Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Think Mark Zuckerberg’s Beacon is scary? Reid Hoffman has some user “tracking” of his own in store.

In November, The Washingotn Post reported the sad tale of how Facebook “ruined” Facebooker Sean Lane’s Christmas when Mark Zuckerberg conspired with Overstock to alert his “friends,” including his wife, of his happy (supposedly surprise) purchase of a diamond ring, for his wife.

Reid Hoffman may soon have some (serious) unwelcome surprises of his own, for the thousands of companies represented within the “rich profile data” of “17 million professionals” hailed by LinkedIn as the “largest group of business decision makers on the Web.”   

LinkedIn’s Mike Gamson is touting an impending fee-based “Research Network” aimed at capitalizing on the reams of data LinkedIn houses on those millions of people:

The service will help hedge fund managers and investment banks find people who used to work at a company they’re interested in, or even who is working for a customer of a company they are interested in. (as cited by eWeek)

In other words, insider corporate intelligence, or espionage:

Let’s say I’m thinking about making an investment in a producer of product X. I might want to speak to people that sell that product, people that buy that product, or that used to work at that company as part of my research process to have a better understanding of how valuable that product is.

BUT, “let’s say” the “producer of product X” does NOT want current or past employees talking to hedge funds and investment banks about its proprietary, confidential, insider goings on. LinkedIn’s financial incentives to its “17 million professionals” may nevertheless be hard to resist. Gamson boasts, “If we can begin to help our members make money and help our clients find the right people, that’s when you create value on both sides and we like those situations.”

Corporations about which LinkedIn users divulge insider information to hedge funds and investment banks, however, will undoubtedly NOT “like those situations.”

Barron’s Business Dictionary on corporate espionage: 

Act of spying. An example is spying on the activities of another company by improperly gathering information about the competing company’s new products or practices. Usually the spy is paid a fee for the information obtained.

The danger of corporate espionage, according to The SANS Institute: 

Corporate espionage is a threat to any business whose livelihood depends on information. The information sought after could be client lists, supplier agreements, personnel records, research documents, prototype plans for a new product or service. Any of this information could be of great financial benefit to a scrupulous individual or competitor, while having a devastating financial effect on a company. Just about any information gathered from a company could be used to commit scams, credit card fraud, blackmail, extortion or just plain malice against the company or the people who work there.

In Web-based social networking, six figure Fortune 500 execs seek the discretion and confidentiality that LinkedIn uniquely offers, Reid Hoffman has indicated to me. The “LinkedIn Research Network” appears to thwart such desired privacy, however.

The “LinkedIn Research Network” also appears to contradict the spirit of LinkedIn’s Privacy Policy which asserts “We will never sell, rent, or otherwise provide your personally identifiable information to any third parties for marketing purposes.” How then will LinkedIn market its “Research Network” company-specific “expertise”?

What’s more, LinkedIn’s “primary research service” risks impacting non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements and insider trading restrictions.

Linkedin claims a “simple philosophy”: relationships matter. YES, but the way relationships are monetized matters as well.    

MORE: AP On LinkedIn: Social Networking Gold Mine at $5 per User? and Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn About Face (book) and Beacon Privacy Solution: STOP USING FACEBOOK! and Multiply.com CEO to Facebook, MySpace: STOP Claiming to be Real-Life Social Networks, INTERVIEW

PLUS: Google Apps Meets Les Miserables: Enterprise IT Team DREAMS Big and Why Silicon Alley VCs Should Do Blogging Due Diligence, Too

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Contrary to the tagline of the Australian Web 2.0 firm Faraday Media sponsored “Data Portability.org,” online sharing is NOT ALWAYS caring: Just ask the Scobleizer’s 5000 “friends.” What’s more, despite the Riley-Kirkpatrick tag team blogosphere boosting of Faraday Media CEO Chris Saad, the social networking BOMBSHELL that Saad’s “Data Portability Working Group,” is purported to be is but more feel good sound and fury, that could very well signify nothing.

