<IT WORLD> Big Brother wants
more By Martin J Young
HUA HIN, Thailand - Google announced this
week it intends to consolidate privacy policies
and combine all of the user data it has harvested
into one profile. This means that data from Gmail
users would be combined with that gathered from
their searches on YouTube, Maps, Google+, Picassa,
Chrome and any of Google's other services.
The company says it will use this digital
hoard of personal data to better target
advertising towards web users. By knowing more
about people's behavior online and tracking them
further across the net it can offer higher priced
ad campaigns and make greater revenue.
Google can glean information on users when
they activate Android phones, search the Internet,
sign into their Google accounts, view
maps and watch videos on
YouTube. Users will not be able to opt out of the
new privacy policy
which starts on March 1. An announcement already
appears on Google's pages, ominously stating,
"We're changing our privacy policy and terms. This
stuff matters. Learn more." Big Brother of the
Internet will soon know more about you than your
own mother.
The company had a rare drop in
income during the last quarter, reporting that the
average revenue per ad click dropped 8% from the
same period in 2010. Net revenue was US$8.31
billion, lower than analyst predictions of $8.37
billion. Google's share price fell by 9% following
the news.
Google is clearly aiming to turn
this around by manipulating user profiles to sell
more ads, in addition to recent changes made to
the search pages to feature results from its
social network, Google+, at the expense of its
competitors, Facebook and Twitter. If the business
model of free Google services paid for by
advertising revenue is to continue, then the user
must be viewed as the product rather than the
customer.
Industry Apple
aficionados have been enjoying this week that has
seen their beloved company double its profits for
the holiday quarter. Sales of the iPhone 4S, which
was introduced in October, have been largely
responsible for the bumper harvest; 37 million
handsets were sold during the final three months
of 2011.
The record revenue of US$46.3
billion also created a record net profit for the
company of $13 billion, as sales rose by 73%
compared with the same quarter of 2010. Demand for
the iPhone 4S continued to outstrip supply and
sales of the smart-phone were up 128% over the
year-ago period, and 117% over the previous
quarter.
Sales of iPads also reached
record levels with 15.4 million units sold during
the quarter, up 111% over the same period last
year and 39% over the previous three months. The
company has been transformed by these two
products, which while not available five years ago
now count for 72% of its revenue.
The rosy
revenues reflected in the stock price. It jumped
over 7% on the day of the announcement and ended
at $450 per share, putting the total market value
at $426 billion and moving Apple above Exxon Mobil
as the world's highest valued company.
Internet In the wake of last
week's US clampdown on file-sharing website
Megaupload.com, other file storage websites have
started shuttering their services to avoid similar
litigation. This raises a big question on the
general viability of cloud-based storage services.
While the website in question was found guilty of
copyright infringement it also had thousands of
users that relied on it for legitimate
file-sharing and storage.
Cyber-locker
websites such as Filesonic have already begun to
disable file-sharing capabilities and refund
subscribers and other large ones such as Dropbox,
Mediafire and Rapidshare are maintaining their
legitimacy and rewriting their terms and
conditions. Confidence in such services, however,
has been affected, especially now that the US is
taking a heavy-handed approach to what happens on
the Internet within its borders.
The
demise of Megaupload, which offered rewards for
uploading popular files, has had far-reaching
repercussions; a number of file-sharing websites
hosted outside the US have started to block access
to US users, close accounts and delete large
numbers of hosted files.
As was the case
when music-sharing site Napster closed its digital
doors in July 2001 at the hands of the Recording
Industry Association of America, a number of
others soon sprouted outside the US offering
similar services.
If American politicians
and lawmakers are intent on looking towards the
great firewall of China for their web control
aspirations they may find that punishing their own
population could well backfire. The Internet is
now far bigger than the country of its inception.
Martin J
Young is an Asia Times
Online correspondent based in Thailand.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online
(Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and
republishing.)
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