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Friday, January 13, 2012

HP Announces Glass-Backed Envy 14 Spectre

HP has upped the ultrabook ante with a glass-backed HP laptop that looks a bit like a MacBook and a lot like the future of HP trade dress. The HD screen displays 1600×900 pixels and includes HDMI out, Ethernet, USB 3.0, and mini Displayport ports.
The glass on the back of the laptop is Gorilla Glass, which means it probably won’t break if you drop it. It includes a fat 128GB SSD drive for $1,400 and an optional 256GB upgrade. It runs a Core i5 or i7 processor and ships in February.
HP has been using this design quite a bit lately, which suggests they’ve gone all in when it comes to high-design ultrabooks. This one is a very special case – the glass back is more gimmick than anything else – but it will be interesting to see how HP is able to sell this to fleet buyers.

Sony Keeps Concepts Alive At CES 2012

Today at Sony’s CES 2012 press conference, the company unveiled several PC concepts that are, well, just concepts. Kazuo Hirai took to the massive Sony stage deep within the Las Vegas Convention center and talked about the convergence of TV and computers. But no one cares about that marketing nonsense. It was the concepts they flashed on the screen that got everyone excited.
But don’t expect these products to hit the market. Companies are not supposed to sell concepts. They’re concepts, not products.

Up until the last decade, Sony was the design leader in consumer electronics. Sure, others had hits, but no one had decades of iconic products like Sony. Then, for whatever reason, Sony seemed to lose it soul. It lost the magic that made generations of consumers fall in love with the brand. It’s sad, really.
Companies seem afraid to show concepts now-in-days. Perhaps they’re frightened of the potential criticism. MG would no doubt crucify some of them. But these companies also lose out on the conversations and hype that they can generate. Concepts are supposed to invoke an emotional response — good or bad. You’re supposed to love it or hate it. Concepts are supposed to show where the brand is headed.
Think about concept cars: They’re a physical roadmap produced when designers are allowed to go wild. Teenage boys dream about these cars. Posters are made. They are the heart of the automotive world and can often reignite a dead brand.

Several concept gadgets made it to the market. The original Dell XPS is a fine example. The limited-run notebook was loved by many and it was Dell’s halo product for several quarters. But because it wasn’t a blockbuster, runaway success, it was quietly killed. Instead, Dell should have had a clear message that this was going to be a limited product, designed simply for Dell’s fans and those looking for a unique product.
The gadget world is stuck in a cycle of regurgitation and repetition. A random company produces a concept, Apple prefects it, which is then copied by nearly every other company. Concepts are a lost art. Sony is in a desperate need of finding its soul again. Sony needs concepts.


Company: Sony
Website: sony.com
Launch Date: January 13, 2012
IPO: NYSE:SNE
Sony is one of the leading manufacturers of electronics, video, communications, video game consoles, and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets.
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Sony Shares Holiday Sales Numbers For The PlayStation

Sony Computer Entertainment reported some solid sales numbers for its various PlayStation systems for the past holiday season today. Sony says that they moved a total of 6.5 million PlayStation 2/3/PSP/Vita units worldwide (Sony defines “holiday season” as between November 21 and January 5 in Asia, November 21 through December 31 in America, and November 18 through December 31 in Europe).
To be more specific, the company sold:
  • 500,000 units of the PlayStation Vita (which launched in Japan on December 7 and in Hong Kong and Taiwan on December 23)
  • 3.9+ million PS3s (Sony says the system is on track to sell 15 million units in the fiscal year through March 31)
  • 1.6 million PSPs (all models combined)
  • 500,000 PS2 systems
  • 1.7 PlayStation Moves (not part of the 6.5 million total)
Sony also said that Vita owners can choose between 24 different games at the moment and that 70 additional titles are currently in development. The company’s newest video game system will hit Europe, Australia, and America on February 22, 2012.

