There are hesitant signs of economic recovery but high unemployment is still chronic and black and latino communities face a full-fledged jobs depression. As calculated by the Department of Labor in December, latino unemployment was at 11.6 percent and black unemployment at 15.5 percent – fully twice the rate of whites. The cause of high [...]
The House payroll tax extension bill is larded with rightwing ideological addenda and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski has denounced a provision that would “tie the agency’s hands in ways that could be counterproductive, reducing economic value and hindering innovation and investment.” [H]e warned that provisions limiting the FCC’s ability to designate [...]
As Google looks to expand its display advertising, Google’s Neal Mohan in this interview laid out his argument for how the company’s integrated system of tracking users can be sold to advertisers by serving up ads based on that user profile: “We’ve been working on technology that can take a single creative concept and create [...]
Zenith Optimedia has a report out showing Google has 44.1% control of all online advertising” Internet advertising is now clearly dominated by Google, which has increased its share of the internet ad market from 34.9% in 2006 to 44.1% in 2010. Over this time Google has tightened its grip on global search (raising its share [...]
New competitors in an industry are supposed to lower prices for consumers. At least, that’s usually the theory. But when Apple entered the e-book business, the most immediate result was Amazon being forced to abandon its $9.99 e-book pricing and being forced to negotiate generally higher prices for e-books it sold. This result got the [...]
Facebook this past month agreed to twenty years of independent audits of its privacy practices, joining Google which agreed earlier this year to similar audits following its breaches of user privacy when it introduced its aborted Buzz social network. As this piece outlines, the audits should be moderately extensive in examining how consumers’ personal information [...]
Rep. Ed Markey has called for investigation of the Carrier IQ software tracking consumer behavior on their smartphones: “This software raises a number of privacy concerns for Android, Blackberry and Nokia phones,” Markey wrote in a letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. “Consumers neither have knowledge of this data collection, nor what Carrier IQ intends [...]
A new bill introduced in Congress would expand the categories of IT workers denied overtime protection under the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act. Not only would this deny the additional pay — time-and-a-half — for those tech workers forced to work over 40 hours a week, but it would eliminate the incentives companies have not [...]
Google announced it will soon start offering one-day shipping for merchants it works with on online commerce. This is framed as competing with Amazon, but the stories about the move make clear that the goal is not so much to make money from the commerce sales — Amazon’s business — but from advertising, thereby entrenching [...]
There’s a lot of publicity on how ‘Carrier IQ’ software on Android phones are tracking user keystrokes, but a new report says the problem of security on Android phones is much broader: Researchers at North Carolina State University have uncovered a variety of vulnerabilities in the standard configurations of popular Android smartphones from Motorola, HTC, [...]
