Google doesn't have to delete links to damaging personal details says Europe's top court

Is Google responsible for material it links to, even when that material might damage a person's reputation? The European Court of Justice doesn't believe so.

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Spain sends right-to-be-forgotten Google case to ECJ

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In an opinion by the advocate general Niilo Jääskinen published on Tuesday, Google shouldn't be held responsible for what appears on web pages it links to and Europe's data protection watchdogs can't compel Google to remove specific sites or material from its index.
The decision follows the case of a Spanish man whose property was sold due to non-payment of social security debts – a fact that came up in a newspaper article when the man's name was Googled ten years later.
The individual asked Google to remove links to the newspaper article when a search was performed on his name, and filed a complaint with Spain's data protection watchdog the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD). The AEPD upheld the compliant, and said Google should remove the newspaper article from its index.
Google appealed to the Spanish high court, which referred the decision onto the European Court of Justice.
The advocate general believes Google is not considered a publisher of information, and is therefore not obliged to make sure the information it links to complies with the European data protection directive.
"In effect, provision of an information location tool does not imply any control over the content included on third party web pages," the opinion said.
"A national data protection authority cannot require an internet search engine service provider to withdraw information from its index except in cases where this service provider has not complied with the exclusion codes [where a website publisher has stipulated material on the site shouldn't be indexed by Google] or where a request emanating from a website regarding an update of cache memory has not been complied with," it added.
However, search giants will still have to comply with local laws regarding removing links to websites hosting illegal or pirated material, according to the opinion.
"In contrast, requesting search engine service providers to suppress legitimate and legal information that has entered the public domain  would entail an interference with the freedom of expression of the publisher of the web page. In his [the court's advocate general] view, it would amount to censorship of his published content by a private party," it added.
The advocate general's opinion will be taken into account by the European Court of Justice in giving its decision on the matter, which is likely to follow Jääskinen's stance. Spain's national court will then have to rule on the case, but again, will typically agree with the court.

SOURCE : http://www.zdnet.com/google-doesnt-have-to-delete-links-to-damaging-personal-details-says-europes-top-court-7000017264/

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Honda Appeals to Females With Costliest Acura Ad Campaign

Honda Motor Co. (HMC) is targeting female drivers for its redesigned 2014 Acura MDX sport wagon with the luxury brand’s most expensive advertising campaign yet.
Using the slogan “Made for Mankind,” a female narrates the moody ads showing women hiking a mountain ridge, dancing and interacting with a robot. The commercial debuts during the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup Finals this month, while the full campaign starts July 7, Tokyo-based Honda said.
Honda is betting the ads will boost Acura sales that have fallen 25 percent in the U.S. from a peak of 209,610 in 2005. The luxury marque of Japan’s third-largest automaker is also promoting new RLX sedan and NSX sports car models priced at more than $100,000. With the new MDX, Acura said it’s trying to make an emotional appeal to female luxury-car buyers.
“Luxury is so focused on a very sort of stereotypical, 40-year-old wealthy male,” Gary Robinson, advertising manager for Honda’s Acura luxury line, said June 20 in Detroit at a briefing on the new MDX. “Going forward, certainly in our country, that is not going to be anybody’s majority anymore. So there’s this opportunity to talk to somebody different.”
Honda is hoping to imbue Acura with the same success it has found with its mainstream model line, which includes the Accord sedan, the second-best-selling car in the U.S. this year.
Going after female buyers for the MDX makes sense, said Michelle Krebs, an analyst at auto researcher Edmunds.com.

Moms’ Car

“Moms drive the MDX; it’s sort of a minivan that’s not a minivan,” said Krebs, who is based in Southfield, Michigan. “Why not appeal to the female audience? Not many automakers do that.”
Robinson said the MDX ad campaign is the costliest ever for Acura. He declined to reveal how much Honda is spending on it. He said it’s more than twice as much as Acura’s campaign last year to introduce the redesigned RDX model. And he said the cost of the MDX campaign is “not too far off” what Honda spends on its bread-and-butter Accord model.
“Our brand sort of struggles in terms of volume,” Robinson said of Acura. “This is our most important vehicle in a lot of ways and we can’t get it wrong.”
Honda set a goal for this year of topping its best-ever U.S. volume of 1.55 million Honda and Acura brand cars and light trucks, set in 2007. The company is counting on the third-generation MDX and new RLX flagship sedan to reach the target. Acura plans to sell 60,000 MDX models a year, Robinson said.

