facebook valuation is now $23 billions

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Private equity firm Elevation Partners purchased $120 million in Facebook stock from private shareholders, valuing the company at $23 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The stock purchases represented Elevation's second round of investments in shares of Facebook through the secondary markets, giving the firm a 1.5 percent stake in the world's largest Internet social network.

With nearly 500 million users, Facebook ranks as one of the world's most popular Web sites, alongside established Internet giants like Google Inc and Yahoo Inc, and is closely watched by investors eager for a blockbuster initial public offering.

Facebook generated between $700 million and $800 million in revenue in 2009, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters earlier this month.

A vibrant market for shares of privately held Facebook has developed in the past year.

In April, Facebook barred its employees from selling their shares in the company to outside investors, except during specified periods. Facebook is not currently in a period during which employees would be permitted to sell shares, another source familiar with the situation told Reuters.

Elevation Partners and Facebook declined to comment. News of the funding was first reported by the technology blog TechCrunch.

Facebook's backers include Digital Sky Technologies, Microsoft Corp Corp, Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing and venture capital firms Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners.

Elevation Partners, whose partners includes U2 frontman Bono, committed to invest up to $100 million in online review site Yelp in January. The firm also invested $460 million in smartphone maker Palm over a period of several years. In April, Hewlett-Packard announced plans to acquire the struggling Palm for $1.2 billion.

Elevation acquired its latest batch of Facebook stock in a series of transactions over the past couple of months, the source said.

The firm had already purchased $90 million worth of Facebook shares based on a $9 billion company valuation in November. Elevation has invested in Facebook at a $14 billion blended valuation, based on the two investments, the source said.

complete article here
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100629/wr_nm/us_facebook

The new privacy bill in the US

Facebook and Google Submit Comments on Privacy Bill

Facebook and Google - both of which have endured increased scrutiny about data privacy - have submitted comments on a federal privacy legislation draft introduced in early May. Other groups, including the Interactive Advertising Bureau and several consumer advocacy organizations, also submitted comments. However, while some information has been made available, the overall lack of transparency about who submitted comments and what they said could lead observers to conclude that interested parties are not pleased with the draft.

"We recognize that the discussion draft is designed to control the collection, use and disclosure of information, but we recommend that this be distinguished from information that individuals intend to share with others," Andrew Noyes, Facebook's manager, public policy communications, told ClickZ News. While he said the company did submit comments regarding the discussion draft, Facebook did not provide them to ClickZ.

The much-anticipated federal privacy legislation draft is sponsored by Congressman Rick Boucher, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, and Cliff Stearns, ranking member of the Subcommittee. Comments on the draft were due June 4. Chairman Boucher's office did not respond to multiple requests from ClickZ made this week for information on which organizations submitted comments on the draft, nor for copies of comments.

Google also submitted official comments on the draft, according to a company spokesperson. "Google supports comprehensive, baseline privacy rules that help build trust and protect our users. There is much to build on in this draft and we've offered several constructive comments directly to the Chairman," noted the spokesperson. "We look forward to working closely with Chairman Boucher, Mr. Stearns and other members of Congress moving forward."

Both Facebook and Google said they support the mission of protecting consumer privacy "Facebook commends the staff of the Subcommittee for its work on the important subject of online privacy. We are supportive of this process and share the Subcommittee's goal of empowering consumers with control over their online information," Noyes said.

The comments the companies were willing to reveal to ClickZ suggest both believe the draft needs work. It does not, for example, differentiate between data collected through tracking of Web interactions, and data posted online directly by users, such as the information they share on their Facebook pages. Facebook would like the legislation to allow for collection, sharing, and use of data provided voluntarily by users. Even after altering its privacy settings late last month in the hopes of assuaging consumer privacy concerns, the company has been subjected to intense criticism about its approach to privacy protection.

The discussion draft deals mainly with the use of data that has been collected by websites and third party systems, such as information gathered and employed for online ad targeting purposes. Yet despite rising public concern about the use of information people willingly post to social media channels, the bill does not specifically mention voluntarily-shared data.

