CDT Launches Campaign to Help Consumers Demand Privacy

Dec 3, 2009 - The Center for Democracy and Technology has launched a new consumer privacy campaign with the goal of empowering Internet users to take control of their privacy.

The Take Back Your Privacy Campaign will focus on pushing the U.S. Congress to pass a comprehensive consumer privacy bill, which the CDT has been advocating for years, but the campaign will also focus on creating user-friendly privacy tools for Internet users.

During the campaign's launch Thursday, CDT released a privacy complaint tool that allows users to quickly file complaints about online privacy violations with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

CDT, a privacy and digital rights advocacy group, will also provide a collaboration platform where developers can work together to create open-source privacy tools, said Leslie Harris, CDT's president and CEO. The Privacy Labs development center is scheduled to launch in early 2010.

The campaign also offers letter-writing tools to help Internet users contact lawmakers; analysis on privacy tools available; and social media tools to spread the word about privacy issues.

"The goal is not [for CDT] to own the campaign," Harris said. "We're trying to seed a user-driven movement."

The new campaign comes as several U.S. lawmakers have talked about passing a new privacy law, and officials with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission have signaled that they will seek to more stringently enforce privacy rules that already exist. In particular, lawmakers in recent months have raised concerns about ways that Web sites are using behavioral advertising to track consumers across the Internet.

CDT expects new privacy legislation to be introduced in 2010, although it may not immediately pass, said Ari Schwartz, CDT's vice president and chief operating officer.

Under existing standards, U.S. companies must give consumers notice about what personal information they're collecting and get consent, but there are few rules limiting what data can be collected, Harris said. Also, many consumers don't know what they're consenting to, many privacy advocates have said.

"Notice and consent ... is not adequate," Harris said. "It puts all the burden on the consumer."

Instead of notice and consent, new privacy legislation should limit what personal data companies can collect, Harris said. Companies should state the purpose of their information collection and limit their collection to the stated purposes, she added.

There are still Web sites "that continue to say, 'We will collect anything about you, for any purpose, for any time, forever and ever,'" Harris said. "There are still lots of them."

Take Back Your Privacy will add new features, including contests, videos and fact sheets, in coming months, CDT said. The Web site will focus on helping consumers be better advocates for their own privacy.

"We know that restoring the privacy balance in this country won't happen overnight, but it won't happen if we don't demand it," Schwartz said. "Our goal is to make privacy a higher priority, so lawmakers and business leaders will have no choice but to respond."

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Yahoo!, Microsoft ink Web search agreement

Dec 4, 2009 - SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that they have finalized the details of their planned Internet search and advertising partnership.

The companies hope to implement the deal next year with the approval of anti-trust regulators.

"Yahoo! and Microsoft welcome the broad support the deal has received from key players in the advertising industry and remain hopeful that the closing of the transaction can occur in early 2010," the companies said in a joint statement on Friday.

"Microsoft and Yahoo! believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice, better value and more innovation."

Yahoo! and Microsoft had originally planned to complete their agreement by October 27 but extended talks "given the complex nature of the transaction."

The plan to ink a 10-year Web search and advertising pact was unveiled in July and promises to set the stage for a Yahoo!-Microsoft offensive against Google, the king of the lucrative search and advertising market.

Under the no-cash deal, Yahoo! will use Microsoft's new Bing search engine on its own sites while Yahoo! will provide the exclusive global sales force for premium search advertisers.

Microsoft's tie-up with Yahoo! gives the companies a larger share of the Web search market but analysts are divided on how much it will actually deliver in making inroads against powerhouse Google.

Google is the overwhelming leader in a Web search and advertising market which the research firm Forrester estimates will grow by 15 percent a year to more than 30 billion dollars in 2014 in the United States alone.

Forrester analyst Rebecca Jennings was among those who said the agreement, under which Yahoo! will use Microsoft's new Bing search engine and handle Web ad sales, would boost both companies.

"This deal should help convince even the most stubborn budget-holder that spreading their money outside of Google would be beneficial," she said.

"This will create a more viable second-string player in all markets, giving interactive marketers a significant, credible alternative/additional outlet for their search spend," Jennings said.

Analyst Rob Enderle of Silicon Valley's Enderle Group agreed, saying that many advertisers were "nervous" about Google's dominance and "would just as soon not do business with Google."

Bing increased its share of the US search market in October, edging up half-a-point to nearly 10 percent, according to data from online tracking firm comScore.

Google also added half-a-point in October to reach 65.4 percent.

Yahoo!, Microsoft's search partner, saw its market share decline 0.8 percent in October to 18.0 percent.

November figures have yet to be released.

It was the fifth month in a row of modest gains in search share for Bing, which Microsoft unveiled in June accompanied by a 100-million-dollar advertising campaign in a bid to challenge search juggernaut Google.

Enderle said a combined Microsoft-Yahoo! "gives them enough of a share to be a player." "At eight percent you're not really a player. You step up to around 30 percent and suddenly you're an alternative," he said.

Chief executive Carol Bartz said the deal will allow Yahoo! to "focus on the things we do best -- being the center of people's lives online with properties like our homepage, mail, finance, news, sports, entertainment, mobile, etc."

Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of SearchEngineLand.com, a website which covers the search industry, said the agreement was a "bargain" for Microsoft, which offered 47.5 billion dollars last year in a takeover bid for Yahoo!

"Yahoo!'s giving up on search and they're not getting any big payment to do so," he said. "Just look at what they were promised last year from Microsoft."

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Teen Internet addicts more likely to self harm: study

Dec 4, 2009 - SYDNEY (Reuters) – Teenagers who are addicted to the Internet are more likely to engage in self-harm behavior, according to an Australian-Chinese study.

Researchers surveyed 1,618 adolescents aged 13 to 18 from China's Guangdong Province about behavior such as hitting themselves, pulling their own hair, or pinching or burning themselves, and gave them a test to gauge Internet addiction.

Internet addiction has been classified as a mental health problem since the mid-1990s with symptoms similar to other addictions.

The test found that about 10 percent of the students surveyed were moderately addicted to the Internet, while less than one percent were severely addicted.

The students ranked as moderately addicted to the Internet were 2.4 times more likely to have self-injured one to five times in the past 6 months than students without an addiction, said Dr. Lawrence Lam from the University of Notre Dame Australia.

The moderately-to-severely addicted students were almost five times more likely than non-addicted students to have self-injured six or more times in the past 6 months, Lam and his colleagues from Guangzhou's Sun Yat-Sen University reported.

"In recent years, with the greater availability of the Internet in most Asian countries, Internet addiction has become an increasing mental problem among adolescents," the researchers said in their study published in the journal Injury Prevention.

"Many studies have reported associations between Internet addiction, psychiatric symptoms and depression among adolescents."

They said their results suggested a "strong and significant" association between Internet addiction and self-injury in adolescence even after accounting for other variables previously associated with the behavior, including depression, family dissatisfaction, or stressful life events.

They said this suggested that Internet addiction is an independent risk factor for self-injurious behavior.

Experts interpret Internet addiction, among other things, as feelings of depression, nervousness, moodiness when not online, which only go away when the addict gets back online.

Fantasizing or being preoccupied about being online are other signs of Internet addiction.

"All these behaviors may be rooted in some common ... factors that require further exploration," they said.

(Reporting by Laura Buchholz of Reuters Health, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith and Miral Fahmy)

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