A new application aims to put users back in control of their private data stored on the increasingly public social networking site, Facebook. With “The Green Safe” app, Facebook users can now export their profile data for off-site storage on Green Safe’s servers. Data can then be purged from Facebook itself, allowing only friends to view profile information by way of a profile page tab labeled “My Info.”

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Privacy Concerns for Facebook Users

With the ever-growing concern about Facebook’s data-sharing policies – policies that are now under attack from several U.S. senators – people are becoming more concerned about how personal information shared with the world’s largest social networking site is being used.

After already having been blindsided with “recommended settings” that automatically publicized previously private data like status updates and photos, Facebook users are now dealing with even more changes that have major privacy implications. Recently announced initiatives include things like “instantly personalized” websites that tap into your Facebook data without prior authorization, revamped profile pages where every interest of yours from bands to books is made public and new terms for Facebook application developers that allow apps to store your data indefinitely.

Despite these radical changes on Facebook’s part, few users are actually deleting their Facebook accounts. Although the privacy concerns are troubling, the social network has become more than a simple pastime for many people. Instead, it has transformed into a communication tool nearly as vital as email for staying in touch with networks of friends, family, co-workers and other colleagues.

Now instead of deleting your Facebook account, The Green Safe app offers a viable alternative: keep Facebook, but remove Facebook’s ability to access your data. And with the data gone from Facebook, application developers and their partners are out of luck too…at least those whose apps you install going forward.

How “The Green Safe” Works

To use The Green Safe, you grant it access just like any other Facebook application, quiz or game, then tell it to “Import Your Data.” After the import is complete, follow the instructions provided to add the app to a tab on your Facebook profile. Here, it will appear as a tab labeled “My Info” which only your friends can see. At this point, you can return to your Facebook profile and delete the information stored there, removing it from Facebook’s control.

This is a somewhat ingenious workaround to the data privacy situation on Facebook – using Facebook’s own application platform against them. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that your personal data is now completely and entirely private, either.

The Green Safe’s homepage clearly states that the app “may use your info to serve up ads that target your interests” In other words, your personal data may be made a marketing tool. However, the privacy policy does assure that the company will not “share, trade or sell your information with anyone.”

So with “The Green Safe,” you may see a few ads in the future, it seems. Still, that’s nothing worse that what Facebook already does. (If you’ve ever wondered why Facebook’s ads are so eerily, creepily personalized, it’s because the Facebook ad platform allows advertisers the ability to very narrowly target users using the information shared on profile pages.)

At least with The Green Safe installed, you’ve turned over your data to a company whose business relies on keeping data safe instead of the opposite: sharing it with the world, as Facebook is doing now. It may not be a perfect solution, but it’s definitely a workaround that’s worth checking out.

The Green Safe’s application developer, LJ Jones, runs a blog here. The most recent post, “My Info is not a Commodity,” is a diatribe against Facebook’s changes.

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Earlier this year Google added a new product to the already overflowing social-space. Its name was Buzz and it instantly found itself in the same category (mainly for the built-in Gmail userbase) alongside both Twitter and Facebook. Based on all the hype surrounding Buzz, it seemed we were getting ready for the fight of social-space supremacy.

Fast-forward a few months

After the initial hype-fest died down, and the dust settled, most of the positive buzz has dissipated. What we’re left with are privacy concerns, a rampant spam problem and copyright issues from users. In an effort not to be totally negative in regards to Buzz, it should be noted that Google has been very quick addressing / fixing certain aspects of the service.

Do you think Google Buzz is a flop? Tell us what you think. 

This past week we asked the question, “Would you consider Google Buzz to be a flop?” on our WebProNews Facebook page. We were surprised by some of the answers left by our fans. My personal favorite comes from Steve Blaze; he states that Google Buzz is the biggest flop since the Edsel. (For those of unfamiliar with the Edsel, it was a brand of car from the Ford Motor Company with a disastrous history so therefore “Edsel” has become synonymous with failure).

One has to ask, why is Google having such a hard with social media? In many ways Google was a pioneer of social media, with their Orkut service (which is still immensely popular in both India and Brasil – but now the US where it counts).

