Articles by Ryan Radia 
Ryan is associate director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where his work focuses on adapting law and policy to the unique challenges of the information age. His research areas include privacy, IP telecommunications, competition policy, and media regulation.
Earlier this month, Google made news when it announced that its cloud computing productivity suite Google Docs had suffered a technical glitch that temporarily compromised a subset of users’ shared documents. After becoming aware of this glitch, Google notified its users via email and posted an entry to the Official Google Docs Blog that offered a more detailed explanation of what happened.
It turns out that a bug in Google’s permissions code was causing certain documents that had been shared by their author with other users but subsequently unshared to remain visible to those users. By the time Google notified its users, the bug had already been resolved, and Google estimates that only around 0.05% of all documents were vulnerable due to the glitch. As to how many documents were actually viewed by unauthorized parties, it’s unclear at this point.
All in all, the Google Docs glitch, while troubling, seems relatively minor as far as bugs go. Nevertheless, the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Mark Rotenberg jumped on the chance to attack Google, as he often does when Google makes news for anything privacy-related. Yesterday, EPIC filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission that called on the FTC to investigate Google’s privacy safeguards, order Google to shut down all cloud computing services—including Gmail, which has 26 million users—pending a thorough privacy evaluation, and force Google to pay $5 million to a fund that would be setup for “privacy research.”
Watchdog activist groups like EPIC can play a useful role in the public discourse on privacy, helping to publicize unsavory behavior by companies and educating consumers about keeping data secure. Unfortunately, however, these groups’ admirable focus on protecting privacy sometimes edges on the myopic, causing them to overreact to data breaches and sometimes even call for regulatory interventions that are decidedly anti-consumer. EPIC’s latest complaint about Google is a classic example of this.
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Facebook sparked a major user uprising when it amended its terms of service earlier this month to grant the social networking site greater licensing rights over user-submitted content. The implications of Facebook’s amended Terms of Use were originally uncovered by The Consumerist this past Sunday in a story entitled, “Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: ‘We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.'” The title pretty much sums up what the controversy was all about: under Facebook’s amended Terms of Use, even after a user deletes his Facebook account, Facebook would retain its license to distribute nearly all types of user-submitted content including photos and videos.
Predictably, news of Facebook’s expanded licensing rights made many users angry, with several Facebook groups against Terms of Use modifications popping up, attracting thousands of members overnight. As is often the case with juicy reports like this one, news of the Facebook fiasco spread throughout the blogosphere rapidly, eventually making its way to major tech sites and even the main page of CNN.com. By yesterday afternoon, a snapshot of Mark Zuckerberg‘s face was plastered on Fox News Channel, next to an excerpt of an entry he posted to Facebook’s blog in defense of the social networking site’s new terms.
Facebook’s explanation of its new terms seemed reasonable enough: even after a user quits Facebook, material that user has posted on friends’ walls and other messages the user has sent to others may remain available. Facebook also noted that its perpetual license only allowed the site to use material in accordance with departed users’ privacy settings (presumably at the time of their departure). Under the new terms, therefore, Facebook would still be required to respect albums marked as private–and ensure they stay that way.
But the seemingly stark contrast between Facebook’s attempts to justify the changes to its terms of use and, well, the actual language of terms themselves left many observers dissatisfied. In theory, if a user who had a Facebook photo album open to her entire network were to delete her account, Facebook would retain license to make those photos available to members of her network in perpetuity. And depending on how you parse the amended terms, Facebook could even use your profile pic in ads for the social network long after you terminated your Facebook account.
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Monday’s USA TODAY ran a long article discussing the tracking capabilities of the T-Mobile G1 smartphone, which is currently the only mobile device available that ships with Google’s Android operating system. I have a different take on the G1 phone, as I explain in a letter to the editor that appeared in today’s USA TODAY:
USA TODAY’s story on the G1 phone, which describes Google’s “surveillance” capabilities, does not do justice to the relationship that online service providers need to maintain with their users (“Feel like someone’s watching you?,” Cover story, Money, Monday). 
Google cannot freely use the data it collects from owners of its G1 phone. Far from it, the G1’s privacy policy describes clearly what Google can and cannot do with user information. And the policy is legally binding. Google has everything to lose and nothing to gain from a data breach.
A single privacy flub can send consumers fleeing from not only the G1 but also from Google’s other online services. This is why Google maintains robust privacy safeguards.
Google’s innovations in search, mail and other applications have helped make the Web a far more accessible and useful resource. Online users need to be careful with their information, but hyping privacy fears is unwarranted.