Sony’s Music Unlimited Service To Land On iOS This Quarter

Apple users probably have more than enough media on their iDevices to keep them entertained on the go, but Sony Network Entertainment President Tim Schaaff thinks there’s room for another media service on iOS. According to VentureBeat, the company’s Music Unlimited streaming service will be hitting Apple’s mobile platform some time in Q1 2012.
In addition to simply streaming music from the Music Unlimited catalog, users will be able save cache their playlists for offline streaming at a later time. The service is already available on Android devices (not to mention several of Sony’s own products) so it’s more than a little surprising that it will soon make the iOS leap.
It’s especially puzzling because there is already no shortage of competitors in the streaming music space. As VentureBeat notes, rivals Spotify and Rdio have been on iOS for quite some time now, and already offer a similar feature set.
Really, it’s problem that all new entrants to this space have to deal with. As Eric Schmidt would probably say, it all comes down to differentiation. Rara, a relatively new streaming music service that launched this past December, is a great example. While they peg their service as being tuned for the non-tech savvy, their other main differentiator was that they launched simultaneously in multiple markets worldwide where some of the bigger services have yet to make a splash. While it’s still early to say if the approach is actually sustainable, I’ve got to give them credit for taking a different approach.
In this case, Sony’s appearance on iOS probably holds considerable appeal for people who have already invested heavily into the Sony media/hardware ecosystem, but it’s going to be a tough sell for anyone who doesn’t have some sort of pre-existing allegiance to the Japanese giant. I wish them the best — more competition is always good — but I look forward to seeing how many iOS users adopt it.

Facebook Comments Box Now On Mobile, And Over 400,000 Web Sites

Over 400,000 sites currently use Facebook’s Comments Box social plugin the company tells me, and as of today they all support an optimized mobile commenting experience. Now you can criticize your least favorite bloggers — I mean participate in intelligent discussion while on the go. Just 10 months after the launch of the revamped plugin, Facebook is starting to creep up on commenting solutions like Disqus which appears on 1.1 million sites.
Comments Box has been a big win for Facebook, giving it exposure, driving use of its Subscribe feature, and demonstrating how Facebook authenticated identity can make the internet a more civil place.
Now when Comments Box detects a mobile device user agent, it will automatically show the mobile version. The new soft update to the Comments Box doesn’t require any developer interaction to enable, it just works.
Some sites using the old version of the plugin already supported mobile commenting. However, the buttons and entry fields looked too small and sometimes were unresponsive. The new version is the right size and makes it easy to comment, Like, and toggle posting to Facebook. You can try it out at m.techcrunch.com/2012/01/11/facebook-mobile-comments/
Facebook’s comment widget first launched in 2009 but became a serious contender with its March 2011 relaunch. Since then Facebook has been playing catchup to commenting systems like Disqus and Livefyre, as well the distant frontrunner WordPress. It’s been iterating rapidly, and giving publishers more incentives to integrate the plugin.
The inclusion of links to subscribe to a commenter’s public Facebook updates draws in blogs. That’s because these links help grow the following a blog’s writers who frequently comment, who in turn publish the blog’s articles to their Facebook subscribes. The one-click ability to publish a comment to Facebook alongside a link to the article can boost referral traffic better than other solutions.
Along with the Like button, Comments Box is leading Facebook’s march across the web. If sites find the plugin reduces trolling and improves conversation by making commenters log in with their real identity, they may become more open to using other Facebook widgets. One day that could include an ad network plugin which could turn into an enormous revenue stream for Facebook.

Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: January 2, 2004
Funding: $2.34B
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...
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When Ranking Facebook Adoption As Percentage Of Population, Cyprus Is #1

Which countries really, really love Facebook? If you guessed the U.S., you would be somewhat right – this country ranks #7 on Pingdom’s new list of countries comparing the number of Facebook users as percentages of the population.
To be clear, we’re not talking about raw number of Facebook users. The U.S. is still #1 there. This is ranking countries by what percentage of the population (online and total) is on Facebook. Or, more simply put, it’s looking at how popular Facebook is in that country.
(The red bars show the number of Facebook users in each country as a percentage of Internet users, yellow bars as a percentage of the population.)
On the island of Cyprus, Pingdom found that 95% of the online population was on Facebook – that’s nearly everyone! And in Chile (#3), there were more Facebook user accounts than Internet users. That could be an anomaly in how the data Pingdom used was compiled, but it could also mean that people had multiple accounts (one for business, one for personal, e.g.).
In its findings, Pingdom also refuted a previous claim which stated that the Philippines was the top country on Facebook, when using similar rankings. Only 28.76% of the population there is on Facebook, says Pingdom, not 93.9%, as had been previously reported. (Note: The Philippine reference is referring to this data: “The Ten Nations Where Facebook Rules the Internet” via 24/7 Wall St.)
India and China, the latter which blocks Facebook, are the largest untapped markets for outside growth, with only 3.42% of India’s population on Facebook and a surprising 530,000 Chinese who have managed to establish accounts despite the country’s attempts to block it.
Facebook had once said that 70% of its growth comes from users outside the U.S. Pingdom says that’s more like 80%. There are now over 800 million Facebook users, out of the 7 billion+ people on Earth.
Since methodology is an important consideration, to generate these rankings (see chart below), Pingdom says it took SocialBaker’s data on how many Facebook users there are in countries around the world, data on Internet users from the World Bank, and population data from Wikipedia. It only looked at countries where the population was greater than 500,000.

Comment 21 inShare156 A Christmas Miracle! Facebook Chat (Kind Of) Supports Extended Rage Faces

First, if you want to get right down to it, here are the codes you type into Facebook chat to get various faces:
Poker face [[129627277060203]]
Forever Alone [[227644903931785]]
OK guy [[100002752520227]]
Me Gusta [[164413893600463]]
Lol guy [[189637151067601]]
Fuck Yeah [[105387672833401]]
Problem? [[171108522930776]]
[[218595638164996]]
[[100002727365206]]
Huzzah! We are truly living in an age of wonder!
Second, why does this work?
There are various ways to bring Facebook content into chats. For example, you use Facebook Pages like a little TC by typing [[techcrunch]]. The numbers above are actually the IDs for pages that someone, for some terrible reason, made featuring all of those rage faces (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Poker-Face/129627277060203, for example). There are more to be found here thanks to Reddit so I’ll leave further discovery as an exercise for the reader.
All I can say is I’m glad there’s an Internet because the long minutes between sips of whiskey on Christmas Eve, spent staring malevolently at the fire, fingering my ratty smoking jacket, drawing from an unlit cheroot that had gone out hours before, and plotting the destruction of my many enemies would be a lot darker without the MeGusta face keeping me going. Happy holidays!
via Reddit [upvote Sky_Prodigy]

Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: January 2, 2004
Funding: $2.34B
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...
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Facebook Opens Mobile News Feed As Viral Channel For Games

Once upon a time, Facebook game companies like Zynga fattened up their user counts thanks to viral distribution to non-gamers through the news feed. Facebook later curtailed this channel, forcing developers to concentrate on paid marketing and true word of mouth to grow. A new boom period could be coming, this time for mobile developers, as Facebook announced today that it is testing game stories in the mobile news feed. This could attract devs to its recently launched HTML5 mobile gaming platform with bait of reaching hundreds of millions of daily active Facebook mobile users.
Facebook learned a lot about balancing developer success with user experience during that first boom period, often called the wild west days. Game spam such as users asking all their friends to install and give them virtual good overran the news feed, making it a bore to non-gamers. Facebook will surely be monitoring the volume of mobile news feed game stories to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
Rather than pepper the feed with individual stories, Facebook is using aggregated stories that read like “Rose Yao and 9 other people recently played games”. Below users see a few friends names and links to the games they played, and can tap to expand to see the whole list. Tapping a game will launch its HTML5 version, or that native app if already installed. The aggregated stories give users control, so those that want to discover something to play can, while those uninterested can breeze by.
Earned viral channels also democratize the Facebook platform, as they provide exposure to small developers without big marketing budgets. Facebook launched the HTML5 platform to make sure Apple and Google weren’t the only ones making money off mobile games. Developer adoption of the channel has been a bit sluggish so far, though. The opening of this viral channel could convince developers to experiment with Facebook mobile.

