USAToday

Some Americans still love to hate Facebook and other social media services, according to an annual survey from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

Social media companies are the fourth-lowest scoring with consumers after Internet service providers, subscription television companies and airlines. The industry has a score of 71 on a 100 point scale. Facebook and LinkedIn ranked the lowest of the seven companies surveyed. Twitter didn't fare much better.

CBS chief Leslie Moonves says he'd be interested in acquiring CNN if a potential Fox-Time Warner deal forces a spinoff of the cable news network.

Moonves says media stock growth recently since the offer was revealed suggests "Wall Street obviously thinks there's going to be more consolidation." And he's ready with extra cash from the recent sale of CBS' outdooor advertising business.

[Commentary] The tech industry is improving the way we connect, work and play thanks to an innovation revolution that is powering America's economy. But the tech industry has a diversity challenge that needs the same transformational approach to improve our workforce.

We are not interested in sugarcoating or defending the indefensible; in fact, we are shining a spotlight on the problem. That is why leading tech companies -- including Intel, Google, Facebook LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo -- are voluntarily disclosing their diversity numbers.

We are owning up to it and are working hard to figure out solutions. Those solutions must be well thought out and authentic to the tech industry.

[Garfield is president and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council]

San Francisco Bay Area residents born and raised on the East Coast (or anywhere else outside the region) often hear the same question repeatedly from friends and family: Why would anyone live where it's so expensive?

The latest figures available from the federal government show just well workers in the city and its closest environs are doing. The average worker in the San Francisco -- San Mateo -- Redwood City metro area was paid a mean hourly wage of $32.41, or 45 percent higher than the US mean of $22.33, as of May, 2013. That's based on the latest figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that break down employment by income and geography.

Some jobs here pay particularly well compared to the rest of the US -- and those that pay the most are not the ones you might think. Indeed, the San Francisco metro area had just over 68,800 tech jobs as of 14 months ago. That's 6.6 percent of total jobs -- more than double the ratio for the entire US, where only 2.8 percent of all employment is in tech.

But a closer look at the numbers shows that tech workers are far from being the best-paid here, relative to the average American, compared to other professions.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission is about to allow Internet providers to charge tolls for speedy access unless we raise our voices to get the agency to declare the Internet a "common carrier," infrastructure that must be open to all on an equal basis, just as telephones, television and railroads are.

This is a critical issue for small businesses and start-ups. But the deadline for public comments is July 14.

If you, like me, want the FCC to require Internet companies to treat small businesses equally, then contact the agency and urge them to classify the Internet as a common carrier. If Internet service providers are allowed to have a fast lane for those who pay a premium and if the fairness of this policy is decided on a case-by-case basis, start-ups and small businesses would have to challenge each discriminatory practice -- an unreasonable and expensive burden.

[Commentary] As the Internet of Things steamrolls from tech novelty to entrenched reality, privacy concerns will mushroom surrounding the personal data generated by devices on our bodies and in our homes.

And now, it seems, is a critical inflection point, according to those gathered at the Internet of Things Privacy Summit, the first such Silicon Valley confab organized by data privacy management company TRUSTe.

The cynical view is that corporations focused on profit will minimize privacy issues if they get in the way of a growing bottom line. But Michelle Dennedy, chief privacy officer at security software firm McAfee, and others caution that approach risks a consumer backlash.

"In almost any segment it's a very competitive market out there, consumers have a lot of choices," she says.

Ultimately, the privacy debate boils down to "whether we as consumers are willing to surrender privacy for convenience, which is dangerous considering the tempting opportunity for the abuse of such private information," says Jana Anderson of The Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University.

There seemed to be two conclusions from the day's events in Silicon Valley. One, the Internet of Things is coming, and with it a growing need for consumers and corporations alike to address its attendant privacy issues. And two, worrying about our online privacy is nothing new.

Around 66 million people created more than 200 million Facebook interactions during the World Cup match between Brazil and Germany -- totals that crushed the social media giant's previous 2014 records, the World Cup opening match featuring Brazil and Croatia and the 2014 Super Bowl.

Facebook users in Brazil, the tournament's host country, were responsible for about one quarter of the total traffic, with 16 million people creating more than 52 million interactions, which include posts, comments and likes.

The United States drew the second-highest total of Facebook interactions, with 6.3 million users creating more than 14 million interactions. Facebook users in Mexico provided the third-most interactions, followed by users in Indonesia and the United Kingdom.

[Commentary] Each time news flares of Facebook or other Web-based entities caught mining or manipulating user data -- as it did recently with the revelation that Facebook in 2012 tweaked user news feeds to gauge emotional reactions -- Internet privacy activists and consumers alike react in outrage. And each time, outrage soon gives way to business as usual.

Is it time to accept the fact that the price of living in our socially connected, high-tech age is forking over our right to do so anonymously? The glaring reality is yes.

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product," says Adi Kamdar, activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has monitored privacy issues from the Web's earliest days. The price of admission isn't cash but personal data.

"What we learned from the Facebook incident was simply that your online experience is highly curated from a profit-motivated point of view," says Kamdar of the social network's experiment, in which 670,000 users were fed both negative and positive posts (shocking result: the former made them sad and vice versa). "I hope it teaches people not to put all their eggs in one online basket."

The federal government is rewarding doctors and hospitals for moving to electronic health records -- and will soon punish them if they don't -- even though these records currently make it easier for health care providers to defraud government-paid health programs, fraud experts say.

The Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general charged in December that the basic auditing safeguards that also help to prevent fraud for electronic health records (EHRs) weren't in place in many hospitals, or they were being used, but vulnerable to corruption. Yet the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services still doesn't require health care providers to keep their audit systems on.

Reed Gelzer, a former primary care doctor who is now an EHR consultant to the federal government and private groups, says that means the health records that are maintained electronically can be easily falsified, altered or otherwise misrepresented.

More than 250 Europeans a day have been applying to a French website to have past incidents "forgotten" by Google since the service was launched. Called forget.me, the site allows European Union residents to apply to have material removed from Google's European Union search results.

The French firm, ReputationVIP, appears to be the first to take advantage of a groundbreaking Europe's high court ruling on May 13. Under European privacy laws, the court ruled, individuals have the right to request search engines remove links to information about them that is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed."

As of June 30, 2014, 13,000 people had registered on the company's website. They submitted 1,105 right to be forgotten applications requesting the remove of a total of 5,418 links, according to Bertrand Girin, the Lyon, France-based reputation management firm's chief executive officer.