Articles Posted in Privacy

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A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media.

 

App Makers’ Privacy Policies Leave Users In The Dark: Panel

Several software developers and privacy advocates at a Federal Trade Commission workshop Wednesday shot down the notion that traditional privacy policies are enough to adequately inform mobile application users of how their information is being collected, stored and used.

Social Media Policies At GM, Target, DISH Network Deemed Unlawful By Labor Official

In an effort to control employees’ activities on Facebook and Twitter, some U.S. companies have instituted social media policies that run afoul of labor law and infringe on workers’ rights, according to a memo issued Wednesday by the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board.

Social Gaming and Gambling Converging

Maybe the most social of popular casual games is breeding a new competitor in the social gaming space as bwin.party sets its sights on this growing part of the market. The company is more known for poker, a game played with friends around dining room tables around the world, but it has set aside $50 million to develop a new game studio called Win that will develop social games.

The video games you play with your mind

The gaming controller of the future won’t have joysticks or buttons; it’ll wrap around your head. A number of companies like San Jose-based NeuroSky are developing affordable, consumer-ready controllers that takes cues from the electrical signals in a wearer’s brain to dictate onscreen action. Here, a concise guide to the new smart technology.

Social media: Bill would limit employers’ and schools’ access to your Facebook, Twitter account information

The House Energy and Technology Committee on Tuesday took testimony on legislation that would create the Social Network Account Privacy Act. The bill as introduced generally would prohibit employers and schools from requesting that employees and students provide access information related to their social media accounts.

Google Augmented Reality Glasses To Go On Sale Next Year

According to specialists, after the Google Project Glass will hit the market, the manufacturers will start building a wide range of gadgets based on the new technology, from smartphones to tablets featuring transparent displays.

 

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A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media.

Magid National Study Finds Social Networking Gaming Growth is Slowing

The research, conducted as part of the Magid Media Futures 2012 study, found social network gaming user growth has slowed in the United States. About two in five (38%) social network users, up slightly from 36% in ’11, say they regularly play games on social networks. Social network gaming has decreased among its primary demographic, females age 12-44, with less than 43% of users age 12-17 (down from 54% in 2011) and about 36% of users 25-44 (down from 40% in 2011) reporting playing on a weekly basis.

Internet Gaming On The Horizon For NJ, Lawmaker Says

Internet gaming could be a reality in New Jersey before the end of the year, eventually providing Atlantic City’s casinos with a much-needed influx of revenue, a state senator sponsoring such legislation told a roomful of attorneys Wednesday.

Overexposed? Thanks to SceneTap, San Francisco bars are now profiling you

SceneTap is a maker of cameras that pick up on facial characteristics to determine a person’s approximate age and gender. The company works with venues to install these cameras and track customers. It also makes web and mobile applications that allow random observers to find out, in real-time, the male-to-female ratio, crowd size, and average age of a bar’s patrons. And no one goes unnoticed. “We represent EVERYONE in the venue,” SceneTap proudly proclaims on its website.

Judge: An IP-Address Doesn’t Identify a Person (or BitTorrent Pirate)

A landmark ruling in one of the many mass-BitTorrent lawsuits in the US has delivered a severe blow to a thus far lucrative business. Among other things, New York Judge Gary Brown explains in great detail why an IP-address is not sufficient evidence to identify copyright infringers. According to the Judge this lack of specific evidence means that many alleged BitTorrent pirates have been wrongfully accused by copyright holders.

For Start-Up, Virtual Casinos

Andrew Pascal was one of Steve Wynn‘s trusted lieutenants when the Las Vegas magnate was rebuilding his gambling empire a decade ago. Now the former president of the Wynn Las Vegas and Encore casinos is the chief executive of a Silicon Valley gaming start-up aimed at running virtual casinos.

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A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media.

FBI:
We need wiretap-ready Web sites

CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.

NJ Online Gambling Bills Clear Assembly Hurdle

A pair of online betting measures cleared a New Jersey Assembly committee Thursday, moving the state a step closer to allowing horse wagers to be placed from hand-held devices at state tracks and permitting casino game betting from personal computers across the state, around the country and abroad.

Twitter:
We’re still the free-speech wing of the free-speech party

As various levels of government both in the U.S. and around the world have stepped up their attempts to track down dissidents through social networks, the pressure has intensified on companies like Twitter and Facebook to comply with these demands — even at the expense of their users’ privacy. Despite that pressure, Twitter at least seems determined to fight these incursions wherever possible. As a case in point, the company has filed a motion in New York state court to quash a court order compelling it to hand over information about a user involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests, arguing that the order violates that individual’s rights.

Social media offers sweet revenge for bad service

If you’re tired of being treated poorly by retailers, airlines and other service-industry types, take revenge via social media. You will get heard, and get action.