Facebook also made a few other announcements to the benefit of web Facebook game developers. Users will now see 6 bookmarks instead of 4 while playing games, which should boost retention and re-engagement. Home page bookmark notifications will now clear when clicked, making the arrival of new alerts more noticeable.  The separate Games & Apps dashboards have been combined so users don’t have to check two places, and game categories have been refined so Facebook can more accurately feature high quality developers. Finally, the company launched a Games Tutorial to ease the path to developing games for its platform.

Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: January 2, 2004
Funding: $2.34B
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...
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Facebook Launches Suggested Events Feature Based On Checkins

We’re creatures of habit. We go where we’ve already gone. That’s why Facebook’s new Suggested Events feature I just discovered is so powerful — it knows where we’ve been thanks to our checkins. Replacing the old Friends’ Events sub-tab of the home page’s Events bookmark, Suggested Events helps you discover things to do that take place at venues you’ve checked in to, that friends are RSVP’d to, that are hosted by Pages you Like, or a combination. The feature could reduce the need third-party event discovery apps, and get more people out of their houses to attend concerts, club nights, and conferences.
[Update: Facebook tells me it is testing the feature, though it has now been rolled out to the entire user base. A spokesperson also says suggestions can be based on the music you listen to through Open Graph apps, which can help improve recommendations for those who checkin via Foursquare or don't share their location at all.]
By promoting offline interaction, Suggested Events should quiet critics who say Facebook weakens real human relationships and leads people to sit at home. It has huge potential to generate good will for Facebook and make the service seem even more indispensable. If you go to a great show, have a fun night out with friends, or meet someone new at a suggested venue, your perception of Facebook’s value to your life will undoubtedly improve.
Sure, you should branch out and find new places to go, but new events at your favorite places are still unique experiences. The feature exposes you to events that are relevant and that you might drag friends to, even if you weren’t invited to them and don’t have friends already RSVP’d.

“What should I do tonight?” is a very prevalent question lots of startups are trying to answer. Just this month we covered the launch of UpOut for real-time discovery, and SeatGeek’s Columbus that’s a “Pandora for live events”. Established players include Plancast and EventBrite, the latter of which closed a huge $50 million funding round and also suggests events your Facebook friends are going to.
But the problem with these services is that they can’t produce as relevant suggestions because they don’t automatically know where you spend your time, which is a proxy for what type of events you go to. Facebook’s Suggested Events adapts to your preferences.
I go to lots of concerts, and Facebook effectively knows this because I check in to the venues or the events themselves thanks to a mobile feature added last year (possibly to collect data for this). Now, Suggested Events recommends me concerts taking place at my favorite venues. The music industry stands to gain a lot from the feature, since concerts are thrown frequently, and occur at Places people commonly check in to.
If you’re in college, Suggested Events might recommend parties at campus dorms, whereas professionals might get clued in to meetups or conferences at local convention halls they visit. The feature also alerts you to Events hosted by Pages you Like, which could encourage more venues, performers, or production companies to officially host the events they throw. One day the feature might be able to show events where a band I Like was mentioned in the description.
With third-party apps you enter your preferences or upload them via Facebook Connect, but then also have to remember to visit. Facebook’s new native event discovery feature makes finding fun things to do a seamless part of every day browsing. That means more outings, more moments, more memories. And you know where you can display the photos, checkins, and status updates about those memories? Timeline.


Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: January 2, 2004
Funding: $2.34B
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...
Learn more

Facebook Snubs Zynga’s CityVille As Most Popular Game Despite 5X Users Of #1 Gardens Of Time


Playdom’s Gardens of Time took the #1 spot of Facebook’s Most Popular Games of 2011 list. But wait, Zynga’s CityVille was ranked #3 despite peaking at over 100 million monthly active users and 21 million daily active users — far more than Gardens of Time’s peaks of 17 million MAU and 4 million DAU, or its current stats according to AppData. That’s because Facebook’s list was mostly based on vaguely described “recommendations”, and hardly on active users.
It’s almost as if Facebook used its cloudy methodology to keep Zynga from completely dominating the list, as the Mark Pincus machine currently owns all 5 Facebook games with the most DAU and still ended up with 4 of the top 10 spots on Facebook’s list.
[Update 9:25pm PST 12/21/11: Facebook has integrated the feedback from this article and updated its Top Games post to more clearly explain what it means by 'Most Popular'. The methodology note now reads: "This list was compiled by looking at the top games on Facebook with more than 100,000 monthly active users and giving priority to those games with the highest user satisfaction scores. The result is a list of the games that received the most user recommendations in 2011."  As long as it's transparent, we're happy to see Facebook finding more ways to feature high quality games, and not just those with the most users.]
Here’s an image of the list Facebook published and the note on its methodology:

A Facebook PR representative denied my theory. She told me that in the methodology, “the top recommended apps (from surveys presented to users in the canvas ticker where they can answer yes/no to, ‘would you recommend this to a friend’?”)…were ranked higher over highest monthly active user numbers. Another way to say it is that these apps were the highest rated among users.”
But why not just say in the post that this was based on ratings, not on active users? The list should have been labeled “Most satisfying games” or “Most recommended games”, not “Most popular games”. Missing the top spot probably won’t help Zynga’s stock, which IPO’d last week. Zynga and Facebook have partnered for years to help Zynga attain traffic goals. However, that relationship may be strained as the gaming company plans to serve games directly to users outside of the Facebook platform.
Facebook could have predicted that people would ask why the #3 game peaked at 80 million more monthly users than the #1 game. If CityVille had a 20% ‘Yes’ rating average and Gardens of Time had an 80% ‘Yes’ average, then fine, the rankings make sense. But if the ratings were even somewhat close, it seems a little fishy that CityVille didn’t take the #1 spot, and Facebook didn’t disclose the actual rating scores or even that they were the core of the methodology.

To really win big on the Facebook platform, you need a substantial marketing budget, existing games to cross-promote from, and sophisticated A/B testing technology. Zynga has all of these and most developers don’t. #1 Playdom and #2 EA (The Sims Social, with peak MAU of 66M MAU and 11M DAU) both do too. Still, Zynga taking the top spot would have really driven home the point that the Facebook gaming business is run by the big boys.
That’s a problem, because attracting the long tail of small and medium developers is essential to retaining gamers who are always looking for something new to play. Facebook went out of its way to feature smaller and non-Silicon Valley developers. It included categories such as Top up-and-comers (Battle Pirates by Kixeye) and most popular games with 50,000-100,000 users (Super Slot Machines). It also cited top sports app TopEleven as having a team of just 30 out of Serbia in an email to us, and noted other develpers from Germany, Japan, and Prague.
There’s nothing wrong with Facebook promoting developer diversity, but it needs to be up front about how this list was calculated. It’s in Facebook’s interest to avoid making it seem like the platform is winner-take-all or like it depends on Zynga. Through obscured methodology, Facebook didn’t have to highlight this by giving CityVille the top spot.
Update 9:23pm PST 12/21/11: Facebook has edited its Top Games post to integrate the feedback from this article. The more transparent explanation of the Most Popular list’s methodology now reads: “This list was compiled by looking at the top games on Facebook with more than 100,000 monthly active users and giving priority to those games with the highest user satisfaction scores. The result is a list of the games that received the most user recommendations in 2011.”

