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THE END USER

A Voice for the consumer

How Google Keep Track

By Victoria Shannon

Paris

When Google announced a change in its privacy policy last week, it got some gushing headlines like, “Google adopt tougher privacy safeguards”.

But upon closer examination, it seems the change was not to protect your privacy on the Web as much as it was simply to give you a little more information about how Google maintains your personal data.

Google’s adjustment was that in stead of retaining user search data for “as long as it is useful” now the company will keep the information for at least 18 month and no longer than 24 month.

In some cases, that will shorten the time Google holds on to such data, which can, in theory, be used to identify individual users and their personal interests.

But the guidelines also mean that search data will sometimes be kept for a longer period than now, according to Peter Fleischer, privacy counsel for Google in Europe. That makes it a clearer policy, but not necessarily a “tougher safe-quard”.

For most of us, keeping personal information private on the Web is a defensive tool: When we are anonymous in our travels on the Web, we can better protect our bank accounts, our children and even our political proclivities in place where just having some in dangerous.

But for other people, privacy is the opposite of security – the more disclosure of personal data, the more trails of information that law enforcement agencies and governments can follow to find those who are stealing credit card numbers, circulating child pornography or organizing terrorist activities.

A third interest group is the world of Internet companies, retail companies and advertisers, all of which could profit commercially from the correct interpretation or sale of the collected data.

Google’s privacy policies are the company’s best efforts to address all of these concerns as well as its own business interests, Fleischer said.

“Privacy decisions are not made in a vacuum,” he said in interview. “It is really balance of a number of factors. If it were just a matter of privacy, we could consider a shorter time period.”

That, in fact, is one of the concerns of privacy advocates – that 24 months is too long for a private company to hold on the potentially incriminating data.

But that length of time was already set as the out site limit by the European Commission when it adopted its Data Retention Directive last year; Fleischer said the U.S. Department of Justice was also proposing a two-year windows for data retention by Internet and telephone companies. Google and other Internet companies are just getting in line.

Still, Fleischer also said the vast majority of data requests from security agencies to Google were for only the past six months or less of collected information. If that is universally true, perhaps European

There are ways you can stop Google

From collecting some of this

data to begin with.

governments that want to err on the side of individual privacy will adopt data-retention laws that default to that minimum, which is permissible under the directive, rather than the 24-month maximum allowed.

But don’t get your hopes up that such moves would give Google and its search brethren a new standard to follow. Fleischer made clear that Google did not intend for its brand-new two-year rule to be starting point on the way to an ever-shrinking data-retention period.

For ordinary Internet users, the most useful information out of last week’s discussion was the fact that, under certain circumstances, you can stop Google from collecting some of this data to begin with.

This trick works only when you are logged in to a Google service, like Gmail of Google Talk. Other wise, you have no way to control Google’s data collection; its logs are automatically generated every time someone does a search.

Here are the steps I took from my Gmail account to stop the company from saving my searches while I am logged into a Google service: Sign in to Gmail; click setting; click account; click Google account setting; click search history; sign in again; click search history; click select all; click pause; click save setting.

May be there are already easier ways. But if Google want to be “open and transparent,” as executive insist that it does, I’m sure the company will make this and other privacy measure even simpler for individuals in future.

Title (article) : THE END USER: A Voice for the consumer

How Google Keep Track

By Victoria Shannon

- E-mail comment to tech@iht.com

From : International Herald Tribune, Thursday, March 22, 2007 (page 21)

Internet address: www.iht.com

E-mail: iht@iht.com

Posted by Jacob's at 6:57 PM | Permalink | Comments

Google’s New Ad Pitch: Pay When Buyers Act

By Miguel Helft

San Francisco: Google is experimenting with a new proposition for advertiser: if you don’t get result, you don’t pay.

The company said Tuesday that it would expand testing of a system that allows advertisers to pay only when an ad spurs a consumer to take an action, whether purchasing a product, subscribing to a newsletter or signing up to receive a quote from a mortgage broker or car dealer.

The vast majority of advertisers now pay Google when user click on ads that are displayed alongside its search results or on other Web sites, while some are billed based on how many people view the ads.

“Where optimistic that it will be something that will be very compelling, for advertisers,” said Susan Wojcicki, the vice president of product management of Google. Wojcicki said the system would also give participating Web publishers a wider choice of ad types for their sites.

Under the “cost per action” system, advertisers decide what they are willing to pay for a specific action, like a purchase or a software download. Armed with that information, Web site publishers then choose whether to run a specific ad or group of ads on their sites.

Many advertiser find cost-per-action appealing, as it greatly reduces their risk, since they are not charged for ads that are ineffective.

Ad rates based on click might give way

to rates based on purchases

or other action.

The model has long been used online by “affiliate marketing” companies like ValueClick, which have created networks of hundreds of thousands of Web sites that display small ads for e-commerce sites. The publishers are paid when they refer a user who makes a purchase.

But many other companies are using cost-per-action ads in different ways. They include the search-engine start-up Snap, which display cost-per-action ads next to search results, and Turn, a network that matches advertisers and publishers interested in cost–per-action ads.

“We think it is a model that all the large players in search will be embracing over time,” said Tom McGovern, the chief executive of Snap.

For the time being Google is not putting cost-per-action ads next to search results, limiting them to publishers’ Web sites and essentially creating its own affiliate marketing network. Industry insiders said Google entry into the market was likely to accelerate its growth.

“This is a big market at an early stage,” said Ellen Siminoff, the chief executive of efficient Frontier, a search marketing firm.

Cost-per-action ads have another advantage: they virtually eliminate the problem of click fraud, a scam in which people or computers generate click on ads for the sole purpose of getting a payment.