Recently Chitika, an online advertising network, did some research within their network and found some interesting data pertaining to Buzz.

The report goes on to say… ”February 9th, 2010 – the day Buzz was launched – the search engines lit up with queries.  The Chitika network saw about 1,500 searches that day for the term “Google Buzz,” approximately 15 times the number of searches for “Twitter.”

However, those searches dropped off quickly – on February 10th, there were 580 searches; on the 11th, 147.  From the 12th on – only three days removed from Buzz’s much-hyped launch – searches for Google Buzz failed to break three digits, and in most cases elicited less than 10 searches per day.  During the same time, searches for Twitter remained fairly stable, averaging about 87 searches per day.”

What are some possible fixes for Google Buzz?

Social media users want services that make there experience easier… not just another service that brings nothing new to the table. There are numerous things that Google could add / tweak to make Buzz more user friendly, specifically here are 5 things that I would like to see…

1.) Lists – Twitter has them and so should Buzz.
2.) Groups – Again, Twitter has them so should Buzz.
3.) Hide all comments – until I want to see comments" option.
4.) Comment moderation – block directly from the comments (like on FriendFeed).
5.) Content filter – Don’t show me any photos from Picasa or posts from a specific user.

Do you have any ideas to improve Google Buzz? Let us know what you got.

Something else that would’ve made this list is Buzz not pulling tweets in real-time. It appears as though this issue maybe getting fixed, a recent message from Josh Wills, an engineer on the Buzz team, explained…

"Okay, change is out everywhere. Here’s the scoop: we’re doing an experiment where we’re going to trust the timestamps on tweets (and by "experiment," I mean rolling it out to everyone, everywhere, all at once.) The net effect of this should be to do away with "tweet dumping", where you’re buzzing along and a whole bunch of tweets show up all at once because we just crawled them and push your page all around. Now, if a tweet shows up at the top of the stream, it will be because it just happened, or because a buzzer commented on it.

Personally, I really like Twitter, and I want better integration between Twitter and Buzz. My hope is that this is a temporary change until we work out a way to play nicely together that is beneficial to everyone."

So Google Buzz might not be exactly what we expected when it first launched earlier this year… but only time will tell if it becomes a major player in the social-space.

Do you see Google Buzz becoming a major player? Or will it just fizzle out? Tell us what you think.

In the midst of the SXSW festival last month, we reviewed a mobile social network called LoKast. Our one lingering question about the app’s utility, at the time, was were we really going to run around town staring at our phone to see if someone else nearby was running the same app?

The answer was “no” then and is “no” now, but the difference now is that the iPhone OS 4.0 that was announced yesterday allows for background location multitasking. This opens up a whole new realm of experiences for the iPhone.

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First, LoKast. LoKast is a self-described “disposable” social network. That is, as you move about and come near other people running LoKast, you can quickly interact with them. Then, when you move ot of range, you may never see them again. It is social networking based on location, without a persistent friends listing.

So now, with background location monitoring, an app like LoKast is actually feasible. I can turn it on, leave it running and wander around town and perhaps have it notify me when I’m within range of someone.

As Kim-Mai Cutler notes, background location also brings up some “slightly creepy” privacy concerns relating not only to applications running in the background, but also location based advertising. But what if you think about location based advertising like you think of iTunes’ “Genius” function or all the other recommendation engine software you use?

It may be tough to realize that you are not quite the unique snowflake you thought you were and that, indeed, everyday around three you end up at the same coffeeshop, but wouldn’t it be nice for your iPhone to realize this and get you 20% off? Without you even having to lift a finger? Well, fine, maybe you have to lift an iPhone.

The list of ideas for background location are endless. Of course, we’ll have to see how quickly a battery gets drained with persistent GPS monitoring. Having the ability to let our phones deliver us information, as we move about the world, based on our location has some amazing potential.

Think of EveryBlock, the hyperlocal news aggregator that Marshall Kirkpatrick went ga-ga over when it arrived in Portland. The block-level delivery of news wouldn’t even need to wait for you to check it any more – it could simply deliver relevant information as you move about your day. Real-time rideshare services like Avego and Flinc suddenly become that much more feasible, in fast-paced, real-life situations.

