Facebook's power should worry us all
Julian
Lee
October 10, 2011
Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg's creation has a power that should concern
all of us. Photo: AFP
If Facebook was a government agency,
its power would be as undisputed as it would be frightening.
For
a single organisation to know as much as it does
about the habits, interests and behaviour of 10 million Australians is
unsettling.
If a government department had so
much up-to-the-minute information about who we know, where we have been and
what we are doing at its fingertips then one can only imagine the outcry.
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And yet here we have a
privately-owned company accountable to no one operating with apparent immunity
from the law. Aside from the grumbling that invariably attends any changes
Facebook makes to its site, no one has yet taken to the streets.
Facebook's power continues to grow (800 million users
and counting) and, on the face of it, the only real alternative left
open to us is to either beat a retreat into a self-imposed disconnected world
or total surrender.
For waiting for the government or
the regulators to step in may be a futile exercise. The hyperbolic pace at which technology moves is no
match for the law.
The
best hope for any privacy protection resides in an issues paper — released a fortnight ago — that explores
whether individuals should be able to sue for a breach of their privacy. Coming as it does following The News
of the World hacking scandal, much of its focus is expected to be on
serious invasions of privacy by the media; As the handling of data by sophisticated technology
companies like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn is at risk of coming a
distant second.
Perhaps
the federal privacy commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim, was all too aware of these
limitations when he said he was not going to investigate Facebook for tracking people's movements across
the internet even after they had logged out of their Facebook account.
His
acceptance of Facebook's word that it had "rectified the issue" was
disappointing and given it fell to an Australian security consultant and
blogger Nik Cubrilovic to unearth Facebook's secret tracking causing Pilgrim's assurances
that he would "continue to monitor future developments" does precious
little to assuage my fears.
Even today Facebook continues to
deny there is a problem with its tracking and is pushing ahead with
"frictionless sharing", whereby a user's activities are published on
their profiles without any prompting by them.
Facebook
talks about empowering you the user to exert control over your privacy settings, rather than what they are doing
with your information and with whom they are sharing it. It's all part of their
quest to gain as much information about you as possible so that it can be
traded for the purpose of helping more targeted advertising.
Julian Lee is deputy editor of the
National Times.
Coca-Cola: The Power of a Brand
Learn how Coca-Cola became one of
the world's most well known and powerful brands.
There are few images as recognizable
throughout the world as the Coca-Cola brand. Travel to the furthest reaches of
the globe and you will probably encounter it on a clock or a sign, if not on
the drink itself. Marketers today look to the Coca-Cola brand as a model of
marketing power. Its image has
transcended national borders and cultural barriers to reach almost everyone on
earth. How did the Coca-Cola symbol become such an omnipresent image?
Beginning in 1886, Coca-Cola
president John Pemberton began traveling the country introducing pharmacists to
the drink. At that time it was considered a medicinal substance that could relieve
headaches and other minor woes. Candler distributed clocks, calendars and other
items laden with the Coca-Cola logo as he toured the country, spreading the
brand and selling his product.
From there the brand continued to penetrate further around the world.
The bottling rights to Coca-Cola were sold in 1899 and in 1915 the Root family
submitted a standard size bottle for distribution, but it was too fat in the
middle. The Coca-Cola Company liked the bottle so much they thinned it down and
has been used ever since and is called a Hobbleskirt Bottle. By 1920, with new
bottlers springing up all the time, the brand had expanded into Cuba, France,
Puerto Rico and other
territories. Its world dominance would increase further with World War II, when
Coca-Cola promised that
"every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for 5 cents, wherever he
is, and whatever it costs the company." Suddenly Coca-Cola could be found
throughout Europe as American GIs carried it with them, and by 1960 the number
of countries with Coke bottling plants had doubled.
Today Coke remains a powerful brand
with over a century of history
behind it. As a result, items featuring previous incarnations of the
Coke image have become classic pieces of Americana. The success of the Coca-Cola brand has made it an icon
not just in the world of brand marketing but of American history. It symbolizes
the popularity of a soft drink as well as the dominance of American
entrepreneurialism in the twentieth century and beyond.
In Judging Hostile Bids, Look at How Take-Two Interactive
Fared
By STEVEN M. DAVIDOFF
Just
say no.
Take-Two
Interactive, in 2008. Take-Two adopted a “don’t touch me” defensive strategy
to fight off EA, and is now trading at about $14.50 a share.
What makes the difference in whether a company is right to turn down an offer? In
all of the examples cited above, the decision to say no was really just the
board’s and not shareholders’. Companies that have prospered by spurning offers
and remaining independent usually have a strong, informed board that is willing
to stand up to both its chief executive and a hostile raider.
Similarly in Yahoo’s case, Yahoo’s co-founder, Jerry Yang,
appeared to want to fight off Microsoft at all costs. The result was
that the decision became more about staying independent than achieving full value for shareholders.
Take-Two
Interactive Software, Inc. is a global publisher and developer of interactive
entertainment software. The Company's business consists of its wholly
owned labels Rockstar Games and 2K, which publishes its titles under 2K Games,
2K Sports and 2K Play. It develops, publishes, markets and sells software
titles for gaming and entertainment hardware platforms and peripherals
