Data protection in Germany

David and Goliath

What lies behind a battle over privacy on Facebook

Apr 8th 2010 | BERLIN | From The Economist print edition

IN THE challenge by Ilse Aigner, the German minister of consumer protection, to Mark Zuckerberg, the 25-year-old founder of Facebook, it is hard to say who is the David. Mrs Aigner accuses Facebook of being careless over the privacy of its 400m members. “What is private must stay private,” she wrote to Mr Zuckerberg on April 5th. “Unfortunately, Facebook ignores this principle.” Shape up, Mrs Aigner warned, or she would quit the social-networking site.

Mrs Aigner fired her slingshot after Facebook had said it might send data on members to hand-picked partners such as CNN and Yahoo! without consulting them first. The American way with data is not for Germany. In 1983 Germany’s constitutional court elaborated a right to “informational self-determination”, anchored in laws, monitored by officials and fiercely defended by activists. The Pirate Party, which champions digital freedom, won 2% of the vote in last year’s federal election.

In German privacy wars, Mrs Aigner’s party is normally cast as Goliath. She comes from the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian wing of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Both parties are keener to chase criminals and terrorists than to fuss over suspects’ privacy. After the constitutional court overturned a law in March that required telecoms and internet firms to make records available to police, the CDU and CSU clamoured for a robust replacement. One reason the Pirate Party did well is that the previous government had passed a law to block child-pornography sites on the internet. That was a step to broader censorship, the new party argued.

Mrs Aigner’s snarl at Mr Zuckerberg is designed to appeal to privacy partisans. In February she demanded that Google get residents’ permission before showing their houses on its Street View service. Patrick Breyer, a lawyer, says the government has become more sensitive since the liberal Free Democrats joined the CDU/CSU in coalition. The new CDU interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, seems keener to balance security with privacy than his predecessor was. He talks to privacy activists and may even consider the idea of requiring firms and agencies to send out “data letters” telling people what information is collected about them.

Mr Breyer is not impressed. In courting pro-privacy voters, the centre-right tries to make it seem that the menace is data collection by business, not by the state. “The CDU will always give priority to law enforcement over privacy,” he declares. Mrs Aigner’s shot will not do much damage to Facebook, either. If she quits, her 1,900-odd friends may notice, but Mr Zuckerberg seems unmoved. In truth there are no Davids in this fight.

iPad Parody Highlights Device Shortcomings [VIDEO]

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For all y’all out there who think that the iPad leaves much to be desired, we’ve got the video for you. This parody, made as an assignment for a Comm 340 class (I hope they got an A), highlights all that’s lacking in the mythical device.

It doesn’t have a camera, you can’t use it to make a phone call, and the name itself has spawned countless parodies — not to mention throwbacks to ‘90s television — that’s basically this video’s beef with Steve Jobs’s newest shiny, shiny baby.

Check out the video below and let us know in the comments: What changes would you like to see in the iPad 2.0? Personally, I’m still waiting on Spice 2.0.

Facebook and Twitter Making a Major Impact on Purchase Decisions [STATS]

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A new study shows that those who are fans or followers of a brand on Facebook or Twitter, respectively, are significantly more likely to buy products and services or recommend the brand to a friend.

Specifically, the study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that consumers are 67% more likely to buy from the brands they follow on Twitter, and 51% more likely to buy from a brand they follow on Facebook (). Moreover, they’re 79% more likely to recommend their Twitter () follows to a friend, and 60% more likely to do the same on Facebook:

Of course, those findings might be a bit overstated — many people actively seek out the brands they’re already fans of and follow or fan them on Twitter and Facebook. But there’s still much to be said for the mindshare that engaging those existing brand enthusiasts on social media sites creates, in turn keeping them active. Plus, the study also found that many consumers across a wide variety of demographics have negative perceptions of brands that aren’t using social media.

Overall, the study is another sign that social media is becoming a competitive advantage for those that are participating, and an increasingly major weakness for those that aren’t.

Toyota Turns To Twitter To Repair Its Image

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by Leena Rao on Mar 2, 2010

Toyota has been dealing with negative backlash from the massive safety recalls of its vehicles; and is even suffering in terms of sales. So what does the company do to repair its image? Turn to Twitter, of course! The Japanese auto giant has launched a branded channel on TweetMeme, in partnership with Federated Media, which aggregates and organize Twitter conversations regarding Toyota.

Called Toyota Conversations, the site brings together the top stories being Tweeted about Toyota, from news articles to press releases. The site also shows visitors the most popular videos and images being shared about Toyota on Twitter. And the channel includes a Featured Tweets from Toyota’s Twitter account and press room as well as AdTweets, which are Tweetmeme’s retweetable ads for Toyota.

You may notice after taking a look at all of the top stories that are being aggregated on the site, that most of the news is positive. That doesn’t seem to match the general tone of the media writing about Toyota, which has been quick to criticize the car company for its manufacturing mistakes. If you take a look at Twitter sentiment app Tweetfeel, the sentiment of Tweets mentioning Toyota lean more negative. Tweetmeme channels can be set up to pick up only certain news sources. It looks like Toyota picked the friendlier ones.

That being said, it’s definitely interesting to see such a high-profile company taking to Twitter to try to reform its image by engaging directly in a dialogue with consumers. As we’ve seen with the recent Southwest/Kevin Smith incident, Twitter is influencing public relations in unprecedented ways. Now more than ever, brands are flocking to Twitter to not only monitor and track what’s being said about their company on Twitter but to influence and participate in the conversation.

How Twitter in the Classroom is Boosting Student Engagement

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Professors who wish to engage students during large lectures face an uphill battle. Not only is it a logistical impossibility for 200+ students to actively participate in a 90 minute lecture, but the downward sloping cone-shape of a lecture hall induces a one-to-many conversation. This problem is compounded by the recent budget cuts that have squeezed ever more students into each room.

Fortunately, educators (including myself) have found that Twitter () is an effective way to broaden participation in lecture. Additionally, the ubiquity of laptops and smartphones have made the integration of Twitter a virtually bureaucracy-free endeavor. This post describes the two main benefits professors find when using Twitter in lecture.

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Increased Participation

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Classroom shyness is like a blackhole: Once silence takes over, it never lets go. In my own experience, in a class of hundreds, the fraction of students who speak up is small, and a still tinier fraction contribute regularly.

That’s why, Dr. Monica Rankin of the University of Texas at Dallas was pleasantly surprised when her experiment with Twitter began pulling more students into discussion. “It’s been really exciting because, in classes like this, you’ll have three people who talk about the discussion material, and so to actually have 30 or 40 people at the same time talking about it is really interesting,” said Megan Malone, Teaching Assistant to Dr. Monica Rankin’s United States history course, in the video below.

During lecture, students tweet comments or questions via laptop or cell phone, while the TA and Dr. Rankin respond to a real-time feed displayed prominently in front of the room. Students who manage to live off the grid for 50 minutes can still pass in hand-written notes for the TA to tweet after class.

Students in another Twitter-friendly classroom at Purdue University agree that digital communication helps overcome the shyness barrier. “It’s just an easy way to answer questions in class without embarrassing yourself and raising your hand in a big lecture hall,” said one student. Studies frequently discover that greater participation translates into better academic performance, motivation, and a likelihood of adopting different points of view, which is why it is so striking that Twitter can foster that type of communication.

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A Community of Learners

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The dynamic of an intellectual ecosystem, where students dive deep into class readings and argue contentious issues outside of class, is difficult to create if discussion ends when class is over. Fortunately, Twitter has no time limit. In fact, Dr. Rankin’s colleague David Parry, Professor of Emerging Media at the University of Texas, found that Twitter chatter during class spilled over into the students’ free time.

“The first thing I noticed when the class started using Twitter was how conversations continued inside and outside of class,” Parry wrote. “Once students started Twittering I think they developed a sense of each other as people beyond the classroom space, rather than just students they saw twice a week for an hour and a half.” As a result, classroom conversation became more productive as “people were more willing to talk, and [be] more respectful of others.”

Parry’s experience is in line with results of one of the first education studies of Twitter, which found that students do indeed carry on discussion outside of the classroom.

In part, students find themselves checking the feed after hours because the public trail of Twitter chatter doubles as an excellent study aid. As one student from Rankin’s class put it, “The significant terms that we’ve talked about in discussions, we’ll tweet that, and you can [go] back [to] that, and it’s a pretty good study aid.” This, in turn, keeps Twitter on their minds, fueling the cycle of involvement.

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Conclusion

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For schools hit hard by the recession, Twitter is an inexpensive solution to the growing problem of increasing class sizes. It is a tried-and-true platform to let conversations flourish. Indeed, Dr. Parry declared that “it was the single thing that changed the classroom dynamics more than anything I’ve ever done teaching.”

5 Winning Corporate Social Good Campaigns

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Geoff Livingston co-founded Zoetica to focus on cause-related work, and released an award-winning book on new media Now is Gone in 2007.

Companies on the social web are increasingly trying to create better relationships by doing good. These social media efforts have created incredible new ways for companies to partner with non-profits and customers. The resulting wide ranging series of initiatives include contests, giveaways, fundraising drives and events to benefit communities.

While cause marketing and corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs have been around for some time with fantastic campaigns, open crowd-oriented social media initiatives are new. We decided to take a look at some of the best corporate efforts around.

These five initiatives represent some of the best corporate “social media for social good” campaigns to date.

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1. DonorsChoose Crate & Barrel Gift Certificates

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Crate & Barrel spends part of its advertising budget to send DonorsChoose gift certificates to its customers, allowing them to determine which education initiatives they want to invest in online. DonorsChoose features projects posted by teachers across America, and potential donors can browse the projects and post reviews.

Since the effort started five years ago, 347,000 students have been impacted by more than 14,500 projects, resulting in 434,000+ hours of classroom instruction. In one benchmark study, 11% of the certificates were redeemed on the DonorsChoose site, and 82% of customers who redeemed the certificates were “very likely to consider Crate & Barrel for their next home furnishings or accessories purchase” compared to 76% of a control group of customers that didn’t get certificates, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Cause and Effect Blogger Leyla Farah wrote, “In this case study, the two groups of consumers experienced exactly the same store and products and sales associates, but those who were given the option to take a philanthropic action after leaving the store, perceived their experience very differently.”

Disclosure: Mashable () has participated in DonorsChoose.

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2. Target Gives the Check to Facebook

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In one of the first major crowdsourced do-good contests in social media, Target’s Bullseye Gives program had a $3 million purse that was voted on over a two-week period. Target let its Facebook community (now numbering more than 900,000 people) decide amongst 10 non-profits.

“Target’s ‘Bullseye Gives’ was the first CSR effort that visibly combined CSR with social media in the form of a contest, and we’ve seen many follow — Chase Bank and Pepsi amongst them — almost to the point of contest fatigue,” said Changeblogger Alexandra Bornkessel. “It was an innovative approach that got many involved, and got people talking. A lesson learned was that while it was a win for Target, it left non-profits wanting more — challenging us all to do better.”

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3. Ford Helps Invisible People Across America

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So many of these campaigns feature large purses, but what really matters is visibility and impact. That’s why Ford’s sponsorship of Mark Horvath’s drive across America was a game changer. The company simply provided a Ford Flex and a company-promoted social site to Horvath’s little-known “Invisible People” campaign. The end result? Ford made homelessness a primary issue on the nostalgic American road.

Further, the 11,263 mile effort legitimized Horvath’s “Invisible People” campaign online. Since last summer, he has become a national leader in the battle against homelessness.

“Let’s be real here, homelessness is not a sexy cause,” said Horvath. “Plus, at the time I was unemployed, without any income and I just lost my house to foreclosure.  Ford took a huge risk on me and it paid off for both of us.  Besides several TV packages, many newspaper and blog mentions, I believe Scott Monty and Ford’s biggest return on their investment was helping hurting people.”

“Ford’s support of the Invisible People project was never one of lead generation; it was mainly because we believed in Mark’s mission and because it aligned with our own strategic initiatives,” said Scott Monty, Ford’s social media lead. “Since the very earliest days of the company, we’ve always believed in giving back to the communities in which we do business — it’s just in our corporate DNA. …[W]e felt that Mark’s project was a way to extend that and to give some additional exposure to some of our strong products.”

Disclosure: The Ford Fiesta Movement was a charitable sponsor of Mashable’s Summer of Social Good campaign.

