AT&T Charges Google’s Privacy Practices Worse Than ISP Snooping

You might not find this astonishing, but your internet service provider (ISP) monitors what you look at online to make sure you’re not a pedophile or a terrorist or conspiring to murder someone. But then, when your ISP sells marketing data based on what you’re looking at online or turns data over to the National Security Agency without a warrant, then you get the government involved in trying to protect our privacy.

AT&T, which happens to be an ISP, alleges that the popular search engine Google does the same thing through its Google toolbar and ability to report back URLs and search terms.

Four prominent House lawmakers… asked 33 internet companies on Aug. 1 to explain some of their monitoring practices, Most have replied. In its letter, AT&T denies that it currently digs deep into the net habits of its users “for the purpose [of] developing a profile of a particular consumer’s online behavior.”* (AT&T is currently facing a class action lawsuit for allegedly helping the NSA spy on Americans’ internet usage, but that’s a different issue since the NSA does not run ads.)

But even if it did, that’s nothing compared to Google, it says. “If anything the largely invisible practices of ad-networks raise even greater privacy concerns than do the behavioral advertising techniques that ISPs could employ, such as deep-packet-inspection,” AT&T wrote.

“Advertising-network operators such as Google have evolved beyond merely tracking consumer web surfing activity on sites for which they have a direct ad-serving relationship. They now have the ability to observe a user’s entire web browsing experience at a granular level, including all URLs visited, all searches, and actual page-views.”

They have a good point, but the rule of thumb is to not look up stuff on the internet that will make people think you’re a pedophile or a terrorist or conspiring to murder someone. That’s generally a motto I try to live by.

I wonder why ISPs need to advertise. They get my $20 a month to run their business. To me, it would make more sense to either raise their price with a concurrent increase in service/speed or advertise to increase their customer base. I suppose you could also let people go, but it’s often hard enough getting somebody on the phone from tech support as it is.

The internet is fickle about this sort of thing. Raising its ire by violating privacy won’t win you many friends or earn you many customers.

Blockbuster CEO ‘Confused by Fascination’ With Netflix

Not to pick on somebody, but we’ve been in the e-commerce era for about 15 years now (Amazon.com launched online in 1995). Do people still not get it?

Blockbuster is a fine company with a perfectly sound business model. Problem is, the whole brick-and-mortar thing smells a little 20th centuryish. While Netflix has cornered the mail DVD business, Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes is baffled by his competitor’s success. “I’ve been frankly confused by this fascination that everybody has with Netflix,” Keyes told Rafat Ali, in an interview with PaidContent.org.

Equally bewildering to Mr. Keyes is the emphasis on catalog size. Why would anyone want to watch anything other than new releases, he wonders. “I don’t care how many movies are available to me. As my personal taste as a customer, I want to watch the new stuff so whether we have 10,000 movies or 200 movies doesn’t matter if I don’t want to see any of the movies that we have . . . our assortment is heavily weighted toward newer releases and mainstream staple titles.”

I’m not a member of Netflix, but I can see the attraction. Meanwhile, Blockbuster appears in this article to be a company who still believes the world is flat.

Facebook Beacon Tracking Program Draws Privacy Lawsuit

Facebook has recently taken over our household. It’s a lot more fun and a lot less pornographic than MySpace. However, how happy was I to find out that Facebook takes some of your personal information and publishes it on other people’s web sites without permission?

Facebook’s Beacon program faced an immediate onslaught of criticism since users were automatically opted into having purchases disclosed to your friends and networks — spoiling, most famously, a man’s surprise Christmas jewelry present for his wife from Overstock.com. (No surprise, he’s one of the plaintiffs). Facebook users who bought items from select stores or rented movies or purchased movie tickets had their purchases automatically noted on their Facebook profile and in the news feeds of their friends.

The suit, filed Tuesday in federal district court in California, accuses the social networking site and advertising partners of illegally spying on its customer’s communications with the advertiser’s sites in violation of federal wiretapping law. The suit also contends that Blockbuster, Fandango, GameFly and Overstock.com illegally publicized customers’ movie choices, in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act (enacted after a newspaper published Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s video rental records).

The suit also names Hotwire, Zappos.com, STA Travel among the plaintiffs. It also further alleges violations of federal and state anti-hacking laws.