U.S. Deliveries

Honda’s total U.S. deliveries gained 5.6 percent this year through May to 608,663. The company’s Honda brand rose 5.2 percent during that period, while its Acura brand increased 9.8 percent, according to researcher Autodata Corp.
Acura’s U.S. sales trail the luxury leaders, Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW)’s BMW, Daimler AG (DAI)’s Mercedes-Benz and Toyota Motor Corp. (7203)’s Lexus line.
“For Acura, the luxury market is so intensely competitive and they’ve fallen so far,” Krebs said. “Now they’re trying to shake things up.”

SOURCE : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-24/honda-appeals-to-females-with-costliest-acura-ad-campaign.html#disqus_thread

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Why You Need A Hashtag Strategy For Your Business

This week associate Adam Torkildson and I had the chance to talk about our favorite topic — PR — with a company that licenses proprietary equipment to individuals who use the product to create their own regional business. Some 30 of the merchant partners had come together to attend the company’s summit event in Salt Lake.
Among the group, some are currently successfully at PR; others are still at square one. Guess which question dominated our discussion? Hashtags.

Business owners remarked that the company’s technology – a lice removal product called AirAllé – is a topic that carries a stigma. People don’t want their own Facebook FB +2.64% page to show that they’ve “liked” a page about how to eradicate lice. What should they do?
My response: Hashtags. When a consumer suddenly needs a solution to head lice, the question is urgent. They will search. A provider who’s “hashtagged” their page and relevant posts will immediately rise to the top. A hand raised, shyly. “What’s a hashtag?” In a nutshell, it’s the use of the symbol (#) in front of a word, a phrase, or even a picture or video that makes the item findable as a searchable “tag”.We spent the balance of our time on why they need a hashtag strategy for their businesses. Here are the reasons you need one, too:
Hashtags are Ubiquitous
Check out the results from this recent survey by ad agency RadiumOne. Among 494 participants:

• 58 percent of respondents utilize hashtags on a regular basis, and 71 percent of regular hashtag users do so from their mobile devices
• 43 percent of respondents think hashtags are useful and 34% use them to search/follow categories and brands of personal interest
• 51 percent of respondents would share hashtags more often if they knew advertisers awarded discounts for sharing product based hashtags
• 41 percent of respondents use hashtags to communicate personal ideas and feelings

In all, more than 70 percent of consumers favor hashtags on mobile devices and nearly half are motivated to explore new content when hashtags are present.
Facebook Hashtags can expose your business to an entirely new audience
Facebook Graph Searches were somewhat useful for finding results among the people and businesses you’re already connected with.  However, hashtags open an entirely new opportunity for your page or your relevant material to be exposed to the full community of Facebook users. So by tagging your page and your resource material with #sanitation or #essentialoils, for example, users who’d have never “liked” your page or even known you existed will find you when the interest or need has occurred.
Hashtags are good for campaigns or promotions
Commonplace searches such as #tech or #ecommerce aren’t unique or compelling and will likely produce hundreds of unrelated results.  It’s a good idea to test any term you’re thinking of by taking a look in advance at the results it produces. Is it a popular search term? Does the other results it produces serve your purposes well?
For example, a consumer brand who adopted a hashtag strategy around #notguilty as a clever way to draw attention to its low-calorie food was dismayed to find its search results in the midst of an ongoing dialogue about a grisly murder.  But campaigns such as Young & Rubicam’s #advertisingis or Charmin’s #tweetfromtheseat are memorable, humorous, and suggest a call to action within the space of a single phrase.
However, use them with care
Indiscriminate use of hashtags, especially on Facebook, makes your posts look like a “visual Tommy gun” remarked social media strategist Mark Mitchell this week in a post for Social Media Today.  Overusing hashtags is the social media equivalent of spam. Hashtags scattered through a statement appear promotional and off-putting, whereas one or two well-chosen tags at the end of a statement are viewed as a welcome help or a clever and humorous call to action. Additionally, the overuse of hashtags will likely be restricted by Facebook to avoid overuse and abuse.
Does your company have a hashtag strategy? And in particular, have you taken advantage of the opportunity to leverage Facebook’s hashtag capabilities yet? If not, what’s stopping you?
Author: Cheryl Conner | Google+

