Facebook takes steps to address privacy concerns
abercrombie saleNew York ? Facebook has taken steps in recent days to address more worries about privacy, warning employers not to ask prospective employees for their passwords and trying to clarify its user "rights and responsibilities" policies.But the latter effort backfired when tens of thousands of users, mostly in Germany, misunderstood the clarifications and blasted the company, even though nothing substantive had changed. Their discontent showed that, no matter what Facebook does, privacy concerns are still the biggest threat to users’ trust and to its growth."There is such an incredible level of scrutiny now about anything any company does about privacy," said Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum, an industry-backed think tank in Washington. "We are treating every single thing that touches privacy as a five-alarm fire. The risk of all these five-alarm level outbursts is that people will become inured about privacy and miss real privacy issues because of crying wolf when nothing is actually going on."Users’ willingness to share information is a key part of Facebook’s business. The site makes the bulk of its money from ads that target users based on their personal information. Last year, the company earned a profit of $668 million and booked $3.7 billion of revenue, and it’s preparing for an initial public offering later this spring that could be valued at as much as $100 billion.
abercrombie outletPrivacy issues have dogged Facebook for years. It settled with the Federal Trade Commission in November over allegations that it misled users about the handling of their personal information. Google Inc., a big rival, agreed to a similar settlement eight months earlier.The latest ruckus happened when more than 30,000 German users posted that they were rejecting the company’s proposed changes to its governing documents. But the changes amounted to nuanced revisions and clarifications of long-standing policies — not a major overhaul.The company, for instance, replaced the word "profile" with "timeline," since Facebook users now have a different type of profile. Facebook also changed "hateful" to "hate speech" in its description of prohibited content.Still, users who read the documents for the first time noticed some things that alarmed them. For example, the document replaced the words "privacy policy" with "data-use policy," seemingly taking privacy out of the picture.Facebook has been calling it a data-use policy since September, preferring to be more straightforward about its actual purpose. But the company makes so many subtle changes that it’s easy to lose track.
abercrombie and fitch sale"It’s clear that some people fundamentally misunderstand our proposed changes. Our data-use policy governs how we use and collect data. That document is not changing at this time," Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said. "That’s why we have this unique and transparent process, though — so have an opportunity to clarify confusion and respond to user concerns. We look forward to doing so in the coming weeks." Comcast has indicated that customers who subscribe to its upcoming Xfinity TV service for the Xbox 360 won't be charged for the service's data use against their cap, which one agency has criticized as a violation of network neutrality laws. In a FAQ, Comcast said that the Xfinity TV data service on the Xbox 360 will move data on a private IP network, and will not count against the Comcast acceptable usage policy, which caps residential customers at 250 Gbytes of data per month. "No, since the content is being delivered over our private IP network and not the public Internet, it does not count against a customer's bandwidth cap," according to the FAQ. "XFINITYTV.com and the XFINITY TV app stream content over the public Internet and count toward the customer's bandwidth cap." According to Comcast, just 1 percent of its customers bump up against the cap, with most of its customers downloading and uploading content at 10 Gbytes or less per month.
cheap abercrombie clothes Comcast's Xfinity TV service was announced last October with both Comcast, Verizon FiOS service, and a host of content providers including HBO. Although it's live on Verizon, the Xbox 360/Comcast partnership has yet to launch, so Comcast has yet to actually route content over its IP network to the service. So far, both services have emphasized prerecorded, on-demand content, rather than live streaming. But some are already calling Comcast's actions a violation of the net neutrality laws. "Comcast tries to justify preferred treatment for its own video on the Xbox 360 by claiming that the content is delivered over a private IP network rather than the public Internet," Free Press policy director Matt Wood said in a statement. "But not counting this video against a Comcast customer's monthly data limit gives the Comcast product an unfair advantage against other Internet video services. Unfortunately, such anti-competitive tricks may be allowed by loopholes in the FCC's Open Internet rules, proving once again that the FCC failed to deliver on the promise of real Net Neutrality." The FCC approved its net neutrality rules in December. The concept argues that no one ISP, site, or service, should be favored over any other. After Comcast was accused of blocking P2P sites, however, the FCC decided to craft rules that would ban ISPs from discriminating based on content as well.
abercrombie and fitch outletComcast requires Xfinity TV customers who wish to use its Xbox service to subscribe to both television and Internet data services. Comcast doesn't allow a customer to use DSL in conjunction with Comcast video services, as the data modem is used to identify that the customer is in the home, the FAQ said. "We are working on a solution that will enable customers to receive the content without an XFINITY Internet subscription, but can't comment on timing yet," Comcast added. The Xfinity app will also work with the Microsoft Kinect peripheral. Comcast will also roll out a Comcast-enabled TiVo box in the coming months, first launching in the Bay Area. That type of mishap is always a risk for the extreme sports star, but this recovery wasn't easy."It's been difficult. As far as in a car now, I've been 100% since December. I've been testing a lot since December," Pastrana said. "I've been just driving anything with wheels — just really trying to get back."Pastrana was in downtown Detroit on Monday to announce a partnership with Dodge and SRT (Street & Racing Technology) Motorsports in this year's Global RallyCross Championship Series. The popular 28-year-old will be behind the wheel of a Dodge Dart rally car on this circuit, which begins May 26 at Charlotte Motor Speedway.