In fact, at the end of the so-called Data Portability day, users may actually be more harmed than helped, (not) thanks to the non-transparent lobbying of interested party Faraday Media in its seemingly benevolent “DataPortability.org,” as I analyze in Data Portability Games: Australian Faraday Media Pushes Web Agenda in U.S.

For a company that positions itself, its products and the industry consortium it seeks to spur, on a vaunted notion of transparency, Faraday Media’s “DataPortability.org” is non-transparent to the users it claims to be helping. Faraday Media is nevertheless crystal clear on its own corporate agenda: To be the definitive “epicenter of the attention ecosystem.” BUT, how does Faraday Media’s creation and evangelizing of the “Data Portability Workgroup,” support its own product roadmap and corporate agenda?

AND, how does a corporate sponsored entity, pooling corporate interests, commercial Web properties and industry consultants, demonstrate that “DataPortability.org” will work in the best interests of users? While the TechCrunch-ReadWrite Web Chris Saad cheerleading team gushes over the “heavy hitters” Faraday Media has managed to snag for its efforts in making sure that it operates as the “epicenter of the Attention Ecosystem,” the confluence of power players may serve to solidify commercial influence over users’ data.

NEWS FLASH: Contrary to conventional blogosphere wisdom, the typical online social networker is NOT clamoring for data portability and many actually fear it, as the Scobleizer-Plaxo stunt reconfirms. SEE: Plaxo, Marc Canter Ignore Rights of Stubborn Social Web Silent Majority and Zuckerberg Message: Facebook Resistance Futile, Billions of Stubborn Email Accounts Targeted and NewsFriends? Facebook Anti Social Utility: Real Friends DON’T Share

ALSO: Does LinkedIn Have a Connections Fraud Problem? and Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn About Face (book) and Deal Maker on LinkedIn: ‘What Do I Do With It?’ and 2008 Social Media Warning: Beware Google AND Facebook and Henry Blodget Braces For ‘Harder Times’: Silicon Alley Insider ‘Screwed’?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

LinkedIn is NO Facebook: CEO Dan Nye has promised he will not tolerate virtual food fights and a Robert Scoble show is conspicuously missing. Nevertheless, LinkedIn is NOT immune to Facebook style user unrest over how the networking service serves its members.

At this very moment, power LinkedIn users are weighing other professional networking options online out of frustration with a perceived “LinkedIn police.” The white collar LinkedIn bad behavior alleged represents a new breed of online social networking infraction: WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF CONNECTIONS FRAUD AND FRIENDING FRAUD!

While Robert DeNiro famously asked “Are you talking to me?,” LinkedIners wonder “Do I know you?” When a LinkedIn member answers “NO” to a fellow member’s connection invitation, that is when the LinkedIn “police” take notice.

LinkedIn is on the lookout for “abuses” of its 16 million strong pool of prime professional networking targets: “What If I Get Invitations That I Don’t Want?,” LinkedIn asks, and answers: 

If you receive invitations from people you don’t know, we recommend that you not accept those invitations to help you ensure that your personal network contains only people you know and trust. If you receive an invitation from someone you don’t know that you find annoying, intrusive, or abusive, you have the option of reporting that invitation as inappropriate. We use such reports to help detect possible misuse of LinkedIn invitations.

LinkedIn members are provided three response options when they receive “invitations to connect”: 1) Accept invitation, 2) “I don’t know this person,” and 3) Decide later (archive it).

Victims of the LinkedIn “police” warn of a “fatal” I don’t know button!:

It happens all the time. One guy who I know quite well was on his computer at 3am when he looked at my invitation and he pressed the fatal ‘I dont know’ button. I was horrified so I emailed him and asked him to have it removed by LinkedIn - no chance - its still on my record.

I realize that a personal message is one of the ways this may be avoided - but there’s always a chance someone can spoil your day. Personally I put some duct tape over my “I don’t know” button!