Also, since the release of the discussion draft, Google has come under fire for gathering data such as e-mail contents from wireless networks in conjunction with its location-based services, and is facing investigations and lawsuits in the U.S. and abroad as a result.

The IAB, along with several consumer privacy advocates, made their full comments on the bill available to media outlets. And while those parties indicated support for the general goal of protecting consumer privacy, none was satisfied with the draft in its current form. The IAB - among the most critical of the bill - stressed the benefits of industry self-regulation. It also suggested that the draft unfairly singles out the use of consumer data for advertising purposes.

In addition, the IAB opposed opt-in requirements for data transfers to third parties, and said that requiring first parties such as websites to allow users to opt-out of data use could prevent them from enabling basic Web functions such as site personalization.

Many consumer privacy groups were vocal critics of the draft from the start. Organizations including Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Federation of America, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and World Privacy Forum submitted a joint letter to the Boucher and Stearns, stating that "the notice and choice model on which the bill is based promotes bureaucracy but does not promote privacy." The groups also called an exception for individual managed profiles "unwarranted." Self-regulatory measures such as a system offered by Google allow users to manage and modify profiles that includes information on their interests that is used for ad targeting.

Consumers Union also submitted comments stating the group is "extremely concerned" that the bill creates loopholes for entities that purge data after 18 months or provide notice of data collection and usage through icons featured on websites - both accepted self-regulatory approaches to online privacy.

full article here
http://www.clickz.com/3640612

The Future Of Privacy

Facebook is under a lot of heat right now for how it shares our personal information. So much so that it is trying to simplify its privacy controls to so that nobody gets surprised when that embarrassing drunk photo you thought you were sharing only with a close set of friends finds its way all over the Web. (Hint: don’t put up drunk photos of yourself on Facebook). But this problem is only going to get worse.

Right now, what people share on Facebook is usually pretty tame: a status update, photo, a link, a video, an action in an app. The ones with the greatest potential to creep people out are the geo-specific ones, which probably explains why Facebook is taking its sweet time to roll out its own geo features like geo-tagged updates and photos. If you think the current uproar over Facebook privacy is bad, wait until Facebook embraces location-based apps in a big way.

This is not just a Facebook problem. It is an issue every major Web service is starting to deal with from Google to Twitter to Foursquare. They all want us to overshare and make it almost too easy for us to do so. The more we share with them about where we go and what we like to do, the more they can show us what other people who we care about are doing nearby or have done in the past. That basic premise is what is so compelling about geo apps. I can check in at a restaurant in the West Village on Foursquare and see that Fred Wilson ate there once and loved the lamb bolognese. That is a very powerful recommendation because I see that right before I look at the menu when I’m hungry and trying to decide what to eat.

When it comes to geo-privacy there are two extremes. Foursquare makes you explicitly check into each place where you want to share your location. That is good for privacy—you only have yourself to blame if you broadcast your location from the strip club—but it makes using the application a bit of a chore. You have to remember to pull out your phone every time you enter a new place and look like a dork while you are checking in. It is also rude when you are at a bar or restaurant with friends and everyone (all the guys, usually) are looking down at their cell phones, but I digress.

On the other end of the spectrum is Google Latitude, which constantly broadcasts your location everywhere you go, but only to people you allow to see it and only at the level of detail you are comfortable with (by city or general neighborhood, for instance). Latitude is a set it and forget it model. This makes you look like less of a dork, but the problem is that you do forget it and you end up either broadcasting your location when you would rather not or, worse, you never have any reason to interact with the application.

Somewhere in between the concept of the explicit check-in and constant geo-tracking is the notion of geo-fences. The idea is that you would basically draw fences around neighborhoods or other locations from where you want to broadcast where you are and places where you don’t. So maybe anytime you travel a certain distance from your home or office, the geo-sharing could begin. This concept is easier said than done, but startups like SimpleGeo are working on making it possible.

