Mark Zuckerberg's Lobby Unraveling As Musk And Sacks Leave
The technology industry’s newest high-powered political lobby, FWD.us, is unraveling just a month after it launched, as two of its biggest partners, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Yammer’s David Sacks, leave the organization. Begun with a reported $20 million of Mark Zuckerberg’s own money, and rare op-ed by the politically shy Facebook founder, FWD.us has faced a torrent of criticism over funding advertisements that praise Republicans who support the controversial Keystone pipeline (below). Environmental groups were up in arms and circulated a boycott of FWD.us that had, ironically, had more supporters than FWD.us’s call to action. The Sierra Club, Progressives United and MoveOn.org were among a littany of progressive groups that are now boycotting Facebook avertisements. “Immigration reform – fine. Oil expansion and pipelines? NOT fine. Where’s the transparency here, rich dudes? Or does FWD actually stand for Fine With Drilling?,” wrote one angry commenter on the FWD.us Facebook ...
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EFF: Trust Twitter — Not Apple Or Verizon — To Protect Your Privacy
tdog17 writes "Verizon and MySpace scored a zero out of a possible six stars in a test of how far 18 technology service providers will go to protect user data from government data demands. Twitter and Internet service provider Sonic.net scored a perfect six in the third annual Electronic Frontier Foundation 'Who Has Your Back?' report. Apple, AT&T and Yahoo ranked near the bottom, each scoring just one star. 'While we are pleased by the strides these companies have made over the past couple years, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Amazon holds huge quantities of information as part of its cloud computing services and retail operations, yet does not promise to inform users when their data is sought by the government, produce annual transparency reports, or publish a law enforcement guide. Facebook has yet to publish a transparency report. Yahoo! has a public record of standing up for user privacy in courts, but it hasn't earned recognition in any of our other categories. Apple and ...
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Zuckerberg's Lobby Can't Stay Silent On Secretive Conservative Political Ads Forever
Online backlash is growing against Mark Zuckerberg’s lobby’s secretive ads supporting conservative senators who encourage the creation of the Keystone XL pipeline and drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. “Immigration reform – fine. Oil expansion and pipelines? NOT fine. Where’s the transparency here, rich dudes? Or does FWD actually stand for Fine With Drilling?,” wrote one angry commenter on the FWD.us Facebook page. FWD.us is the latest A-list technology political interest group to come out swinging for high-skilled immigration reform. Partnering with many of Silicon Valley’s brightest luminaries, from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt to Bill Gates, FWD.us made a very public debut last week, promising grassroots activism in support of knowledge-economy-friendly policymaking. FWD.us strategically splits its operation into democratic and conservative outreach, directly funding ads of senators friendly to high-skilled immigration reform. The Internet rumor machine spun an ad ...
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Heyzap Launches An AppData-Like Leaderboard For Mobile Games With User Counts
While Apple’s app store and Google Play have long had leaderboards for the most downloaded and lucrative apps, there hasn’t been that much transparency around engagement after the download. Heyzap, a Union Square Ventures-backed startup that runs a mobile gaming network, has stepped in and decided to build one. The startup, which was founded about four years ago and originally centered around Flash games, has moved onto mobile platforms (pretty much like every other game developer over the past few years). They have an app on Android with about 10 million installs that lets gamers add friends in their favorite titles and share tips and badges. From those 10 million installs, they say they’ve been able to gauge the size of different developers’ active userbases. So from that, they’ve launched Heyzap Trends, a live leaderboard that estimates active usage. The standard iOS and Google leaderboards mainly focus on downloads or installs and then revenue over specific time periods (although ...
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To Earn Trust, Facebook Could Declare News Feed Changes Like Google PageRank
Too much bad press and too many confused users. That's what Facebook got from silently tinkering with the news feed. BiltonGate was the last straw. Signs now point to Facebook beginning to announce news feed algorithm changes the way Google does for PageRank. Combined with education, Facebook could use transparency to try to convince people it tweaks the feed to help users, not sell more ads.
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