LinkedIn is aware of member discontent with what is perceived as LinkedIn treating casual network connecting as deliberate spam-like malfeaseance. BUT, WILL LINKEDIN CHANGE ITS “I don’t know you” ways?

I recently pointed out LinkedIn’s sexist, glass-ceiling reinforcing all male “icon” strategy. SEE: Sexist LinkedIn: Hillary Clinton and Gender Politics and Facebook vs. LinkedIn: Who has the Women?

Linkedin subsequently informed me they “noticed my blog mention about the executive male mascots on LinkedIn and are trying to work with design teams to change that to unisex, if feasible.” LinkedIn did change its icons (on the down low) but the new profile “Summary” icon still appears to contain an image of a male executive.

LinkedIn also appears to proceed on the down low with the wealth of user product feedback it garners from its own “Answers” feature. LinkedIn prides itself on the direct communication it enables between members but itself prefers cheery corporate blog posts and PR media for its member communicatons.

MORE: Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn About Face (book) and Deal Maker on LinkedIn: ‘What Do I Do With It?’ and 2008 Social Media Warning: Beware Google AND Facebook and Salesconx Will Monetize Your Rolodex: LinkedIn Beware? INTERVIEW

ALSO: How Google AdSense FAILS Better Business Bureau and Facebook vs. Google: The Real Tech President Political Power Plays and Google Joins Blogosphere in Mocking Wikia Search: Jimmy Wales Defiant

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

“Become a knowledge management ninja with Google Reader”? 

If 2007 was the year of Facebook’s “social graph,” Google hopes 2008 will be the year of Google Social. From Open Social, to Google “shared stuff,” to Google Reader “sharing,” Google hopes it can simply “share” its Googley way to Facebook extinction.

I have often underscored, however, that sharing Web 2.0 social media style is NOT really caring.

SEE: NewsFriends? Facebook Anti Social Utility: Real Friends DON’T Share and  YAY? Weblo Cheapens Facebook ‘Friendship,’ Whales Rejoice! and Twitter and Facebook: The BIG Illusions of Friendship and Influence

After all, Old Chinese proverb says: “You can hardly make a friend in a year, but you can easily offend one in an hour,” i.e. Facebook Beacon and Google Reader “sharing.”

Nevertheless, Steve Micro Persuasion Rubel wants more sharing in 2008, especially the Google kind:

Be a ninja in 08. Go forward and good luck.  have been using various RSS readers for nearly five years now - I’ve tried them all. However, none matches the power of Google Reader. I have found that if you tap into all of its features, it’s the Holy Grail of Personal Knowledge Management.

Rubel’s buzzwords dazzle, but where is the real knowledge that he claims to be managing?

I encourage you to throw as many feeds as you can at the Google Reader just so you can capture and mine it. This should include relevant feeds that you never have any intention of reading or even scanning.

Sound familiar? Facebook whales “throw” up to 5000 “friends” around, with never any intention of ever being their friends.

Rubel nevertheless believes his own custom searchable database makes him a knowledge “ninja”:

With the recent addition of search, the Google Reader becomes much more. Like Gmail, Reader should be viewed as a database that you can build from scratch and continually hone.

The end game? Rubel can do his own search for all mentions of employer Edelman’s client Microsoft’s Xbox in Techmeme!

YAY? For Google! Google is the one becoming the knowledge ninja, all knowledgeable of Steve Rubel’s every personal and professional interest and need.

The end of the year privacy brouhahas over Google Reader “sharing” and Facebook Beacon were but charades, feel-good “outrage” with no meaningful privacy effect.

What privacy transgressions were Facebook and Google accused of? The enabling of “sharing” of users’ information with users’ own social graph. The real privacy danger of Google and Facebook continues to be ignored by users, however, as I often underscore here at Insider Chatter.