Drawing geo-fences is still a lot of work. What would be more helpful, perhaps, would be the ability to tell an application to broadcast your location anytime you are in a public space—a restaurant, a park, a bar, a conference. It would then tell you via a notification when it detects that you are in such a place before it shares out the location. But getting constantly pinged as you walk down the street could get annoying as well. Maybe it would know to ask only a few times a day or when it detects your friends or lots of other people nearby.

As apps and mobile devices become more geo-aware, a balance will need to be struck between the over-sharing creepiness of constant location broadcasting in the background and the annoyance of the constant check-in chore. On Tuesday, at our Disrupt conference, Facebook’s VP of Product Chris Cox described a future where phones are “contextually aware” so that they can “check into flights, find deals at grocery stores,” and do other things for us at that right place, at the right time. “These things take a bunch of clicks now—it’s all wasting time,” he said. “The phone should know what we want.”

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley and Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra were also on that panel. Crowley built Foursquare specifically around the check-in and the idea of getting rewarded for exploring the real world. Gundotra later told us:

There are some people who want to check in and who love the game dynamics. There are other people who may want much more of a passive model where the phone just passively gives them dynamic information and it is less about the game dynamics.

Intuitively, the idea of our devices working for us automatically in the background is much more appealing. But you have to ask yourself: Do you want ease of use or do you want control? Somehow these companies are going to have to give us both.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/27/geo-fences-privacy/

Privacy becomes a critical issue, it comes to US congress

Facebook to put privacy changes to US Congress


The meeting with congressmen, which takes place on Thursday on Capitol Hill, is open to House and Senate staff only.

Politicians have been among the most vocal critics of Facebook's privacy changes, which have seen an increasing amount of personal information shared with friends on the site by default. Four US Senators wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive, calling for "guidelines to be established for social networking sites..on how information can be shared or disseminated to third parties".

Related Articles

*
Facebook: privacy changes ‘as soon as possible’, says Zuckerberg
*
Facebook tighten privacy settings
*
Facebook admits mistakes
*
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg: 'people do not want complete privacy online'

Facebook said the meeting was designed to help congressmen and senators "learn about what these [privacy] tools mean for your constituents and the future of sharing online."

The social networking site is overhauling its privacy settings in light of the outcry, to make it easier for its users to control what information they want to share with friends, acquaintances and the wider web.

The "drastically simplified" controls will ensure users no longer have to navigate through a maze of menus and options to control the flow of information from their accounts.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive, will reveal full details of the changes at a press conference in California later today. In a piece written for the Washington Post earlier this week, Zuckerberg acknowledged that Facebook had "missed the mark" in its efforts to convey privacy settings to its almost 500 million users worldwide.

Recent changes to privacy controls have made some information about a user's interests public, and include new features that allow selected third-party partner websites to access some user data without prior permission or explicit consent.

complete article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/7766679/Facebook-to-put-privacy-changes-to-US-Congress.html

About social networks privacy and Facebook privacy again

Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.

To help illustrate Facebook's shift away from privacy, we have highlighted some excerpts from Facebook's privacy policies over the years. Watch closely as your privacy disappears, one small change at a time!

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2005:

No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2006:

We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2007:

Profile information you submit to Facebook will be available to users of Facebook who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa November 2009:

Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to share your information with anyone you want. You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on Facebook and you control how it is distributed through your privacy settings. You should review the default privacy settings and change them if necessary to reflect your preferences. You should also consider your settings whenever you share information. ...

Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa December 2009:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.

Current Facebook Privacy Policy, as of April 2010:

When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. ... The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” ... Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information.

the complete article here
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

Privacy Concerns Limit Online Ads, Study Says

Privacy advocates have had an impact on Madison Avenue after all, according to a new study.

Among marketers, privacy groups are often portrayed as scare mongers out of touch with ordinary consumers, who overstate the privacy perils of data collection online. Still, the privacy advocates seem to be making a difference.