Leaked Report: FBI is Terrified of Bitcoin Becoming a Currency for ‘Cyber Criminals’

Published in late April but leaked yesterday, the unclassified document-of which Wired provided a PDF-outlines the federal government’s fears surrounding the Bitcoin currency, primarily that in the near future, “cyber criminals will treat Bitcoin as another payment option alongside more traditional and established virtual currencies.”

Virtual worlds can end the loneliness of the long distance learner

Students now have opportunities to learn by doing wherever they are in the world with the advent of Virtual World classrooms and 3D work enactment technology being introduced at UWE Bristol.

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A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media.

 

The Virtual Military

While much of the international system remains mired in the economic doldrums, many global military powers continue to increase defense budgets focused upon the research and development of simulation technologies. As part of our week-long focus on the importance of games to international relations and security, today we consider how Russia,
China and the United States are using virtual simulators to train its armed forces.

Social game Idle Worship takes Facebook gaming to new level

Idle Games is launching a next-generation social game today dubbed Idle Worship. The title opens up a new genre on Facebook — the once popular “god game” — and it has an interesting and witty approach to social gameplay. Founded by former ad executive Jeffrey Hyman, San Francisco-based Idle Games is in a “holy war against games that suck or aren’t actually social.”

TrialPay and TubeMogul Introduce Real-Time Bidding for Virtual Currency and Social Video

TrialPay,
a leader in transactional advertising, and TubeMogul, a media buying platform for brand advertising, announced a partnership that brings real-time media buying to social video advertising for the first time today.

Illinois legislation to ban employers from asking for social network passwords hits snag

Legislation that would prohibit employers from seeking job applicants’ social network passwords is on hold in the Illinois House. Democratic Rep. La Shawn Ford’s measure would allow job-seekers to file lawsuits if asked for access to sites like Facebook. Bosses could still ask for usernames that would allow them to view public information on the sites.

 Smithsonian Art Of Video Games Exhibit Opens With Gaming Festival

The exhibit is curated by Chris Melissinos of Past Pixels, a group charged with the preservation of video game history. Over the past year, Melissinos — aided by a board of advisors that includes Double Fine’s Tim Schafer, text adventure veteran Steve Meretzky, and Penny Arcade team Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik — designed an exhibit that encourages visitors to make what Melissinos calls “a deeply personal decision” of whether video games are art. The exhibit offers five eras of video games with both playable demos and self-playing videos,
showcasing everything from the Atari 2600 to the PlayStation 3, from the traditional platforming of Super Mario Bros. to the more experimental play of Flower.

Navy Pursues a Better Attack Submarine Virtually

Technical advances in the field of virtual reality, also known as virtual worlds (VWs), are making it possible for the U.S Navy to tap into the collective expertise of its best submariners to design and build the next generation of attack submarines. At the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) in Newport, Rhode Island, designers are able to create collaborative environments for submarine development using a fully immersive virtual reality application similar to the popular Second Life environment, which enables them to interact with one another both audibly and visually. Numerous participants at remote sites worldwide are linked to one another through the Defense Department’s secure computer network.

 

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A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media.

Piracy battle goes to CES, Wikipedia may join SOPA protest, Google social search faces privacy concerns

A contentious battle over Internet anti-piracy legislation shifted from Washington to the Consumer Electronics Show, The Washington Post reported. The Consumer Electronics Association, which is behind the show, has been a vocal opponent of the two bills circulating in Congress that would help Hollywood titans, record labels and pharmaceutical firms enforce copyright infringement laws online.

Mobile virtual currency market to hit $4.8bn by 2016

In fact, a study released yesterday from Juniper Research predicts that the amount of money being spent on virtual currency in mobile apps is going to more than double in the next four years, going from $2.1bn last year to $4.8bn by 2016.

Bethesda Buys Interplay’s ‘Fallout’ Rights, Ends IP Suit

Interplay Entertainment Corp., original developer of the “Fallout” line of video games, on Monday forfeited its rights to continue work on the series — resolving a trademark dispute with former business partner Bethesda Softworks LLC.

Domino’s Pizza uses augmented reality offers to boost food sales

Domino’s Pizza, which has already been testing the waters of mobile marketing for some time now, has started a new campaign that includes the use of augmented reality, to add a whole new dimension to its latest 555 pizza offer.

CES: Better augmented reality with high-tech contact lenses

Augmented reality has made progress on smartphones, with apps letting people layer information and graphics over a view of the real world. A startup from the Seattle region is looking to take the next step toward an AR future with special contact lenses that make it possible to view objects projected onto glasses a short distance away from the eye.

Banks start playing games with your money

A new video game has gotten its hooks into Brian Kealer, a 26-year-old San Francisco software engineer. He’s not killing birds or using his vocabulary to impress his friends. No, Kealer is after real prizes, like the iPad2 he just scored. And he’s playing with his bank account. 