Company: Zynga
Website: zynga.com
Funding: $860M
Zynga was founded in July 2007 by Mark Pincus and is named for his late American Bulldog, Zinga. Loyal and spirited, Zinga’s name is a nod to a legendary African warrior queen. The early supporting founding team included Eric Schiermeyer, Michael Luxton, Justin Waldron, Kyle Stewart, Scott Dale, John Doerr, Steve Schoettler, Kevin Hagan, and Andrew Trader. Zynga’s mission is connecting the world through games. Everyday millions of people interact with their friends and express their unique personalities through our...
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45 Privacy Changes Facebook Will Make To Comply With Data Protection Law


Facebook Ireland Report Of Audit




In 2012, Facebook will be making 45 privacy-related changes to comply with the recommendations of an audit by Ireland’s Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) released today. Below I’ve compiled a roadmap of all the changes Facebook will implement based on the the 149 pages of DPC recommendations and how the social network says it will address them.
First, read my analysis of the audit’s findings from this morning. It explains why these changes won’t seriously interfere with Facebook’s business model or product development. That’s very good news for Facebook. Still, complying with the audit’s recommendations could prevent the company from building a huge stockpile of historical data for some unknown later use.
The changes mostly deal with how long Facebook retains data, and how people are educated about Facebook’s usage of that data. Some will require engineering work, such as irrevocably deleting user data within 40 days of an account deletion request. Others will simply see Facebook adding additional links or messaging within the product to improve transparency and user understanding.
Facebook avoided having to make some big changes that could have hurt its business, such as needing users to explicitly opt in to ad targeting based on their personal data. It also won’t have to discontinue its facial recognition feature, or requires users to opt into having their content used in Sponsored Stories ads.
Here are the 45 changes Facebook will implement and their due dates:
Privacy and Data Use Policy
  • Simplify the explanations of its Data Use Policy- End of Q1 2012
  • Add a mechanism for controlling personal data to the registration process – End of Q1 2012
  • Increase the size of links to the privacy policy and statement of rights in the registration process -  End of February 2012
  • Add privacy policy, statement of rights, and Help Center links to the left side of the Facebook home page – End of February 2012
Advertising Use of User Data
  • Clarify how it employs user data in ad targeting to ensure full transparency – End of Q1 2012
  • Limit data collection from social plugins, restrict access to this data, and delete it on schedule, though social plugin data is not currently used in ad targeting – Immediately
  • Move option to opt out of having one’s content shown in social ads from the Account Settings to the Privacy Settings – End of Q1 2012
  • Prior to implementation, discuss any plans to provide individuals’ profile pictures and names to third parties for advertising purposes – Ongoing
  • Switch from retaining ad-click data indefinitely to a 2 year retention period – Review in July 2012