While the appeal of the cost-per-action model to advertisers is clear, some analysts say publishers may be more reluctant to embrace it, at least for now.

“For publishers, it increases the complexity of their business,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst with Citigroup. Publishers have limited space for ads and need to maximize the revenue they generate.

A cost-per-click models is risky, since it provides no guarantees that a publisher will receive any payment for a given ad. Mahaney said Google could make the system more effective and appealing if it figured out an automated way to project how much revenue each ad is likely to generate.

Advertising.com, a unit of AOL, uses such a system to determine the right placement for cost-per-action ads on publishers’ sites.

For now, the affiliate marketing unit, the industry’s largest, had sales of $112 million in 2006, while Google’s revenue topped $10 billion.

Google’s test is limited to about 75 advertisers and 75 publishers.

A test last summer had about 30 advertisers and 30 publishers.

Title (article) : Google’s New Ad Pitch: Pay When Buyers Act

By Miguel Helft

From : International Herald Tribune, Thursday, March 22, 2007 (page 20)

Internet address: www.iht.com

Posted by Jacob's at 6:45 PM | Permalink | Comments

MANAGING GLOBALIZATION

Daniel Altman

Blogging and Thinking about the Big Issues

On Thursday, the Managing Globalization blog celebrates its first anniversary. Its started small but has grown into one of iht.com’s most-visited destinations, thanks in part to prominent quests like Jeffrey Sachs, Mary Robinson and Pascal Lamy. And looking back at some of last year’s posts and comments, there are plenty of portents for the future.

Most of the issues I dealt with a year ago still very current. To wit, If you’ve been waiting for an agreement in the World Trade Organization’s latest round of trade liberalization talks, delivery of an Airbus A380 Super jumbo, $40 barrels of oil or the free float of the Chinese Yuan on international currency markets, then you’re still waiting.

In the blog’s very first week, I wrote about the globalization of carmaking, Venezuela’s oil politics and U.S. economic negotiations with China. Next week’s posts could touch one the same topics without seeming out of date.

Yet much also changed during the blog’s first year. The importance-or at least the lip service-given to environmental concerns by companies and governments intensified so much that iht.com began a new blog on the business of green. The European Union started a comprehensive climate-change strategy, and now it is pushing developing countries to cut emissions as well.

In parallel with high oil prices and the emphasis on conservation, several countries tightened their grip on energy resources. Russia used every trick in the book to grab back the oil and gas concessions sold off after the Iron Curtain fell, and Venezuela and Bolivia nationalized their energy projects.

In finance, the booming private equity industry flexed its muscles with high-profile acquisitions like Chrysler, and then China flexed its muscles by buying part of Blackstone Group, the private equity firm. And just this month, the German government took the first steps in a major economy toward the regulation of hedge funds.

Through it all, readers shared their insights, feelings and even expertise. At times, the discussions were animated. Garry Henscheid, who is an American living in Japan, and David Hillary, who left his narrative New Zealand for China, clashed on topics from tax policy to constitutional law. Daug McVitie, an aerospace consultant, hgave a lesson on aircraft manufacturing; Michael Smitka, an economic professor, explained DaimlerChrysler’s mistake; and Ioannis Michaletos, a strategic analyst and former naval officer, answered a post on China’s growing tanker fleet with a master class on business cycles in the shipping industry.

While commenters butted heads and shared their knowledge, was anyone in high place reading?

Apparently so, as an Stephen Adams, a spokesman for Peter Mandelson, the European Union’s commissioners for trade, took issues with the headline “Mandelson: Repent, repent!” He had read it as “Mandelson, repent, repent!” After a short offline discussion of punctuation, Adams contributed a substantive response to the blog.

The blog’s wide readerships came through in the comments, too. I’ll never call Vietnam China’s little brother again, even in jest, after Phan Ho The Nam wrote in about his country’s “distinct character”.

When an editor suggested finding out why so few women left comments by taking the subject on in a post, female “lurkers” immediately made their presence know with varying degrees of indignation. “why indeed are we, as women, only within the widely under-represented?” wrote Laure Kellens, from France. “Is it perhaps because we are to busy managing our profesional lives while also tending to the needs of our children and families, and therefore have little times to leisurely peruse-and even less to comment on-the blog?”

Discussion of China drew in expatriates and locals alike, especially for a question –and-answer session with Zhang Rongde, a Migran worker who discusses his live in my new book. When the blog played host to professors Sachs, Jagdish Bhagwati and Joseph Stiglitz from Columbia University, readers from Africa, South America, Asia, Europe and the United States all asked how their countries could improve their citizens’ livelihoods.

Looking forward, our readers have also hinted at some predictions for our globalizing world. They see China exerting more muscle aboard by monopolizing supply chains, cornering energy sources and gaining influence over politicians. They see cross-border mergers posing an ever-large challenge to nationalist priorities. And they see the most success in poverty reduction coming from locally tailored, entrepreneurial solutions.

All of their insights can be helpful as we try to manage the on going process of globalizations. As we think about the big issues, we see more of how to plan our own economic future: how much we’ll spend on the product we use, what new skills we’ll need, what careers our children might choose.

So in closing, I offer my thanks to all the blog’s commenters, on behalf of everyone who has learned from them-my self included.

Title (article) : Blogging and Thinking about the Big Issues

Managing Globalization : Daniel Altman

- E-mail: daltman@iht.com

- iht.com/biz

Read Daniel Altman’s past columns and join the discussion on the managing globalization blog.

From : International Herald Tribune, Wednesday, May 30, 2007 (page 12)

Internet address: www.iht.com

E-mail: iht@iht.com

Posted by Jacob's at 7:54 PM | Permalink | Comments