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A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media.

 

Will 2012 be the year of virtual worlds?

What got me thinking about this was a blog post by Maria Korlova over at the HyperGrid Business Blog. In it, she maintains her firm conviction that businesses will soon come around to using these virtual worlds as business tools. Just as the nay-sayers were wrong about the Internet, Software as a Service, and Lady Gaga, we will eventually integrate this technology into how we work.

Courts, Sports And Videogames:
What’s In A Game?

Although one of the clearest legal thinkers, Louis Brandeis, conceived the modern right of publicity,[1]
“unclear” would be an adjective all lawyers would apply to the current state of right of publicity law, regardless of which side of the issue they usually argue. Indeed, although the right of publicity concept was further developed by another very clear legal thinker, William Prosser,[2] he himself alluded to it as the concept “that launched a thousand lawsuits,”[3] few of which can be reconciled with one another.

Insurers Can’t Join Coverage Suit Over Athlete Image Use

A Georgia federal judge said Wednesday that four insurers can’t intervene in a coverage suit in California over underlying antitrust class actions concerning the use of college athletes’ likenesses in video games.

What the Copycat Saw: Creative Theft in Mobile and Social Games

The distinction between theft and inspiration is often unclear in video games. Traditions are formed,
broken down, and remade every few years. The most successful ideas are eagerly absorbed by others, from regenerative health in first person shooters to the subdivision of platformer levels into world and stage.

Virtual worlds training for federal cyber pros in the works

After finishing a successful year of training the federal cyber workforce, the government is taking another step toward cultivating better-prepared digital defenders.

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Facebook recently filed a Patent Application that Triggered a Congressional inquiry.  The patent application, which describes technology for tracking users on other websites,
resulted in a letter from Reps. Edward Markey, D- Mass., and Joe Barton,
R-Texas, seeking information on its current privacy practices and future intentions for tracking user activity and data. Markey and Barton co-chair the Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus.

The application
was published on Sept. 22, 2011 and describes a method “for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain.”

In the letter to facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Markey and Barton sought clarification on the purpose of the patent and how Facebook intends to use it. They also inquired about how Facebook intends to integrate the location data of its users into its targeted advertising system, noting that Facebook has previously stated that it does not track people across the Internet.

It is important to note that just because Facebook has filed a patent does not necessarily mean that they have commercially implemented what the patent discloses. However,  this action is just one of the latest from Washington focusing on privacy. There seems to be a very focused effort by legislators and regulators to ensure that companies only collect user information needed for legitimate business purposes and that the information collected is not retained indefinitely. 

As with many other aspects of social media, the laws and regulatory climate are continuing to evolve.  If you have not recently reviewed your data collection, privacy practices and privacy policies, now is a good time to do so. 

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Given the great interest in “the cloud” from a business perspective, as well as Microsoft’s popularization of the concept with its “To the Cloud!” advertising campaign, it’s no wonder that many game providers are looking to the cloud as the next viable and profitable gaming platform. The cloud movement not only provides economic incentives through various subscription and pay-to-play models,
but also helps defeat piracy by locking down game code and other intellectual property from potential thieves.

Cloud game providers have a lot to gain from virtualization, but moving to a cloud-based framework raises potential legal issues that should be considered.

Latency

The first big issue for gaming providers considering moving to the cloud is both a practical one and a legal one – latency. Unlike digital downloads, streaming games require both down and upstream communications. Further, gaming often demands instant, real-time action, so any material latency will be noticed, especially for multi-player, FPS-type or other real-time games. Currently, some game providers have tried to satisfy gamers’ demand for real-time, low-latency play by operating in data centers that are physically close to the gamer. From a technical perspective, cloud gaming may present an issue because it could involve moving the game servers much farther away from the gamer, thus having the potential to lead to increased, or even significant latency. Another technical fix may be to use “tricks” similar to those used in non-cloud gaming to compensate for latency issues.

From a legal perspective,
however, the move to the cloud could bring such “tricks” into the realm of patents held by the gaming company OnLive–patents which cover “twitch gameplay” over a cloud-based system. When porting a game from client-server or mobile-based platforms to a cloud-based platform, game providers should be sure to investigate whether the conversion will expose them to potential infringement liability, including the OnLive patent portfolio.
This is especially important because most game providers are not the actual game developer, so game providers should also review their agreements with the game developer to understand whether indemnification or re-development are options. Further, if the agreement is with a small game developer, the developer may not have the financial resources to indemnify the game provider,
and thus the game provider should be aware of the potential risks before embarking on a cloud-based venture.

To read this publication in its entirety, click here.