Privacy issues have prompted marketers to use online behavioral advertising — based on tracking a user’s Web browsing habits — 75 percent less than they would otherwise, according to a report by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy research group.

The 90 companies and organizations surveyed curtailed their behavioral advertising, even though they estimated the tracking-based ads were 50 percent more efficient in generating sales than conventional online display ads.

“Privacy fears are definitely having an economic impact,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman of the privacy and security research group. (The Ponemon Institute conducts both sponsored and independent research. The current study, Mr. Ponemon said, was an independent project.)

The markets are holding back, Mr. Ponemon says, because of the uncertain legal and regulatory environment. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission are mulling tighter restrictions on online data collection, disclosure and use.

One conclusion to be drawn from the study is that the advertising industry has a powerful self-interest in forcefully addressing privacy fears.

“If you can diminish the privacy concerns, money will flow into online behavioral advertising,” said Michael S. Zaneis, vice president for public policy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “It would be a lift for the entire industry.”

The industry has stepped up its efforts in the last year to develop a meaningful self-regulatory program. The effort includes public education and technology — a click-on icon — to tell consumers what is happening when they see a targeted ad that uses demographics and behavioral data. The ad industry plans to roll that technology out in online ads within a few months.

The self-regulatory drive is more than just a marketing campaign to fend off regulation. The industry is making real investments in technology. Start-ups are focused on the privacy market. One of them is Better Advertising, which offers a consumer tool for tracking the online trackers, and business software for advertisers, agencies, ad networks and publishers to help them monitor and audit data-collection trails.

“If we can bring transparency to this market, it will be a turning point for the industry,” said Scott Meyer, chief executive of Better Advertising (Mr. Meyer formerly headed About.com, which is owned by The New York Times Company.)

Information disclosure and transparency are important, but probably more important to experts and regulators than to consumers. In the realm of online data collection, the notion of “consumer empowerment” tends to ring hollow.

The problem is what economists call “information asymmetry.” In simple terms, on one side of the computer screen is grandma searching for arthritis treatments or a birthday gift for a granddaughter, and on the other side of the screen is a black-belt quant working for a data-mining start-up. The consumer can’t be expected to understand — and follow — all that happens with his or her data, and the clickstreams can closely approximate personally identifiable information.

Advertisers insist their self-interest is benign. They just want to show tailored ads to people who are likely to buy. Why, they say, show a Viagra ad to a 35-year-old woman?

“We need to be able to use the data creatively — from an analytic perspective — so we are not advertising to people who are not in the market,” explained John Montgomery, chief operating officer of GroupM Interaction, the digital division of WPP.

But privacy advocates worry that freewheeling data collection online will open the door to digital red-lining in fields like financial services and health services. The fear, they say, is discrimination by statistical inference. Your race, gender, sexual orientation and political beliefs, they say, can be inferred by tracking your online behavior.

A group of privacy groups sent their principles for controlling data collection and use, in a letter to be sent to members of Congress on Monday. The groups include the Center for Digital Democracy, the Consumer Federation of America, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the United States Public Interest Research Group and the World Privacy Forum.

Their suggested steps include limiting the ability of Web sites and ad networks to use behavioral data to 24 hours after it is collected, and requiring consumers’ permission — an opt-in approach — to hold such data beyond 24 hours.

The groups also say individual privacy rights should include being able to find out who is tracking them, request the data and be able to correct it or have it removed from the tracker’s database.

“The online ad lobby is spinning a glossy fairy tale about how they want to protect privacy, all so they can continue data collection practices as usual,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

complete article here
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/privacy-concerns-limit-online-ads-study-says/

D-9: Operation 4M€ Sales Machine Ignition

In a few days, we will launch an operation initiating the future of Right People. Watch your email box if you already are part of our investors' mailing-list. Otherwise, subscribe here .

FRENCH:
Dans quelques jours, nous lançons une opération initiant le futur de Right People. Surveillez votre email si vous êtes sur notre mailing-liste d'investisseurs. Sinon, vous pouvez vous y inscrire ici.