February 2010

Privacy Group Pings FTC About Google Buzz

The Electronic Privacy Information Center complained to the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday about Google's new Buzz social networking service, saying it violates federal consumer protection law.

Since launching Google Buzz as part of Gmail a week ago, the search company has come under fire for automatically creating public circles of friends for users based on their most frequent Gmail contacts. Over the weekend, Google altered the service to merely suggest contacts for its users' social networks. Despite the changes, EPIC said privacy violations remain because Google automatically signs up Gmail users for Buzz, rather than waiting for them to do so themselves, or "opt in" for the service. The company does give users the option to disable the new service.

EPIC wants the FTC to require that Google make Buzz an opt-in service and to stop using Gmail address book contacts to compile social networking lists.

Federal Officials Tout Importance of Health IT Adoption

Last week, three high-level federal officials tasked with overseeing different areas of the Obama administration's agenda walked into the same conference room, stood at the same podium and touted the same thing -- health IT.

Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, National Coordinator for Health IT David Blumenthal and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Director Carolyn Clancy spoke at a joint plenary session of the National Health Information Exchange Summit, the Health IT Summit for Government Leaders and the Eighteenth National HIPAA Summit. Chopra, Blumenthal and Clancy offered insight into how health IT fits into the Obama's administration's larger health care and innovation goals.

White House archive rules could save its Twitter followers' messages

Followers of the White House's Twitter accounts could someday discover they are in fact part of the federal government's official archives.

The longstanding Presidential Records Act of 1978 -- which requires White House staffers to preserve all communications -- could apply to public replies and private messages that voters send Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and other members of the Obama administration's communications team, Gibbs said Tuesday. "We have dating back -- I don't know when it dates back to -- but presidential records require that if I go on a site like this, and send out a message, that message has to be archived for the future, just like any e-mails I send or get are also archived for the future," said Gibbs, who just recently joined Twitter. He added the law is "intended to preserve the paper and records of the administration." Initially, the White House's communications shop was unable to join such platforms as Twitter, mostly because federal guidelines lagged years behind advances in online social networking.

Google's Schmidt On The State Of The Mobile Phone: 'It's Like Magic'

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Eric Schmidt referred to the rise of cloud computing and faster connectivity speeds as driving mobile adoption. "A device that is not connected is not interesting, it is literally lonely. An application that does not leverage the cloud isn't going to wow anybody," he said. "It's like magic. All of a sudden there are things you can do that we've never even (thought of) because of this convergence." During the question and answer session following his remarks, one person asserted that Google wanted to turn the operators into "dumb data pipes." The questioner went on: "You see the operator as the data supplier, you're the one with the service." Schmidt fired back, saying, "I disagree with your premise completely" and asking the man to explain himself. "I feel very strongly that we depend on the successful business of the operators," Schmidt said. "We need advanced sophisticated networks." Later on, yet another member of the audience asked Schmidt whether five years from now a mobile phone user would "feel like a Vodafone/T-Mobile customer or a Google customer." Schmidt responded "both."

Live TV's Alive as Ever, Boosted by Social Media

Remember all the talk about how TV ratings for awards shows and other giant, live-programming spectacles were tanking? It looks like it was premature. And there's evidence Twitter and its ilk deserve some credit. Until 2008, live events were in the midst of a four-year decline on par with the rest of broadcast TV, with everything from the Oscars to the Grammys witnessing some of the steepest live-viewing ratings declines in their respective histories. It was, many said, just further proof that mass media was dying. But in the past year, live events have seen significant ratings increases, thanks in large part to social media.

Obama administration tweaks its cybersecurity plans

When it comes to cybersecurity, the Obama administration is taking the same approach to the policies of the Bush administration as it has in so many other areas: there are differences, but they're mainly matters of subtle emphasis and focus.

Take the Trusted Internet Connection initiative, which the Bush administration launched in late 2007, and which is aimed at securing the government's network infrastructure by routing all of its network traffic through a smaller number of access points. The original goals of the TIC program were to establish a baseline set of security practices for government systems that access the Internet, to consolidate all federal Internet access points into about 50 officially certified TICs, and to put in place an audit process to ensure that all government agencies stay in compliance with the program. Of these three goals, it was the network consolidation piece—the entire federal government accessing the Internet through only 50 connections total—that grabbed headlines and caused the most push-back from federal agencies. It's this part that the Obama Administration has eased up on, but only a bit.

Cell-phone-use-while-driving bans work best in urban areas

The pileup of studies on the negative effect of cell phones on driving ability resulted in some states banning their use; now studies on the effect of the bans are piling up, too. A study, set to be published in the journal Transportation Research Part A, provides some evidence that a ban has had more effect in urban areas, but the statistics aren't very robust.

The report shows that, overall, there have been lower crash rates in the State of New York since the institution of a ban on cell phone use by drivers. The biggest differences in rates were in areas with a high density of licensed drivers, such as New York City. The numbers indicate that both personal and fatal injury crash rates have dropped. The report's authors caution that they made little effort to dispense with any spurious variables that could have contributed to the lower accident rates, such as "road construction, safety education, introduction of new automobile safety features, and/or changes in alcohol and illegal substance control policies."

Cell phone subscriptions to hit 5 billion globally

On a planet with around 6.8 billion people, we're likely to see 5 billion cell phone subscriptions this year.

Reaching 4.6 billion at the end of 2009, the number of cell phone subscriptions across the globe will hit 5 billion sometime in 2010, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The explosion in cell phone use has been driven not only by developed countries, but by developing nations hungry for services like mobile banking and health care.

Microsoft Adds To DC Team

Microsoft has hired Christina Pearson to join its Washington office as senior director for public relations. Pearson most recently worked for the public relations firm Fleishman-Hillard, specializing in assisting clients in crafting public relations strategies during crisis situations such as product recalls and public health emergencies. Before joining Fleishman-Hillard, she worked as the top spokeswoman at the Health and Human Services Department during the Bush administration. Pearson also worked for the Senate Finance Committee and for the communications firm launched by GOP operative Ed Gillespie and former Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour, who is now Mississippi's governor.

Panel proposes reducing meaningful use measures

Members of a federal health IT advisory group last week proposed to relax the number of measures that will be required for healthcare providers to demonstrate "meaningful use" of electronic health record systems.

The Health & Human Service Department's meaningful use workgroup crafted an approach they said strikes a "middle ground" between too few and too onerous a set of measures of meaningful use necessary to qualify providers for financial incentives under HHS's health IT adoption plan. The workgroup, which reports to HHS's Health IT Policy Committee, proposed that physicians and hospitals could drop up to six meaningful use measures for 2011. That would still require providers to meet about 80 percent of the measures of meaningful use originally proposed, said Dr. George Hripcsak, the co-chair of the workgroup and a biomedical informatics professor at Columbia University.