 

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On June 21, Canada’s Federal Office of Privacy Commissioner released its 2010 annual report on Canada’s data privacy law, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (known as “PIPEDA”). According to the report, in 2010 the Office of the Privacy Commissioner:

§ Received 4,793 inquiries in 2010 under PIPEDA,
§ Received 108 “early resolution” complaints of violations,
§ Received 99 formal complaints of violations, and
§ Closed a total of 249 investigations into formal PIPEDA complaints.

Among other things, the Report states, “Social media networks, which some research suggests now link together more than half of all Canadian Internet users, were of particularly pressing interest to our Office.” This is consistent with similar statements that have been made by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office, and should indicate to any game or social media company with global ambitions that the days of flying under the radar of data protection authorities are coming to an end.

The Report includes discussion of the Office of Privacy Commissioner’s investigations into the privacy practices of Facebook and issues around the launch of Google Buzz and Google’s well-known street-view wifi data collection practice. The Report also covers a previously unreported investigation of online dating site eHarmony’s privacy practices. The investigation was prompted by a complaint by an eHarmony member. According to the Report, when she requested to delete her online account after her membership ended, eHarmony’s response was to tell her that her account was inaccessible to other members, but that the personal information could not be entirely removed.

The Privacy Commissioner found that the option to “close” an account was not readily accessible on the eHarmony website, and that the website did not provide a clear explanation of what eHarmony meant by the term “close the account.” Based on recommendations from the Office of Privacy Commissioner, eHarmony is establishing a two-year retention period for personal information collected from its users, providing a “clear and efficient process” for users to request removal of their personal information, and providing users with “clear information” on the difference between deactivating and deleting an account and on its personal information retention policy.

It’s important to note that the Report stressed that the office’s interest in the privacy practices of online dating sites is not restricted to eHarmony. The Report noted that other dating sites do not have privacy policies at all and others have policies but do not specify how they handle personal information after a user is no longer active.

The fact that the Privacy Commissioner felt the need to note that some websites do not have privacy policies is somewhat shocking. Since July 1, 2004, it has been a violation of the California Online Privacy Protection Act (OPPA) of 2003 to fail to post a conspicuous privacy policy on any commercial website that collects personal information about California residents.

The 132-page 2010 annual report is available at http://www.priv.gc.ca/information/ar/201011/2010_pipeda_e.pdf.

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The EU “Cookie Rule,” which requires companies with European customers to get informed consent from visitors to their websites in order to use most cookies (other than those “strictly necessary” for the service requested by the consumer), went into effect on May 25. As an example of how they wanted websites to behave, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office put the following banner on their website:

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Thanks to a Freedom of Information request from Vicky Brock, we can see the effect of the opt-in cookie requirement on tracked traffic to the ICO website:

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Vicky has also made the underlying data available in a Google Docs spreadsheet.

While this does seem to pose a challenge for marketers, there are a couple of things about this data to keep in mind:

1)         The UK ICO implemented the opt-in via a banner on the top of the page. People have grown so used to ignoring banners that they might not have even looked at the option being provided. Thus, another method for requesting consent might have a greater opt-in rate.  Guidance from the UK ICO states that consent can be obtained via the following methods:

 

  • Pop-ups. A website operator could ask a user directly if they agree to a website operator putting something on their computer and if they click “yes”, this would constitute consent.
  • Terms and conditions. A website operator could alternatively make users aware of the use of cookies via the terms and conditions, asking a user to tick a box to indicate that they consent to the new terms.
  • Settings-led consent. Consent could also be gained as part of the process by which the user confirms what they want to do or how they want the website to work, e.g., some websites “remember”
    which language version of a website a user prefers. If this feature is enabled by the storage of a cookie, then the website operator could explain this to the user and that it will not ask the user every time they visit the website.

It is worth noting, however, that the guidance does not purport to be exhaustive. The ICO states that they will consider supplementing the advice with further examples of how to gain consent for particular types of cookies in the future. It goes on to say that the examples listed are not intended to be a prescriptive list on how to comply,
rather, that a website operator is best placed to work out how to get information to users and what users will understand.  Each case will be facts-specific.

2)
Even for those who did see the banner, there isn’t really any incentive to opting-in. If a website makes a case for the opt-in by pointing out additional functionality or other benefits to opting-in, that may increase the opt-in rate.

Another issue for websites is that it is not yet clear whether the Cookie Rule applies to non-cookie tracking technologies like web beacons. Technically, the Cookie Rule applies to “the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user.” However, given the assertive position that many European Data Protection Authorities take towards the protection of personal information, it may be prudent to assume that anything that lets a website track users could require consent. In the case of web beacons, as well, since they could disclose a users IP address, which could be personally indentifying information, they might be subject to the general obligation to obtain user consent before collecting personal information,
anyway.