Policy group files lawsuit to stop Google policy change

 

A consumer advocacy group on Wednesday filed a lawsuit to try to derail Google s plan to merge user data from YouTube, Gmail, Google and other services in individual comprehensive profiles.

 

The Electronic Privacy Information Center urged a federal court to block Google from implementing the change on March 1 as planned and to direct the Federal Trade Commission to intervene.

 

Google announced the change to its terms of service in January, explaining that it will essentially “treat you as a single user across all our products” when it comes to use patterns tracked for targeting services, content or ads.

 

EPIC charged that the change would violate an agreement that the commission negotiated with the California Internet giant last year to address privacy concerns raised by the launch of a failed Google Buzz social tool in 2010.

 

Combining user data as planned without consent from the people involved would breach the consent decree signed by Google, EPIC argued.

 

“EPIC is wrong on the facts and the law,” Google countered in a statement released Wednesday.

Google, facing pressure from US lawmakers over the new privacy policy, said on January 31 that it remains committed to

 

protecting consumer data as it creates a “seamless and easy” Web experience.

 

The Internet giant sent a letter to lawmakers and posted comments on its public policy blog defending the changes, which will consolidate the policies of its offerings such as search, mail, video and map usage.

 

Google said in a blog post at the time that said the change will make Google s privacy policy “simpler and more understandable” and will “make our users  experience seamless and easy by allowing more sharing of information among products when users are signed into their Google Accounts.”

 

Some privacy advocates have expressed concern that users will not be able to “opt out” of the new policy, which will allow advertisers to develop personalized messages based on Web searches, use of Android mobile devices or activity on other Google products.

 

Google allows people to opt out of any data collecting by searching, watching videos on YouTube, getting directions on Google Maps, and performing other tasks without signing into a Google Account.”

 

US Representatives Edward Markey and Joe Barton sent a letter to the FTC last month asking if the planned changes are a violation of the settlement.

 

Google said in its letter to lawmakers that “our approach to privacy has not changed,” and that Google users “continue to have choice and control” over private data by not signing into accounts or by using other tools like anonymous search or chat.
 

messi arsenal

Guardiola praises character of star Messi
MADRID, Apr 7, 2010 (Pal Telegraph)- Barcelona striker Leo Messi scored an incredible four times as his side beat Arsenal 4-1 to qualify for the semifinals of the Champions League on Tuesday night.

The Argentinean showed why he is the best player in the world with a first half hat-trick after the visitors had taken a surprise first half lead.

Both sides went into the game with numerous players missing: Barcelona was without suspended duo of Carles Puyol and Gerard Pique, while Zlatan Ibrahimovich was missing with a calf strain, allowing Bojan to start in attack.

The young striker had scored two goals at the weekend and got the nod ahead of former Arsenal hero Thierry Henry.

The visitors meanwhile had a host of injuries, including Cesc Fabrigas, William Gallas, Alex Song, Andrey Arshavin and young midfielder Alex Ramsey, limiting the options of coach Arsene Wenger, who opted to use Mikael Silvestre in central defense while leaving veteran Sol Campbell on the substitutes’ bench.

The 2-2 draw from the first leg meant that Arsenal had to score to have any chance of qualifying for the last four and although Barcelona began by controlling the play Arsenal did indeed score the first goal.

Abu Diaby robbed possession in midfield, fed Theo Walcott and the winger’s pace allowed him to cross the ball for Nicklas Bendtnaar to score at the second attempt after 19 minutes.

That goal threatened to upset Barcelona, but Messi got them back on level terms just two minutes later. The ball fell kindly to him on the edge of the Arsenal area and he produced an unstoppable left foot shot.

Barca continued to dominate and took the lead after 37 minutes. Eric Abidal cut in from the left and his ball into the area was knocked down by Pedro for Messi to control and beat Manuel Almunia from close range.

There was still time in the half for Messi to complete his hat-trick. As the Arsenal defense pushed forward, he ran onto a smart header from Keita before clipping the ball over a stranded Almunia.

With the tie under control, Barcelona looked to control the game in the second half and reserve energy for next Saturday’s visit to play Real Madrid.

Toure Yaya came into the game to close down space and with Arsenal unable to create chances and Barcelona content to let the clock tick down it made for a dull spectacle.

Three minutes from time, however, Messi made it all worthwhile. Again he found space in the Arsenal half and although Almunia stopped his first shot, Messi slotted the rebound through the keeper’s legs.

Barcelona won 4-1 on the night, 6-3 on aggregate and Messi now has 25 goals in 41 Champions League appearances, making him the club’s record scorer in the competition along with Rivaldo.

earthquake

7.2 Mexico Earthquake Felt All The Way In Las Vegas – Disaster struck on Easter Sunday. A magnitude 7.2 earthquake hit the Baja California, Mexico area damaging many structures and killing 2 people. The rumbling occurred at 3:41 PM on Sunday April 04 lasting about 40 seconds. The quake happened 16 miles south-west of Guadalupe Victoria at a depth of 20 miles.