SEE: Google Reader: Naughty or Nice? Santa Safe! and
YES! Facebook IS Scarier Than Google! and
Facebook is ‘Sorry’? Savvy Users Will Forget, NOT Forgive, Mark Zuckerberg and
Beacon Privacy Solution: STOP USING FACEBOOK! and
Dear Facebook, Beacon Tracking STILL Evil: Will Zuckerberg Partners Repent?

Why have I deemed facebook to be scarier than Google? Each Facebook user knowingly and willingly provides an interested corporation with the intimate details of their daily personal and professional lives to enable persistent data records for the unique data mining profit advantage of the corporation. Because Facebook as “Big Brother” is consensual, there is no redress.

Google has now tied Facebook for scary honors, however, due to how it profits from users’ personal genetic materials obtained by Google under false pretenses via GOOG 411. SEE: Google Warning: How GOOG 411 Tricks Consumers

Bottom 2008 line? Use Google and Facebook accounts at your own risk.

ALSO: Why Google Worship is a BAD Call in 2008 and How Google AdSense FAILS Better Business Bureau

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Beware Google, really. I oft underscore how the GOOG secret weapon is a four letter word: SPIN. Google is now wreaking havoc with another four letter word: GOOG (411).

I also often warn how Google Services’ Privacy Policies enable Google to do whatever it likes, for as long as it likes, with users’ private information that consumers willingly hand to Google on a (free) silver platter. The nefarious results of “whatever Google likes,” is now rearing its ugly head, thanks to Mountain View’s devious GOOG 411.

Google hawks GOOG 411 to consumers as its “new 411 service”: “With GOOG-411, you can find local business information completely free, directly from your phone. You can access 1-800-GOOG-411 from any phone, anywhere, at anytime.”

YAY Google? Once again to the FREE consumer rescue?

NO, IT IS GOOGLE TRICKING USERS ONCE MORE, TO THE SOLE ADVANTAGE OF THE $200 BILLION MARKET CAP CORPORATION. 

Why has Google been spending money to advertise GOOG 411 to consumers when the Googleplex prides itself on never spending a penny on marketing?

Google’s best friends at Search Engine Land cheered their sightings of GOOG 411 billboards, hailing GOOG 411 billboards as “a bona fide effort by Google to expose the service to people and generate usage”

What’s remarkable with this is that Google is actually doing consumer marketing (a first) for a product and not relying entirely on word of mouth.

NO, what is really remarkable is how gullible many are willing to be, for the sake of Google!

AND, what really matters, is the sake of consumers duped by Google into using GOOG 411 under false pretenses.

A call to GOOG 411 begins with an announcement: “The call is recorded for quality,” BUT THAT IS A GOOGLE LIE.

Marissa Mayer, Google VP, Search Products & User Experience, on the real reason GOOG 411 records calls, as cited by InfoWorld in October:

The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. 

So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we’re trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.

GOOG 411 is NOT a touchy, feely, free Google consumer service, it is a ruse to trick people into giving Google their own personal genetic materials, for free, so that Google can profit from the proprietarty human (very) personal property of millions of innocent consumers.

NOW MORE THAN EVER, USE GOOGLE SERVICES AT YOUR OWN RISK. HERE’S WHY:

Google Privacy Trap: Consumers Beware and
Google is WRONG On Consumer Privacy and
Google is NOT Your Friend 

BEWARE FACEBOOK, TOO: SEE: YES! Facebook IS Scarier Than Google! and
Facebook is ‘Sorry’? Savvy Users Will Forget, NOT Forgive, Mark Zuckerberg and
Beacon Privacy Solution: STOP USING FACEBOOK! and
Dear Facebook, Beacon Tracking STILL Evil: Will Zuckerberg Partners Repent? and
Facebook STILL a Danger to Children: Zuckerberg, Attorney General Cuomo in PR Push

MORE GOOGLE DEVIOUSNESS: Google Has Insomnia: Mrs. Manber Beats 21,300,017 SERP and AdWords! and
Google Zeitgeist: $200 University Payola AdWords Scam and
Google Knol: The End of Google.com, NOT Wikipedia

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

While the media world applauds Mark Zuckerberg for supposedly fessing up to his user privacy ‘mistakes,’ Michael TechCrunch Arrington applauds Facebook for making his world better.