We could go on, but we have another couple of months before the next version of the iPhone OS comes out and we’re already too excited as it is. What crazy, creepy or otherwise cool potential do you see with the new background location capabilities?

Discuss

Without a doubt, location-based services and social networks are one of the hottest topics on the Internet right now. Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and many others are vying for users, but strong privacy concerns are still holding back the mainstream adoption of these kinds of services. Rally Up for the iPhone is a new location-based social network that puts a very strong emphasis on privacy and also features some innovative new concepts.

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Focus on Privacy

While Rally Up (iTunes link) allows you to friend anybody who is a member of the service, it features some nifty privacy settings, which are represented by a slider on every friend’s profile. You can choose between four different privacy settings. These range from not sharing information with this person to just seeing this friend’s update but not sharing information with them, to giving the contact the full firehose of settings with and without push notifications. The idea here is that you only give your real friends full access to all of your updates, while still giving you the option to follow anybody else on the service – though these users can obviously also choose to not share any information with you. Your own home’s location is always private and never shared on the service.

Just like Gowalla and Foursquare, Rally Up features badges, but the emphasis of the service is more on connecting you to your real friends. Because of this, the Rally Up team also decided not to allow users to syndicate their location feed on Twitter. You can, however, choose to share your location with your Facebook friends. The assumption here, we assume, is that your Facebook friends are more likely to be your “real” friends and that Facebook will keep this data private.

Instead of connecting to Twitter, Rally Up emphasizes private microblogging on the service itself. Rally Up allows you to send short text messages to your friends, but you can also attach photos to any location.

I’m On My Way

Besides focusing on privacy, Rally Up also included some interesting innovations in its service that aren’t available in most of the current crop of popular location-based services yet.

While most services only allow you to check in once you have arrived at a location, Rally Up also allows you to send out a notification when you are on your way to a venue. You can also set up temporary locations, which is quite useful when you go to a party at somebody’s house, for example.

The app, which, by the way, is very well designed, doesn’t focus so much on venues as on connecting people. This is a nice departure from quite a few of the location-based social networks we have recently seen.

Overall, Rally Up represents a very nifty take on the location-based social networking model and we especially like the company’s focus on privacy.

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Update: Anytime interest-based advertising is mentioned, privacy concerns usually follow, based on its use of browser history.  A Google spokesperson tells WebProNews, "An advertiser can only remarket to users who have visited their site (or who have interacted with their YouTube homepage ad or brand channel)."

Users can opt-out of seeing remarketing ads using Google’s  Ads Preferences Manager,as mentioned in Google’s announcement, but in case users haven’t seen that particular link, "Clicking on ‘Ads by google’ or ‘i’ (in rich media ads) alongside all ads we serve takes you to this page which explains our ad practices and leads to the Ads Preferences Manager," she says.

Original Article: Google is rolling out a new AdWords feature called Remarketing. What this does is allow advertisers to reach users on sites within the Google Content Network, as they browse the web. The feature was originally introduced as a trial a year ago as part of Google’s interest based advertising beta, but the company  is now making it widely available.

"We’ve received a tremendous response from the hundreds of advertisers who’ve been using it in recent months, across all industries – including automotive, retail, local and finance," says Product Manager Aitan Weinberg. "We’ve seen that remarketing has worked well for many different kinds of advertisers – whether they’re looking to boost brand awareness, or drive clicks and sales, and whether they use display or text ads. For example, if you’re a search advertiser, you can use remarketing to create an integrated campaign strategy. After driving traffic to your site with search ads, you can then remarket to those users who reach your site by showing them tailored ads on sites throughout the Google Content Network."

Google says remarketing is a great way to reach users who are likely to be "highly receptive" to special offers.

"Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network," explains Weinberg. "In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked your YouTube homepage ad."

Advertisers can run multiple remarketing campaigns at once. "For example, you could offer discount game tickets to users who’ve previously visited your tickets page, advertise VIP hospitality packages to users who clicked on your ‘How to get to the arena’ page, and advertise a sale on team merchandise to users who previously visited your YouTube brand channel," says Weinberg.

Advertisers who want to use remarketing can set up and create their campaigns in the "audience" tab in AdWords.

Soon, you will be able to share your location with your Facebook friends. According to the New York Times’ Nick Bilton, Facebook plans to reveal this new feature during its f8 developer conference at the end of April. As Bilton notes, Facebook updated its privacy policy last year to incorporate language about location sharing. Facebook, according to this report, has been working on this feature for over a year. The company will offer location-based services through its own mobile applications and developers will be able to use this data to develop their own location-based apps on top of a new Facebook location API.

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How Will Facebook’s Users React?

It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s users – who are famously averse to change – will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. According to Bilton, Facebook “has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns.”

When Facebook introduced the newsfeed (which is now an integral part of the service), a large number of users considered this to be an invasion of their privacy. Location-based services have long suffered from the impression that sharing your location online can be dangerous and services like the Foursquare-based PleaseRobMe have only strengthened this sentiment among many users. Even though Facebook offers relatively sophisticated privacy controls, it will be interesting to see if the service’s users will warm up to the idea of sharing their location with their friends. A lot of the success of this service will depend on how well Facebook can educate its users and how it implements this feature and the privacy controls around it.

Will Facebook’s Users Care?

It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s users are even interested in sharing this information. While services like Foursquare and Gowalla are slowly but surely gaining new users (in part thanks to offering incentives for checking in at various venues), Twitter, which introduced a geotagging API last year and just introduced some location features on its website today, hasn’t seen a very strong response from users and developers so far.

Not Competing with Foursquare and Co.?

According to the New York Times report, Facebook isn’t trying to compete with location-based networks like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare, however. Instead, Bilton argues, the company is far more interested in competing with Google for small-business advertising. This will surely raise additional privacy concerns among Facebook’s users.

It’s also important to note that Facebook’s API, will allow intrepid developers (including Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt) to develop interesting location-based services on top of Facebook, however.

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When a startup entrepreneur tells the story of his/her mistakes and how they’ve corrected them, it’s endearing. When an investment associate for one of the more prestigious VC firms does it, it’s surprising.

Union Square Ventures’ Andrew Parker recently started a Got It Wrong Series on his Gong Show blog where he identifies his own mistakes and mis-judgements about the industry.

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While investment analysts and associates don’t directly control the money in the VC world, a large number of our readers believe associates help drive the decision-making process. When someone like Parker decides to air his mistakes for all to see, he’s giving us a glimpse at the information that guides the future of the tech landscape and whether or not the funding will follow. Some of Parker’s mistakes have included:

1. Privacy: Parker was adamant about user privacy and assumed that others were the same. He watched as personal finance site Mint, Loopt and Twitter gained ground despite the expectation that privacy concerns would prove to be a bigger barrier to adoption.

2. Mobile Browsers: In 2006 Parker told investor Fred Wilson that he did not expect the mobile browsing experience to catch up to the laptop in the next 5 years. He believed that the form factor of handheld devices was to small to make it easy to reformat pages on the fly, design mobile web pages and zoom into regular pages. Parker admits he was proven wrong by the iPhone.

3. Taste-maker Risk: Parker explains that certain sites succeed on the ability to popularize content from taste-makers. When he first saw the Huffington Post close a $5 million dollar round he was unsure of the investment thesis. Says Parker, “In hindsight, I think I have a blind spot when it comes to first-party content and editorial choices in web services.  The taste-maker risk is a risk, but it’s not nearly as important as I thought it was, and additionally, it’s a risk that smart technologists can navigate well.”

To keep an eye on the series visit Thegongshow.tumblr.com.

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The European Union has asked Google to revise the way it stores images for its Maps and Street View services, due to privacy concerns.

Google currently keeps all images on Street View for a year, but the EU’s Article 29 Data Protection Working Party wants that time cut in half to no longer than six months.

"The Working Party believes that a maximum retention of six months for the unblurred copies of the images would strike the right balance between the protection of privacy and the ability to eliminate false positives," the group said in a letter to Google’s global counsel, Peter, Fleishcer.

Google has also been told it needs to provide more information to residents when its Street View cars will be taking pictures in their areas. Google already posts updates online when it will be taking pictures in local areas. The EU says there should be announcement in local and national newspapers about the whereabouts of the Street View cameras.

"In Europe, we have high standards for data protection. I expect that all companies play according to the rules of the game," said EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding.
 

Two consumer groups Monday asked the Federal Trade Commission to block Google’s $750 million deal to acquire mobile advertising firm, AdMob, on anti-trust grounds.

In a joint letter to the FTC, Consumer Watchdog and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) said Google is simply buying its way to dominance in the mobile advertising market, reducing competition to the detriment of consumers.

"The mobile sector is the next frontier of the digital revolution. Without vigorous competition and strong privacy guarantees this vital and growing segment of the online economy will be stifled," wrote John M. Simpson, consumer advocate at Consumer Watchdog and CDD Executive Director Jeffery A. Chester.

"Consumers will face higher prices, less innovation and fewer choices. The FTC should conduct the appropriate investigation, block the proposed Google/AdMob deal, and also address the privacy issues."

Last week Google said the FTC had made a second request for additional information about the deal, a signal the commission is closely examining the proposal.

In addition to the anti-trust issues, the letter from the two non-partisan, non-profit groups, said a combined Google/AdMob raises privacy concerns. Both AdMob and Google gather large amounts of data about consumers’ online behavior, including their location.

"Permitting the expansion of mobile advertising through the combination of these two market leaders without requiring privacy guarantees poses a serious threat to consumers," the letter said.

Related Articles:

> Google Provides An Update On The AdMob Acquistion

> Mobile Advertising Guidelines Get An Update

> Best Buy Now Installing Google Mobile Apps On Smartphones

The experimental feature that Marissa Mayer announced last week is becoming available today for everyone to try.  Google Social Search promises to help users "find more relevant public content from your broader social circle."

The premise is simple: people value their acquaintances’ content more than that of random strangers.  So Google Social Search brings content from your social circle to the forefront, perhaps showing a friend’s or coworker’s take on a restaurant rather than (or in addition to) whatever the local newspaper reviewer had to say.

On the Official Google Blog, Maureen Heymans and Murali Viswanathan explained, "The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed. . . .  If you use Gmail, we’ll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups.  And if you use Google Reader, we’ll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.

Today a joint hearing on online advertising between two subcommittees of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce is being held. Google’s Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong is giving a testimony about advertising products and the company’s commitment to protecting user privacy.

There have been a lot of privacy concerns regarding Google’s Interest-based advertising, which was announced earlier this year. Essentially, this is where Google serves ads based on users’ browsing history. The company does have a video available about privacy in relation to this.

In her testimony, which is available in its entirety in this PDF document, Wong discusses three main topics. These are:

- Google’s main advertising products and the benefits Google believes online advertising brings to advertisers, online publishers, and individual Internet users

- Google’s approach to privacy, specific steps that the company takes to protect users’ privacy, and the release of interest-based advertising

- Ideas and recommendations for how to better protect Internet users’ privacy with respect to advertising, as well as more generally

In the first part,  Wong discusses the benefits of AdWords, AdSense for search, AdSense for Content, the Google Content Network, DoubleClick, etc. "In our experience, users value the advertisements that we deliver along with search results and other web content because the ads help connect them to the information, products, and services they’re looking for," she says.

With regards to privacy, Wong says the following three fundamentals have to be "at the bedrock of" privacy products and practices:

- Transparency
- Choice
- Security

Wong also notes that innovation is "a critical part" of Google’s approach to privacy. "To best innovate in privacy, we welcome the feedback of privacy advocates, government experts, our users, and other stakeholders," she says. "This feedback, and our own internal discussions about how to protect privacy, has led to several privacy innovations, including our development of new privacy tools for new products and our decision last year to anonymize our server logs after nine months for IP addresses and 18 months for cookies."

If you have any amount of interest in Google and privacy, particularly with its relation to advertising, you should definitely read the entire testimony. What do you think about it? Comment.