To be sure, using the G1 phone is not without risks, and some especially risk-averse individuals might want to steer clear of Android entirely. But when you consider the privacy risks many of us live with every day, Android’s privacy risks don’t seem all that great. In fact, the ubiquitous personal computer is probably the most vulnerable device owned by the average person–Internet architect Vint Cerf has estimated that up to 1 in 4 PCs worldwide is infected with malware. The G1 may be a marketer’s goldmine, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also offer strong privacy assurances.
Mozilla Foundation chairperson Mitchell Baker believes that Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows represents an “ongoing threat to competition and innovation on the Internet.” But as Adam explains in an earlier post, and Ryan Paul argues over at ArsTechnica, Baker’s portrayal of the browser marketplace is way off base.
Perhaps the most interesting rebuttal to the Mozilla Foundation’s take on bundling IE with Windows comes from a surprising source: Mike Connor, Firefox’s chief software architect. Here’s what he had to say a couple days ago in an interview with PC Pro:
Connor said, referring to Firefox’s ever improving market share, which now stands at just over 20% worldwide. “It’s asserting that bundling leads to market share. I don’t know how you can make the claim with a straight face,” he said.
“As people become aware there’s an alternative, you don’t end up in that [monopoly] situation. You have to be perceptibly better [than Internet Explorer],” Connor added.
Right on. It’s common knowledge that there are lots of alternatives to Internet Explorer out there. Firefox is a household name at this point, and anybody dissatisfied with IE can easily download FF–or any other competing browser.
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Adam raises some important questions below about the legislation introduced in Congress to ban silent cell phone cameras. Like many things Congress does, I wonder if the proposed solution might end up being worse than the perceived problem.
Is cell phone camera voyeurism actually a serious problem in the U.S.? Or is this just another problem being blown out of proportion by politicians? Some actual data on the incidence of camera phone “predation” would be useful in deciding whether digital voyeurism is a matter that demands Congress’s attention. The bill’s current language offers up only the vague statement, “Congress finds that children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone.”
I also wonder why the legislation targets phones rather than silent compact cameras of all sorts. Ridding from the market all silent mobile phone cameras would just make bad guys switch to compact, silent cameras with memory cards. (That’s not to say that Congress should ban them, either).
There’s a case to be made that in some situations, it might actually be a good thing for people to have cell phones equipped with silent cameras. What about somebody who’s being assaulted, or mugged, or raped and wants to photograph their attacker but fears retaliation? Or someone who’s just witnessed a crime, unbeknownst to the perpretator, and is trying to get a snapshot of the fleeing suspect? Or a whistleblower who wants to collect evidence of illicit activity by snapping covert photos?
To be sure, these are all hypothetical, unlikely scenarios. But for all we know, incidents involving “cell phone predators” are just as unlikely. And the person with the “good” use for their silent cell phone camera is much more likely to be impacted by a ban, because the bad guys will just skirt the law by hacking their phones or buying regular cameras.
The European Commission may order Microsoft to strip Internet Explorer from certain versions of Windows, according to a preliminary ruling against Microsoft stemming from a complaint brought by Opera. Opera claims that Microsoft is “abusing its dominant position” by bundling IE with Windows, and consequently denying consumers “genuine choice” among web browsers.
If the European Commission upholds Opera’s complaint against Microsoft, it wouldn’t be the first time Microsoft has been found guilty of antitrust violations stemming from applications bundled with Windows.
Back in 2004, the Commission ruled that it was illegal for Microsoft to bundle its Windows Media Player with Windows and ordered Microsoft to offer a Media Player-less version of the operating system. Microsoft responded by unveiling the wryly named “Windows XP Reduced Media Edition.” Unsurprisingly, the European Commission rejected the name, so Microsoft renamed the OS “Windows N.”
Despite Windows N’s fairly neutral-sounding name, consumers showed little interest in Windows N when it hit the shelves. It’s quite obvious why Windows N was a flop–why would anybody want to run an operating system lacking useful components, especially when plenty of alternatives are available online at the click of a button?
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According to Investor’s Business Daily, several major cable companies have launched an advertising start-up called Canoe Ventures that is developing the technology to record and analyze cable subscribers’ viewing metrics. As part of this plan, Comcast is reportedly building a “500 TB TV Warehouse” to store the aggregate habits of its 16.8 million digital cable customers.
Canoe has the potential to bring television advertising techniques up to par with their online counterparts, which have for years enabled websites to tailor ads to individual visitors. While cable companies haven’t used digital set-top boxes to collect viewing metrics until fairly recently, the concept of tracking television viewing habits isn’t new. For several years, TiVO set-top boxes have logged these habits without any ensuing privacy violations. And last May, Charter Communications began selling set-top box data to Nielsen Media Research so it could analyze the viewing statistics of Charter’s Los Angeles-area cable customers.
