OPINION
November 30, 2011
The day after news leaked about Facebook's plans for a blockbuster initial stock offering, the Federal Trade Commission announced a proposed consent order that would rein in the social network's freewheeling approach to its users' personal information. The order reiterates an important principle that has been guiding the commission's approach to online privacy: Consumers, not Facebook, get to decide how their personal information will be shared online. Facebook's approach to privacy has improved over the years, but it's still capable of egregious missteps.
BUSINESS
August 7, 2010 | By Mark Milian, Los Angeles Times
Google Inc. made another play for the social networking space Friday with its acquisition of Slide Inc., which makes games, applications and widgets for websites such as Facebook and MySpace. The San Francisco developer makes free apps that Facebook users can install on their profiles in order to play simple games with friends or to arrange photo slide shows. Slide's SuperPoke application and its animal-centric variations, for example, are a family of popular social games with which players can virtually hug friends or raise a pet pig. A feature similar to Slide's Top Friends was eventually implemented by Facebook into every profile, allowing users to rank online buddies.
BUSINESS
July 11, 2013 | By Salvador Rodriguez
Google is set to shut down Latitude, a location mobile app, next month, making it the latest in a long list of notable services killed by the search giant. Latitude, which allows people to let others know where they are through the use of their smartphone's GPS, will stop functioning Aug. 9. Google is urging people who want to share their locations to use the company's Google+ app on Android. The company says the location-sharing feature will be added at some point to the iPhone version of Google+.
BUSINESS
July 1, 2011 | By Nathan Olivarez-Giles, Los Angeles Times
Google+ users were quietly given the ability to invite friends into the new social network Wednesday night, but that option lasted only a few hours because of overwhelming demand. Vic Gundotra, who is overseeing Google's social networking efforts, said in a Google+ post: "We've shut down invite mechanism for the night. Insane demand. We need to do this carefully, and in a controlled way. Thank you all for your interest!" Google didn't formally announce that it was providing the invite feature; instead, a small red envelope with Google's "G+" logo and the words "invite people to join Google+" popped up, and it seems it didn't take long before users found it and started bringing people in. Gundotra didn't say when invites might return, but it is Google's style to go with invites before fully opening new products to the public, as has been the practice with the hugely popular Gmail service and the search giant's recently launched Google Music Beta.
BUSINESS
August 9, 2012 | By Jessica Guynn
Google agreed to pay a record $22.5 million fine to settle allegations by the Federal Trade Commission that it violated a pledge to protect the privacy of its users who use Apple's Safari browser. The FTC is ramping up its efforts to protect the online privacy of consumers and said it levied the largest fine in its history against Google to send a clear message to the Internet giant, which bypassed Apple software's privacy settings to track users across the Web. The FTC said the behavior violated terms of the settlement Google reached with the commission last year over its now-defunct Buzz social networking service.
BUSINESS
February 17, 2012 | By David Sarno
In the wake of evidence that Google Inc. circumvented privacy protections on the iPhone, federal lawmakers are asking if the company violated the terms of its broad privacy settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC settlement, finalized in October ,"bars the company from future privacy misrepresentations," and required Google to implement a comprehensive privacy program. But Reps. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Joe Barton (R-Texas) and Cliff Sterns (R-Fla.)