Arrington REALLY wants the world to know how happy he is with Facebook, leading a post on the Facebook messaging system:

“Dear Facebook: Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

What’s the big deal? Arrington:

In August Facebook opened up their messaging system to allow people to add normal email addresses. I wrote a post praising the change, but I specifically asked for more.

Thankfully, Arrington has gotten his wish!:

Suddenly, Facebook messages are actually forwarded to my outside email address.

This is great. It’s frickin wonderful, even.

Oddly, Arrington’s over the top joy over Facebook’s “messaging,” ignores the message Zuckerberg himself sent to the world yesterday about the messages BEACON WILL CONTINUE TO BE SENDING FACEBOOK ABOUT FACEBOOK USERS.

While the media world scrambled to thank Zuckerberg yesterday for apologizing for his flawed social graph, I broke the Facebook news that Zuckerberg was STILL NOT doing the right PRIVACY thing. As is the tradition here at Insider Chatter, I dissected Facebook’s written proclamations and warned that all is NOT WELL in the Beacon world because Beacon lives on, big time.

SEE: Facebook is ‘Sorry’? Savvy Users Will Forget, NOT Forgive, Mark Zuckerberg

I underscored yesterday the single, most important Facebook “money” line of Zuckerberg’s purported change of privacy heart:

If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

As I pointed out upon reading Zuckerberg’s disingenuous missive yesterday, Facebook “social graph” PR speak continues to reign Facebook supreme, and Beacon does as well.

BOTTOM PRIVACY LINE? THE BEACON BALL IS IN THE FACEBOOK PARTNERS’ COURT NOW!

Zuckerberg proudly hails dozens of Beacon partners: eBay, New York Times, IAC, CBS…

Every Facebook user is at risk when they use a Facebook Beacon partner because, in the word’s of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Beacon partners will continue to send Beacon actions to Facebook.

Opt-in, opt-out? Regardless, the Zuckerberg so-called apology reasserts Facebook Beacon will continue to track and record Facebook user actions at third-party Web sites, and will CONTINUE TO SEND BEACON ACTIONS TO FACEBOOK!

FACEBOOK BEACON PARTNERS ARE COCONSPIRATORS IN MARK ZUCKERBERG’S WHO NEEDS PRIVACY BUSINESS MODEL.

WILL BEACON PARTNERS REPENT? REAL FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY REQUIRES BEACON PARTNERS TO CEASE TRACKING USERS ON BEHALF OF FACEBOOK.

WHY WILL FACEBOOK NEVER REALLY CHANGE ITS PRIVACY INTRUSION WAYS? GET THE SCOOP HERE, AT INSIDER CHATTER: Beacon Privacy Solution: STOP USING FACEBOOK!

MORE:  Facebook: Harvard Dropout Tricks NYT? Zuckerberg is Coca-Cola Scapegoat and Facebook: Bloggers Kick Zuckerberg Off Throne, What Were They ‘Smoking’?” and MoveOn’s Facebook Crusade: eBay, IAC, CBS, NYTimes Get Beacon Privacy Pass and Zuckerberg Flash: Facebook FREE VPN Is Advertising Supported and MoveOn.org Facebook Petition: What 501(c)(4) Civic Action?

ALSO: Google Beware: Facebook Takes Local Advertising Gloves Off, ILM REPORT and Deal Maker on LinkedIn: ‘What Do I Do With It?’ and Loic Le Meur Seesmic Formula? NO (Big) Idea, NO (Marketing) Plan, NO (Revenue) Model and Henry Blodget Slams eBay’s Whitman: Yahoo’s Yang Next?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN