[EXP 3] The articles

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

By Bob Zurn

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