SOURCE : http://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2013/06/22/why-you-need-a-hashtag-strategy-for-your-business/

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Instagram users upload 5M clips in vid-sharing feature's first day

Just 24 hours after its unveiling, video sharing on Instagram is already proving so popular an activity that it would take you years to watch all the clips uploaded to the service.

by Jennifer Van Grove

June 21, 2013 11:15 AM PDT

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Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom announces video on Instagram at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET) Instagram users have embraced the application's just-released video feature by uploading 5 million videos in the first 24 hours of the feature's availability, a company representative told CNET.
Thursday, Facebook-owned Instagram added video to its iOS and Android applications, enabling users to capture moments in a new way by shooting and sharing up to 15 seconds of video, with effects-filters available and footage stabilized during the uploading process. The feature, which bears a resemblance to Twitter's Vine application, seems to be an early hit with Instagram's 130 million active users, who, in the first eight hours, uploaded so many videos that it would take a year to watch them all.

At peak, Instagram users uploaded 40 hours of video per minute. The climactic moment came Thursday night as the Miami Heat defeated the San Antonio Spurs during the NBA Finals, the representative said.
The initial numbers suggest that Instagram can bring video sharing to the masses, which historically has proved a difficult task for other app makers.
Not everyone is enamored with Instagram's newest dimension. Apple pundit and widely followed technology blogger John Gruber said that video makes Instagram worse. He criticized video on Instagram for being slow to load and ruining the service's simplicity and focus. "Thankfully there's a setting to turn off 'Auto-Play Videos'; otherwise I'd abandon ship," he said.

SOURCE : http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57590494-93/instagram-users-upload-5m-clips-in-vid-sharing-features-first-day/

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Russia says it has no authority to expel Snowden

MOSCOW — Despite a direct request from the United States to return Edward Snowden to U.S. soil to face charges of leaking government secrets, Russian officials said Monday that they had no legal authority to detain the fugitive former government contractor, who arrived in Moscow on Sunday and was seeking asylum in Ecuador, reportedly by way of Havana.
News services said Snowden was expected to board an Aeroflot flight to Havana, scheduled to depart Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport at 6:05 a.m. Eastern time Monday. But reporters on board the flight said on Twitter that he had not been spotted among the passengers.

“They’ve just locked the doors of the plane, #Snowden is NOT on this plane!!!” tweeted Egor Piskunov, a reporter with Russia’s government-financed RT. It was still possible, however, that Snowden was on board but out of sight of the journalists, or wearing a disguise.
Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s human rights ombudsman and a former ambassador to the United States, told the Interfax news agency that Russia had no authority to expel Snowden, as Washington was asking it to do.
Russian officials said travelers who never leave a secure transit zone inside an airport ---which means not crossing passport control---are not officially on Russian soil. In addition, Russia and the United States do not have an extradition treaty.
Snowden did not have a Russia visa, several officials said, and therefore could not leave the transit zone. He stayed out of sight overnight, apparently hidden away either in a VIP room or a small hotel. The Associated Press reported that he was expected to fly to Havana and then to continue on to Ecuador, perhaps by way of Venezuela. A flight to Caracas is scheduled to leave Cuba a few hours after he arrives there.
“The Americans can’t demand anything,” Lukin said, calling the affair a detective story rather than an international incident. “Detective stories are good bedtime reading,” he said.
Snowden, who leaked top-secret documents about U.S. surveillance programs, has been charged with espionage in the United States. He flew into Moscow from Hong Kong Sunday with the help of the WikiLeaks organization.
“We now understand Mr. Snowden is on Russian soil,” Caitlin Hayden, National Security Council spokesman, said late Sunday. “Given our intensified cooperation after the Boston marathon bombings and our history of working with Russia on law enforcement matters — including returning numerous high-level criminals back to Russia at the request of the Russian government — we expect the Russian Government to look at all options available to expel Mr. Snowden back to the U.S. to face justice for the crimes with which he is charged.”
The Aeroflot flight to Havana usually crosses U.S. air space, but a check of recent flights showed the route can vary, apparently with the weather, and sometimes steers well clear of the United States.
Crowds of journalists gathered at the airport on Monday for the second consecutive day — some with tickets in hand for the Havana flight.

Read More : http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russia-says-it-has-no-authority-to-expel-snowden/2013/06/24/325281f2-dcaf-11e2-bd83-e99e43c336ed_story.html

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Facebook Security Bug Exposed Personal Account Information, Emails And Phone Numbers, Six Million Accounts Affected

A Facebook security bug exposed users’ personal contact information (email or phone number) to other users who were connected to them; the bug has affected 6 million accounts.
“When people upload their contact lists or address books to Facebook, we try to match that data with the contact information of other people on Facebook in order to generate friend recommendations,” the security team wrote in a blog post published today.

“Because of the bug, some of the information used to make friend recommendations and reduce the number of invitations we send was inadvertently stored in association with people’s contact information as part of their account on Facebook,” the post continued. “As a result, if a person went to download an archive of their Facebook account through our Download Your Information (DYI) tool, they may have been provided with additional email addresses or telephone numbers for their contacts or people with whom they have some connection.”

A Facebook spokesperson tells me the bug has been live since last year, and was discovered last week. Facebook says the security team fixed the bug less than 24 hours after it was brought to their attention.
The social giant says six million users had email addresses or phone numbers that were included in the downloads. Additionally, there were non-Facebook users’ email addresses and phone numbers included in the downloads from tools to invite contacts to join Facebook; a Facebook spokesperson tells me that this information wasn’t tied to any Facebook accounts and “wasn’t structured and wasn’t identifiable.”
Facebook says the bug has not been exploited maliciously, and the company is reaching out to the affected users.

“For almost all of the email addresses or telephone numbers impacted, each individual email address or telephone number was only included in a download once or twice,” the post said. “This means, in almost all cases, an email address or telephone number was only exposed to one person. Additionally, no other types of personal or financial information were included and only people on Facebook – not developers or advertisers – have access to the DYI tool.”

SOURCE : http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/21/facebook-security-bug-exposed-personal-account-information-emails-and-phone-numbers-six-million-accounts-affected/

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Google Ordered to Delete Collected U.K. Street View Data

Officials in the U.K. have ordered Google to delete all of the data it accidentally collected via its Street View cars.
The country's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said today that Google has just over a month to delete the information or face a more severe punishment.
"Today's enforcement notice strengthens the action already taken by our office, placing a legal requirement on Google to delete the remaining payload data identified last year within the next 35 days and immediately inform the ICO if any further disks are found," Stephen Eckersley, ICO Head of Enforcement, said in a statement. "Failure to abide by the notice will be considered as contempt of court, which is a criminal offense."
Between 2008 and 2010, the equipment attached to Google's Street View vehicles not only collected 360-degree mapping images, but also data from unencrypted wireless networks within range. That included emails, passwords, photos, and chat logs.
Google has apologized for the data collection, and pledged to work with data protection agencies around the globe on rectifying the situation.
The ICO and Google reached an agreement in 2010 whereby Google would implement more security training for employees and data protection requirements for new features. But after the Federal Communications Commission in the U.S. released an April 2012 report that said several employees and at least one senior manager knew of the data gathering, the ICO decided to take another look and re-opened its case.
The ICO has since determined that "there was insufficient evidence to show that Google intended, on a corporate level, to collect personal data," the agency said today. As a result, the 2010 agreement remains, provided Google deletes the data from disks it found in the last year.
"The early days of Google Street View should be seen as an example of what can go wrong if technology companies fail to understand how their products are using personal information," Eckersley said. "The punishment for this breach would have been far worse, if this payload data had not been contained."
In April, German data protection officials handed down a 145,000 Euro ($189,000) fine against Google for the data collection.

SOURCE : http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2420818,00.asp

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