Access Requests
  • If identifiable personal data of users or non-users is held, it must be provided in response to an access request within 40 days - Beginning in January 2012
  • Provide easier access to this data via the profile, Activity Log, and Download Your Information tool – Beginning in January 2012
Retention of Data
  • Clarify to users how deleted data such as received friend requests and removed tags is retained – End of Q1 2012
  • Provide users with the ability to delete friend requests, pokes, tages, posts, and messages on a per item basis – Begin in Q1 2012, show progress by July 2012.
  • Change Groups invitations so user won’t appear as members until they’ve visited the Group and been given an easy way to leave – End of Q1 2012
  • Delete personal data once the purpose for which it was collected has ceased – Immediate, ongoing, review in July 2012
  • Delete all social plugin impression data with 90 days of a website visit
  • For non-users and logged out users, delete social plugin impression data within 10 days
  • Anonymize data about a user’s searches on Facebook with 6 months
  • Anonymize all ad click data after 2 years
  • Significantly shorten the retention period of log-in information
  • Educate users through the Data Use Policy about recording of login activity across browsers and devices – End of Q1 2012
  • Work with the DPC to identify an acceptable retention period of data from inactive or deactivated accounts – July 2012
Third-Party Apps
  • Roll out updated granular data permissions dialog box to all applications – End of February 2012, review in July 2012
  • Clarify that use of an app is visible to friends by default (Facebook has fixed this with the audience selector of its granular data permissions dialog box) – Review in July 2012
  • Educate users on the importance of reading app privacy policies, possibly increase size of links to report an app or view app its privacy policy in the data permissions dialog box – End of February 2012
  • Implement a tool that determines if links to app privacy policies are live. First, Facebook will asses the technical feasibility of such as tool – Review progress towards implementation in July 2012
  • Examine alternative privacy controls for allowing friends to provide one’s data to applications, as currently users must turn off apps entirely to prevent friends from giving apps their data – Report back to DPC in July 2012
  • Investigate technical solutions to reduce risk of abuse of authorization tokens via one app transferring a token to another – Immediate assessment, solution by end of Q1 2012
  • Expand mesaging to developers regarding policy prohibiting sharing of authorization tokens –  End of January 2012
  • Refine automated tools that detect and prevent abuse of user data by developers – Progress review in July 2012
Disclosures to Third Parties
  • Improve system for disclosing data to law enforcement by requiring validation from a senior officer and a full explanation for why the data is needed – Commence in January 2012, review in July 2012
Facial Recognition / Tag Suggest
  • Notify users that Tag Suggest exists with a series of home page prompts and link to an explanation of how it works – First week of January 2012
  • Prior to implementation, discuss with DPC  any plans to extend tag suggest to allow suggestions beyond confirmed friends – Ongoing
Security
  • Formally document security policies and procedures – Review in July 2012
  • Monitor employees to ensure user password resets aren’t used to gain unauthorized access to user data – End of January 2012
  • Implement a new access provisioning tool to allow for fine-grained, role-specific control of employee access to user data to ensure all access is authorized – Review in July 2012
Deletion of Accounts
  • Continue devoting engineering resources towards improving the system that irrevocably deletes user accounts and data within 40 days of receipt of a deletion request – Review in July 2012
Friend Finder 
  • Provide education about and review alternatives for reducing risks inherent in transmitting contact information via plain text for use in the contact sync feature – End of Q1 2012
  • Add text explaining that deactivating the contact sync feature does not remove previously synced data – End of Q1 2012
  • Prevent Pages that have uploaded email addresses to send messages to European users or non-users via geoblocking of major EU domains and warn businesses using the feature about ePrivacy law – Geoblocking immediately, warnings by end of Q1 2012
Tagging
  • Review implications of DPC’s recommendation to allow users to prevent themselves from being tagged in photos or other content – In advance of July 2012
Posting On Other Profiles
  • Review implications of DPC’s recommendation that prior to posting, users be shown how broad the audience will be for a potential post on the wall of another user, and notify users if that wall’s owner changes that audience size – In advance of July 2012
Facebook Credits 
  • Add information to the Data Use Policy regarding Facebook’s role as a data controller and that information about a user’s use of Credits is linked to their account, and launch a privacy policy dedicated to its payments systems in approximately 6 months – End of Q1 2012
Compliance Management / Governance
  • Develop documented procedures for direct marketing by Facebook employees and train employees to ensure data protection – Completed
  • Review European data protection laws and consult with the DPC when developing new products or uses to ensure compliance with data protection law
Additionally, the DPC’s audit made statements, indicating its satisfaction with how Facebook handles these potentially controversial issues:
  • Cookies are not used for profiling or ad targeting
  • Apps were found to not be able to access user data without consent
  • Disabling Tag Suggest deletes a user’s facial recognition profile
  • User data is available to employees on a need-to-know basis
  • There is no threat to user photos during upload to Akamai or during deletion
  • The site protects against large-scale data harvesting through screen-scraping
  • User contact info, including phone numbers and email addresses, is only stored and not used unless users choose to supply email addresses for use in the Friend Finder
  • When users give Friend Finder access to their third-party email accounts and other services, their passwords are held securely and destroyed
  • Facebook has provided sufficient justification of its policy of refusing pseudonymous accounts
  • Facebook provides sufficient ways to report abuse on the site

Company: Facebook
Website: facebook.com
Launch Date: January 2, 2004
Funding: $2.34B
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...
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