Wide spread damage was reported ranging from shattered store windows to large cracks in buildings and even roads. Many people lost power in their area. The quake was felt all throughout Southern California and even Nevada. It was described as a slow rocking motion by many California residents. Some aftershocks were felt as well.

Later reports revealed that this earthquake released twice the energy of the Haiti quake but did far less damage. The reasons being are that the suspected fault line of the Mexicali Earthquake is far away from the nearest towns. Also because of the higher building codes required by California and Mexico. In Haiti however the fault that produced the quake was right in the middle of town.

Many more extensive reports are slowly coming in. Many small videos have popped up on video sites such as You Tube showing real life glimpses of how people react during these disasters.
A tsunami alert has been lifted after an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 hit the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

The quake’s epicentre was 204km (127 miles) northwest of Sibolga on Sumatra’s coast, at a depth of nearly 48km, the US Geological Survey said.

Aftershocks were reported in the northern province of Aceh, but there were no reports of casualties.

sumatra

JAKARTA, Indonesia – A magnitude 7.7 earthquake shook Indonesia’s northwest island of Sumatra early Wednesday, prompting a brief tsunami warning and sending panicked residents rushing for higher ground.

There were scattered reports of injuries, but only minor damage in most areas.

The quake struck at 5:15 a.m. (2215 GMT) and was centered 125 miles (205 kilometers) northwest of the coastal town of Sibolga in Sumatra at a depth of 19 miles (31 kilometers), the U.S. Geological Survey said. It had earlier said the quake measured 7.8.

Indonesia’s Meteorology and Geophysics Agency and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu issued tsunami warnings following the quake, but lifted them two hours later.

A hospital on Simeulue island off the coast of Sumatra admitted 17 people for treatment of injuries sustained in the quake, including four in critical condition, said Capt. Ajas Siagian, a deputy police chief for the area.

Abdul Karim, a government spokesman in Simeulue, said dozens of houses collapsed or were damaged in Teupah Selatan village. He said no larger buildings were reported damaged, but electricity had been knocked out on the island.

“We are still collecting reports of damages and injuries … but the situation has returned to normal and people are going back home,” he said.

Local network Metro TV reported that a dormitory for nurses partially collapsed in Aceh province’s Singkil district and one woman suffered minor injuries in the rush to get out of the building. It said fires sparked by the quake had burned at least 14 houses in Medan, the capital city of North Sumatra province. Electricity was cut in Medan, Banda Aceh, the provincial capital of Aceh, and other areas.

Paulus Prihandojo, another seismologist with the meteorology agency, said along with the quake’s relative depth, the epicenter was too far away from the major population centers of Medan and Banda Aceh to cause major damage.

He said areas closer to the epicenter were more sparsely populated and many of the buildings in that area were made of wood, which fares better in earthquakes than brick and cement.

At least five strong aftershocks measuring up to 5.2 were recorded, the meteorology agency said.

People in several cities along the southeastern coast of Sumatra as well as Sinabang on Simeulue island and Gunung Sitoli on nearby Nias island poured into the streets and rushed to higher ground after the quake.

“Rumors about a tsunami panicked villagers living near the beach,” said Eddy Effendi, a resident on Nias island. “They ran away on motorbikes and cars or by climbing the hills. There was panic and chaos everywhere, but I don’t see serious damage or injuries in my village.”

Residents in Sibolga said the shaking lasted more than a minute and utility poles in the area were knocked down.

The quake was felt as far away as the outskirts of Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur, about 320 miles (515 kilometers) away. There were no reports of damage there.

A 2004 tsunami triggered by a magnitude-9.2 earthquake in the same part of Indonesia killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries on the Indian Ocean basin.

los angeles

Census ads seek to boost minority participation
LOS ANGELES — Radio commercials blare ranchera tunes, beseeching Mexican-Americans to fill out their census forms. Print ads with a portrait of a Thai family with a carved elephant in the background implore Thais to do the same. So does a Congolese basketball hero in another.

The ads scream stand up and be counted, and are designed to reach some of the most difficult to count communities across the nation.

“We wanted to make sure that in addition to being ‘in language,’ we were also ‘in culture,’” said Raul Cisneros, chief of the 2010 Census publicity office. “We’ve got to count everybody, so we’ve got to pull all the levers.”

During the 2000 Census, when the bureau used paid advertisements for the first time in its history, critics accused the agency of adopting an overly generic, one-size-fits-all approach in its efforts to reach minorities.

Speakers of Vietnamese, Persian, Hindi, Greek and other languages were not addressed in their native tongues. Billboards designed for continental-U.S.-based Hispanics were also deployed in Puerto Rico.

The same East Asian-looking family was used for ads targeting communities with heritage that reached from Pakistan to the Philippines.

“Simply having a poster of a Chinese-American family is not going to resonate. If you’re from India, you’re not going to say, ‘Oh, that’s my family.’” said Karen Narasaki, president and executive director of the Asian American Justice Center. “It’s much more sophisticated this time around.”

Ads promoting participation are appearing in 28 languages this year, up from 17 in 2000. Although minority groups make up just 26 percent of the population, more than half of the bureau’s $140 million ad-placement budget is going to campaigns that target them.