Two lessons from this: be careful what Facebook apps you add and don’t rent movies at Blockbuster that you wouldn’t want publicized to the internet.

While I’m on the subject of Facebook, since it has rising in popularity lately, here’s another nugget of info to share:

Almost everyone forgets a Web site password once in a while. When you do, you click on the familiar “Forgot your password?” link and, after entering your pet’s name, identifying your high school mascot or answering some other seemingly obscure questions, you can get back into your account.

But there’s a problem: A criminal can do that, too. With the help of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, personal trivia is getting less obscure all the time. You’d be surprised how easily someone can uncover Fido’s name or your alma mater with a little creative searching.

As an experiment, Herbert Thompson, chief security strategist of People Security, recently asked a few friends for permission to “hack” into their bank accounts. Using only information gathered from Web sites, Thompson found his way in within minutes.

In other words, if you don’t want somebody to hack your bank or credit card accounts, don’t put your hometown or your maiden name or stuff like that there on your social networking accounts.

The Ignite Presentation Method

It seems that I have gone all Techie Conspiracy Theorist lately, so let’s get back to communication and public speaking. Here’s an interesting premise:

Ignite asks the questions: What if you only had five minutes on stage to make your point? And what if you could use only 20 slides that automatically advanced every 15 seconds? The Ignite communities are interesting indeed and have developed quite a buzz.

So, basically, Ignite is like mixing Toastmasters with speed dating. They’re only organized in the big cities for right now.

A lot of students will ask me if they can do a PowerPoint presentation for a 3- to 5-minute speech. I generally say no, because that’s only long enough to do a couple of slides, and you would probably be better off with some other sort of visual aid anyway. Not only that, but then they tend to put together 10 to 12 slides and push the boundaries into the 10-minute territory. So, the idea of using 4 slides per minute is somewhat intriguing.

I am trying to do away with all my old bullet points, but I’m afraid that old habits die hard. I am revamping slides for a COM 115 class I’ll be teaching in November, so we’ll see if I can figure out something by then.

The video is humorous and has a lot of good information about buying a car, but I think the speaker suffers from pacing. It was way too fast, and at times, the speaker sounded like an auctioneer. I know that it was supposed to be in and out in 5 minutes, but then maybe that’s the result of too many points to cover.

Silent Helper

I’m always hesitant to talk about 9/11 in a Biblical sense, because it’s too easy to get carried away. A lot of people said that 9/11 happened to punish America for thinking about allowing homosexuals to marry, for allowing abortions to occur, and for overall straying away from God. The problem with those arguments are that they’re Old Testament thinking. We are told that God does not curse and that God does not align himself with evil, and the people that flew those airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania were definitely evil.

On the other hand, nothing happens without escaping God’s notice and everything happens to achieve His glory. That week, there were many people crying out to God, and that weekend, there were many more people in our churches coming to seek Him. Maybe they didn’t stay, but their hearts acknowledged that they needed Him to mend them and their souls acknowledged that they were not perfect and they were not yet ready to meet Him face-to-face at the judgment seat.

And then, there are people who are angry with God for not preventing this tragedy. They ask why a God who is loving and who cares for us would allow this to happen. Well, again, I feel God’s love is shown to us in this tragedy by drawing us all closer to Him for a greater relationship.

Those who died who knew Christ as their Savior leave behind families that know they will see their loved ones again one day and that God will protect their families and fulfill the role of Father that their earthly fathers once held. Those who don’t will sadly be like the story of the rich man and Lazarus the poor man, who upon his death and punishment in hell, asked God to be able to tell his family to repent, to which God said that if they didn’t believe Moses and the prophets, then they would not believe a dead man either.

As we remember the tragedy that happened seven years ago that shocked our nation to its core, let’s also not forget to thank our Lord for keeping us from similar attacks in the meantime, for all the invisible help He gives us to allow us to move throughout our days unaware of what could have happened.

The Lord… often gets blamed when something goes wrong, but He seldom gets credit for all the things that go right. Every day people get up, get dressed, drive to work or school or the grocery store, and return safely to their families. No one knows how many times God has protected us from harm. But when there is a tragedy, we ask, “Where was God?”