privacy Archives - Page 2 of 2

Privacy Advice from the Last Century

Posted on December 27, 2007 ·

I’m still wondering if the How to Safeguard Your Privacy Online post on GigaOM is real or a parody. No, I’m not talking about the advice for the paranoid, which includes gems like:

Do not make international phone calls.

Do not have a home broadband connection.

After all, these are for the paranoid… but let’s look at some of the tips for most of us, assuming we fall under the Feeling Practical But Not Paranoid category:

Do not use desktop search tools like Google Desktop or Microsoft Desktop Search.

Do not use webmail from a service provider like AT&T, Google or Microsoft.

Do not use browser toolbars or desktop gadgets.

Remove all social network accounts.

Clear your browser cookies after every session.

Change your local username daily.

He is so right, yet so wrong. Yes, the above are all real dangers on our privacy – but hey, we all know since Scott McNealy we don’t have privacy anyway. He got chastised for his famous declaration in 1998 – perhaps he was a bit ahead of his time, but things got a lot worse (better?) since then.

Let’s just look at cookies. The obvious Privacy 101 principle in the 90’s was to control them. Since then we’ve seen an army of cookie-washer products, the popular browsers all offer their own privacy/cookie settings – yet all this works less and less. Quite a few sites – including blogs – will fail to load properly when seemingly unrelated, third-party cookies are blocked. Sometimes they work, but next time you come back to the site, there’s just a white, blank screen. This is ugly. Since I can’t easily figure out what blocked the site, I typically end up deleting all browser cookies as well as all cookie-rules. Then the game starts again – some of the sites / blogs take minutes to rotate through dozens of cookie-requests, literally making it impossible to read their own content. I’m about to give up: might as well just enable cookies – privacy is long gone, anyway. Besides, if I am getting ads served up, they might as well be better targeted.

Not using search? Web-mail? Changing user-names daily? C’mon… it would be completely impossible to live with these rules. We have long given up any resemblance to privacy for the sake of convenience. Get used to it. Unless you want to shut down the Internet, remove any computers from the house and lock yourself up in your home. Better yet, move to a remote island, where everything is low-tech and healthy.

Filed Under: Misc, Software, Technology · Tagged: advertising, convenience, cookies, inetrnet, privacy

SaaS Will Never Be the Same – Again

Posted on December 4, 2007 ·

The first time I said SaaS would never be the same was referring to Freshbook’s launch of their benchmarking service:

It’s *the* hidden business model enabled by SaaS. An opportunity not talked about, but so obvious it has to be on the back of all SaaS CEO’s mind. Benchmarking is a huge business, practiced by research firms like Forrester, Hoovers, Dunn and Bradstreet, as well as by specialized shops like the Hackett group – none of which are affordable to small businesses. More importantly, all previous benchmarking efforts were hampered by the quality of source data, which, with systems behind firewalls was at least questionable. SaaS providers will have access to the most authentic data ever, aggregation if which leads to the most reliable industry metrics and benchmarking.

Hosting customer data offers a lot more opportunities, beyond benchmarking. Tomorrow CRM provider Salesforce.com will launch a new service called Salesforce to Salesforce (S2S) that facilitates the sharing of data between customers -reports TechCrunch. I believe, just like Freshbook’s move, the ramifications of this new Salesforce service will go way beyond the immediate opportunities it brings to customers ( not that those are negligible: see first reaction by Echosign CEO Jason Lemkin, another business innovator in my book.)

This is a first step in a paradigm-shift: while current concerns about SaaS mostly focus on the security, privacy, and consequently isolation of business data, eventually a culture of controlled sharing for business benefits will develop. Forget CRM; think of more complete business suites, like NetSuite, or when it really kicks in, SAP’s Business ByDesign, the most comprehensive SaaS business suite ever. Procurement, manufacturing, inventory, resources…etc data – can you envision the improvements in Supply Chain visibility? SaaS will never be the same – again.

Update (12/5): Larry Dignan at Between the Lines sees the same opportunity:

Today, the service is predictably focused on sharing sales lead and CRM-type information. But as Salesforce.com grabs more large customers its possible that the latest service could be used to exchange supply chain information and link other business processes.

Filed Under: Business, Enterprise Software, SaaS · Tagged: A1S, benchmarking, business bydesign, crm, data security, data sharing, freshbooks, netsuite, On-Demand, privacy, SaaS, salesforce.com, sap, sap bbd

Is Your Online Content Really Yours?

Posted on August 29, 2007 ·

Industry Analyst and fellow Enterprise Irregular Josh Greenbaum had a shocking discovery:

…the Terms of Service posted on the Google Docs and Spreadsheets site assigns content rights of anything saved on Doc and Spreadsheets to Google. It’s almost too incredible to believe, so here’s the wording from the mighty Google maw itself:

“… you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting Google services…”

His conclusion:

I’ve said it before – Google is the new evil empire – but now I really am beginning to believe it. I know that user agreements are typically ignored by most users, but anyone in the corporate world who ignores this risks seeing their IP in a Google marketing campaign, or worse.

All I can say is this: Are they out of their minds?

Unlike Josh, I’m not sure this is part of Google’s Evil Master Plan, more a case of careless wording. Google’s very own Privacy Policy spells out more proper intent:

Files you create with Google Docs & Spreadsheets may, if you choose, be read, copied, used and redistributed by people you know or, again if you choose, by people you do not know. Information you disclose using the chat function of Google Docs & Spreadsheets may be read, copied, used and redistributed by people participating in the chat. Use care when including sensitive personal information in documents you share or in chat sessions, such as social security numbers, financial account information, home addresses or phone numbers.

It’s all about warning me and you, users, to be careful about protecting our content, which to me would be contrary to the “Evil Plan”. I think in this case Dennis Howlett is right, there are inconsistencies between the legal terms of various Google Services, that’s all:

I leave it to the lawyerly brethern to chew over this lot but as an advisor to business decision makers, I don’t need a lawyer to tell me this is an unholy mess where my rights are unclear and where my privacy is at risk. Unlike Josh, I find it hard to believe Google wants part ownership of my data. It wants to send contextual advertising. To that extent, it needs to analyze and understand what’s going on in the things I commit to GAPE. The conclusion I’ve come to is that like so much that comes out of Google, it is half baked and poorly thought through.

In the above Dennis refers to Google Apps for the Enterprise. Now, Google and other online services are certainly targeted to small businesses, too (some more than others), which will look at usability, convenience, cost, and don’t typically comb through legal documents. This is not very reassuring. In fact it got me outright worried – are my friends at Zoho equally lax about legalities? I’m using their services and never bothered to check the TOS. Ignorant, I know – but you see, I am a Very Small Business.

My worries only lasted 5 minutes, until I found this in Zoho’s Privacy Policy:

We assure you that the contents of your Account will not be disclosed to anyone and will not be accessible to employees of AdventNet. Neither do we process the contents of your Account for serving targeted advertisements.

It’s affirmative, plain and simple, black and white: does not take a lawyer to decipher . This may very well be one of the differentiators I’ve hinted at before. Case closed.