only are humans capable of learning together--we’re doing it, contributing to peer learning online, every day of our lives. That is a major educational paradigm shift, the great gift we’ve been given by those who built the web on open architecture. Web literacy explains the world we live in and gives us the tools to contribute to that world.
[Davidson is a professor at Duke University. Mark Surman is the executive director of Mozilla.]
Why Web Literacy Should Be Part of Every Education
Is TV news making more mistakes? Or are they just more obvious?
There are at least two possibilities at work, both involving the crush of tweeted, Tumbl'd and wall-posted information that besieges anyone with access to a laptop or a nice phone.
- One: The old-school, TV elite are making more mistakes because of the pressure of competing not just with each other, but with the unwashed, unedited and un-vetted masses breaking stories from their parents' attics.
- Two: Traditional journalists are making the same number of mistakes they always have. But the same motley confederation competing with them to break news is also holding them more accountable than ever before. That, fans of accuracy would agree, would be a good thing.
- It could be a combination of both. And it remains to be seen whether that will lead to a golden age of accountability in which everyone is kept honest, or an Idiocracy in which people throw up their hands and refuse to believe anything.
Is TV News Making More Mistakes? Or Are They Just More Obvious?
[Commentary] The immediate threat to the Internet as we know it is the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) scheduled for December in Dubai by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a U.N. body whose remit has thus far been limited to global telephone systems.
Members meet behind closed doors. Their policy proposals were until recently accessible only to members -- until activists forced transparency upon them through a website called "WCITLeaks." The leaked documents reveal how a number of governments -- in league with some old-school telecommunications companies seeking to regain revenues lost to the Internet -- are proposing to rewrite global international telecommunications regulations in ways that opponents believe will corrode, if not destroy, the open and free nature of the Internet. This is by no means, however, the first attempt by powerful governments to assert power through the ITU. China, Russia, and many developing countries have complained for nearly two decades that the new, nongovernmental multistakeholder institutions are dominated by Americans and Western Europeans who manipulate outcomes to serve their own commercial and geopolitical advantage. These critiques converge with the interests of former and current state-owned phone companies wanting to restore revenues of yore before email and Skype wiped out the need for most international phone calls.
The United Nations and the Internet: It's Complicated