That expenditure is based on an understanding of how difficult it is to get many members of those groups to mail in their census forms and, for those that don’t, to cooperate with census takers who visit their homes.

“Minority populations are historically more difficult to reach,” said Phil Sparks, a former Census Bureau director who oversaw the 2000 ad campaign and now leads the Census Project, a nonpartisan census watchdog.

Language barriers keep some from filling out their forms, while others haven’t been in the country long enough to understand that congressional districts are drawn up and federal resources allocated based on the count.

Still others are wary of cooperating with a public agency like the Census Bureau because of fears over confidentiality or feelings that they’ve been neglected by the government in the past.

Last decade’s minority-focused ads helped boost response rates, Sparks said, but this census’ campaign should help even more.

“It’s much more sophisticated, it’s much more targeted and I think it will be that much more effective,” he said.

A print ad campaign targeting Asians, for example, swaps families that are identifiable members of their target markets into the same living-room backdrop, with culturally specific trinkets on their walls and mantles: a small wooden box with drawers for the Chinese family; a carved figurine of an elephant in the Thai ad; an ornamental bamboo tube on the wall of the Filipino home.

For U.S. radio markets with large Mexican communities, the Census Bureau set its Spanish-language message promising anonymity and a fair share of federal cash to a plaintive ranchero tune.

But for areas with a larger Dominican contingency, the agency set the message to a more lively, tropical bachata beat.

The ads aimed at blacks from sub-Saharan Africa, meanwhile, feature retired Congolese American basketball pro Dikembe Mutombo, who appears in posters and magazine spreads surrounded by children.

A different group of children, whose broad range of skin tones reflect the diversity of the Caribbean Islands, appear in the ads aimed at immigrants from that region. They surround a model that focus groups identified as convincingly West Indian.

African-Americans, meanwhile, were targeted using a TV spot with characters whose voices are muted until they mail their census forms.

Those last ads resonated with African-Americans because they played to perceptions among blacks that they’re not listened to by the members of the broader culture, said Damien Reid, vice president of GlobalHue, the firm that produced the ads.

Not all demographic groups got the same deep-bore approach.

The American Indian population was divided into four geographic zones — instead of the more than 500 federally recognized tribal divisions — with familiar-type landscapes featured in ads for target areas.

And among Arabic-speaking residents, the shared experience of feeling under suspicion in post-9/11 America was stronger than any cultural differences in their backgrounds, said Jalal Sayed, an account manager with Allied Media Corp., which produced ads for those groups.

In one Arabic-language ad, the central image is of the main character joining a multicultural cast in mailing his census form. The purpose was to show that Arab residents weren’t being singled out for surveillance by the census agency, Sayed said.

“It’s a tough sell in my community frankly because this is the first census since Sept. 11 and there are all these fears and concerns about racial profiling that have gone on over the last nine years,” said Helen Hatab Samhan, executive director of the Arab American Institute Foundation and a member of a committee that is advising the census on its ads targeting minority communities.

Samhan and other advocacy group leaders gave the census bureau high marks in its efforts to reach minority communities, but said there were still gaps in the communications strategy that they had to fill.

One particularly glaring omission, she said, was the lack of advertisements targeting the native-English speaking Arab community.

Her group, along with organizations representing the Hispanic and Asian communities, have independently produced English-language public service advertisements for their respective communities.

Urban League president and chief executive Marc Morial, who also sits on the advisory committee, said the census campaigns effectively stressed that communities need to be fully counted in order to receive their entire allotments of political clout and economic resources.

But he said the paid advertisements are no replacement for personal interactions with trusted community members.

“Sometimes it’s not only the message, it’s the messenger,” he said

Goddess Of The Market, Jennifer Burns

Goddess of the market, Jennifer Burns is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His new biography, the goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American right, follows through its Rand 9780195324877rise fight meteoric Hollywood screenwriter best-selling novelist. Burns highlights two aspects of the work of Rand, which makes it a perennial draw for those on the right: its promotion of capitalism, and his advocacy of limited government. In honor of the appearance Jennifer Burns The Daily Show (be sure to set at 11 tonight!) We published an excerpt below.

“I’m coming back to life,” Rand said as the Nathaniel Branden Institute entered its second year of existence. Watching Nathan packed conference, Rand began to believe that it could still have an impact on culture. He awoke from his despair, he began writing again. In 1961 he published his first nonfiction work, For the New Intellectual, and in 1962 launched its own monthly magazine, The Objectivist newsletter. During the decade that reprinted articles from the newsletter and the speeches he had given in two books, the virtue of selfishness and capitalism: the unknown ideal. Although occasionally spoke of a fourth novel, Rand had abandoned the fiction forever. Instead, it reinvents itself as a public intellectual. Gone were the shops allegorical, tragic heroes and heroines, the coded references to unrealistic politicians, intellectuals, and events. Rand Objectivist Newsletter in the name and the names of the fingers pointed, direct-injected itself into the hottest political issues of the day.

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Goddess Of The Market, Jennifer Burns was first posted on October 16, 2009 at 12:41 pm.