It’s a near-certainty that Canoe will have privacy activists up in arms, warning us that consumer privacy is under siege and calling for regulators—or Congress—to act. But as always, privacy risks must be balanced with the wealth-creating upside of targeted marketing. Data mining can indeed co-exist with effective privacy safeguards, and disciplined firms must be allowed to experiment with intelligent methods of matching buyers with sellers.
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The FCC’s much-maligned proposal to create a free, filtered wireless broadband network seemed all but dead earlier this week after FCC Chairman Kevin Martin stated in an interview with Broadcast & Cable that the proposal’s chances of surviving a full FCC vote were “dim.”
Now, Ars reports that Kevin Martin has changed his mind about the filtering requirements, caving in to pressure from an array of interest groups to drop the smut-free provisions from the plan. These “family-friendly” rules, which would have mandated that the network filter any content deemed unsuitable for a five-year-old, ended up acting as a lightning rod for critics across the ideological spectrum, and raised serious First Amendment concerns (as Adam and Berin have argued on several occasions).
Even with the smut-free rules having been removed, the proposal remains a very bad idea. Setting aside 25 mhz of the airwaves—a $2 billion chunk of spectrum—to blanket the nation with free wireless broadband (as defined by the FCC) would mean less spectrum available for more robust services. At a time when wireless firms are experimenting with a number of strategies for monetizing the airwaves, allowing a single firm’s business model—especially one that many experts have suggested is simply not viable—to reign over other, more effective models would hurt consumers who yearn for more than basic broadband service.
The case for setting spectrum aside for free wireless broadband is predicated on the myth that there exists an elusive “public interest” that the marketplace is unable to maximize. We’ve heard the same line many times before. It goes something like this: The forces of competition that we rely upon to allocate finite resources in nearly every other sector of the economy are incapable of fulfilling consumer needs when it comes to broadband. Washington DC intellectuals have figured out that the public really wants a free nationwide wireless network—yet this amazing concept has been blocked by evil incumbents that are bent on denying consumers the services they most desire.
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Claims that Google has abandoned its stance on network neutrality have been thoroughly debunked, as Cord and Adam note below. Over at Broadband Reports, Karl Bode explains that Google is seeking edge-caching agreements, not preferential treatment. Edge-caching involves Google housing its content on servers located inside consumer ISP networks, cutting bandwidth costs by allowing users to access Google content located just a few hops away.
Even though edge-caching doesn’t violate network neutrality as defined by Google, it’s still one of the many advantages that big players have over new entrants. Edge-caching isn’t a “fast track,” as the WSJ imprecisely terms it, but rather a short track—functionally, there’s a lot of similarity between the two. As Richard Bennett has explained time and time again, being close to end users is quite advantageous even without preferential treatment, as it eliminates the need to push vast amounts of data across the congestion-prone core of the public Internet.
We’ve heard about how edge-caching enables content providers and ISPs to cut their bandwidth bills and make more efficient use of finite network resources. Both of these are true, but there’s more—edge caching makes it much less likely that users will experience long load times or buffering hiccups while watching streaming video online. That high-def YouTube clip might take a few extra seconds to buffer if it has to make its way through congested central network exchanges—not so, however, if that video is housed just a few hops away, within your ISP’s network.
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There’s much to discuss as Obama shapes his administration (more on this at OpenMarket.org) but arguably one of the most important unanswered questions is who Obama will pick to staff the Federal Communications Commission.
CNET reports that Henry Rivera, a lawyer and former FCC Commissioner, has been selected to head the transition team tasked with reshaping the FCC. This selection gives us a glimpse of what the FCC’s agenda will look like under Obama, and it’s quite troubling.
Rivera has embraced a media “reform” agenda aimed at promoting minority ownership of broadcast media outlets. A couple weeks ago, Rivera sent a letter to the FCC that backed rules originally conceived by the Media Access Project to create a new class of stations to which only “small and distressed businesses” (SDB) could belong. The S-Class stations would be authorized to sublease digital spectrum and formulate must-carry programming, with the caveat that only half of the content can be “commercial”. To avoid the Constitutional issues surrounding racial quotas, eligibility for SDB classification would be based on economic status, rather than the racial composition of would-be station owners.
The S-Class proposal, like other media reform proposals, falsely assumes that current owners of media outlets are failing to meet the demands of their audience for a diverse range of content. The proposal also ignores the fact that consumers already enjoy an abundance of voices from all viewpoints, as we’ve discussed extensively here on TLF.
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