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4. Stonyfield Farms Says “Have A Cow”

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The Stonyfield Have-A-Cow program educates interested parties about life on organic farms and its impact on the planet’s health. The CSR effort ties back beautifully into the company’s organic differentiator. And overall, Stonyfield gives away 10% of its profits ($10 million to date) to support the environment and organic programs.

“They’ve leveraged what is both part of their story and their social responsibility card into an engaging, educational and successful social media arsenal: Farm cam video diaries; blog () with a farmer; Twitter account (with the standard customer service and promotions); online community and more,” said Changeblogger Amy Sample Ward. “Anecdotally, I’ve even found Stonyfield Farm’s content engaging enough that as a vegan I’ve still participated in the ‘have a cow’ program.”

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5. The Pepsi Refresh Project

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Pepsi Refresh is still in the works: Awards () have yet to be granted and community impact has yet to be determined. But there’s no question that Pepsi trumped this year’s Super Bowl ad hoopla with its audacious $20 million budget reallocation to the crowdsourced community giving program. A weak year in Super Bowl ads helped make Pepsi’s decision look even smarter, giving the company a ton of publicity.

The contest of all contests has garnered significant support online, too. “There are a lot of reasons why Pepsi Refresh works, but two stand out in my mind,” said Jason Falls, author of the Social Media Explorer blog. “First, it’s not just writing one check to a good cause to show you’re giving back, it’s a program that can make hundreds of little impacts over time, any of which may snowball into larger impacts.”

“The second reason it’s so powerful for Pepsi is that the decision of who gets the money is at least partially (and it seems more than just a small part) in the hands of us, the voters,” continued Falls. “We can help decide how Pepsi invests in our communities, our environment, our health and so on. It’s not just about supporting good causes, it’s about letting your customers help decide which ones are worth supporting.”

Disclosure: Pepsi sponsored Mashable’s NextUp NYC: The Future Journalist event.

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Honorable Mention: Tyson Delivers Hunger Relief

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We’ve seen great bursts of tweets and blog posts supporting their social media comment contests, but Tyson’s chicken-giving efforts are more than a gimmick. The company has evolved its hunger relief effort over the past decade to its current social media savvy, geoweb-enabled presence. As part of its efforts it sponsors hunger-specific charities like Share Our Strength. During that time it has donated more than 41 million pounds of meat to foodbanks across the country.

“What sets them apart in my mind is that Tyson sincerely puts the cause first,” said Changeblogger John Haydon. “Billy Shore, founder of Share Our Strength, and other leaders recognize this long standing commitment from Tyson. Standing side-by-side with a common mission creates unity between these two organizations — and this can’t be overlooked.”

These are just a few of the many efforts to date. Which corporate social media do good efforts would you add?

Yelp Hit With Class Action Lawsuit For Running An “Extortion Scheme”

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by Robin Wauters on Feb 24, 2010

Two law firms, Beck & Lee from Miami and The Weston Firm in San Diego, have filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court alleging unfair business practices by local business review and rating website operator Yelp.

The plaintiff in the suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by the San Francisco startup, after which its sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review.

Sounds familiar, you say?

You may be thinking of last year, when East Bay Express ran an explosive story, basically accusing Yelp of being in the ‘Business of Extortion 2.0′, which covered similar ground. Shortly after reporter Kathleen Richards published the article, Yelp vehemently denied everything and called her piece inaccurate.

Now, the company will have to defend itself in court rather than on its company blog.

The lawsuit essentially alleges that the heavily funded startup runs an “extortion scheme” and has “unscrupulous sales practices” in place to generate revenue, in which the company’s employees call businesses demanding monthly payments in the guise of advertising contracts, in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews.

The case, which is styled Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital Inc. v. Yelp Inc., was filed on February 23, 2010, and is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. We have an e-mail in with Yelp and are awaiting a response.

Update: a Yelp representative commented as follows:

Yelp provides a valuable service to millions of consumers and businesses based on our trusted content. The allegations are demonstrably false, since many businesses that advertise on Yelp have both negative and positive reviews. These businesses realize that both kinds of feedback provide authenticity and value. Running a good business is hard; filing a lawsuit is easy. While we haven’t seen the suit in question, we will dispute it aggressively.

The class action lawsuit comes mere weeks after Yelp took a large investment from Elevation Partners, and months after we reported the company walked away from a $550 million Google acquisition deal.