From Politico:

Lawmakers are asking the FTC to investigate Facebook following reports that the social network has been collecting data even from users logged out of their profiles.

The concerns from Capitol Hill came Wednesday in a letter by Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), who have repeatedly questioned Facebook’s privacy practices.

The duo expressed deep concern with the findings of one Australian security blogger, who discovered this week Facebook was gathering data even from logged out users whenever they visited Web pages that feature the social network’s signature “Like” button.

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European courts brought more bad news to Google’s recent reign of error as Switzerland’s top Court ruled that Google’s Street View mapping service violated the privacy of its citizens forcing Google to blur faces and license plate numbers before putting images on the Internet. The Swiss Court stated, “the interest of the public in having a visual record and the commercial interests of the defendants in no way outweighs the rights over one’s own image.” Switzerland joins the United Kingdom, Spain and France all of whom have found that Google violated various privacy laws.

Lately, the United States has gotten into the act.  Last year, the Federal Communications Commission opened an investigation after the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint asking the Commission to investigate violations of federal wiretap law and the U.S. Communications Act. Now, the FTC has launched an anti-trust probe into Google and the Senate will be holding hearings on privacy and Google’s anti-competitiveness nature when Congress returns in September.  But authorities have only begun to scratch the surface of issues relating to whether Google has lived up to its mantra of “Do No Evil.”

One thing is clear–Google’s position on privacy turns America’s long-standing view of the Constitution on its head.

In December 2009, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, declared about privacy concerns: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines—including Google—do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”

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Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), the chairwoman of the subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, has opened hearings on the issue of privacy and the Internet. Not surprisingly the poster child for privacy violations — Google–came up often.

Google’s policy toward individual and personal privacy of its users can be summed up by comment of their CEO Eric Schmidt who said, “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” Unfortunately for consumers, it appears that Google cross that line – often.

Google’s history of privacy violations is long and often appears to be part company policy. Google has admitted it collected personal information and data for three years across the globe while its cars traveled through neighborhood snapping pictures for its Street View program. The cars also collected information from Wi-Fi’s from people’s homes.

Former House Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton initially called for hearings into Google’s Wi-Fi scandal. “[Google] made fairly significant verbal assurances that they would improve their behavior but apparently that’s all they did,” Barton said. “They really didn’t change their business model and it appears to me Google had adopted a model of saying one thing in Washington and doing another in their business practices. We might need to drop the ‘G’ from Google and just call them ‘Oogle’ because of what they appear to be doing,” he said.

If the Wi-Fi incident were the only instance where Google grabbed personal information from consumers, it might be excused but there appears to be a clear pattern of apathy towards personal privacy.

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The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) supposedly voluntary guidelines for marketing food products to children, if adopted, would undermine free speech, seriously hinder small businesses, consumer choice, and could adversely affect rates of childhood obesity.

The guidelines, put forth by an interagency working group with members from the FTC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, stipulate that producers of food and drink products who market to children between the ages of 2 and 17 voluntarily make sure those products contribute to the government’s recommended daily nutritional requirements and do not contain high levels of added sugar or salt.

While the guidelines are touted as voluntary, the power these five agencies wield over the industry would almost certainly make them a de facto mandate, as few members of the industry would risk running afoul of government entities that can issue licenses, fines and sanctions, ban products, and file lawsuits.

The goal of the guidelines, as stated in the Agencies’ report is to address “high rates of childhood obesity” over the next five years. To accomplish that goal, they want to modify the nutritional makeup of foods that are heavily marketed to children so that only foods that make “a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet” are advertised to kids and teens.

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Google has built an empire by collecting, storing and using the personal data of their users. Every email sent through Gmail; every document created with GoogleDocs; every purchase made with Google Wallet; every thing users do is stored on Google’s servers and used for whatever marketing purpose the company sees fit.

The model goes something like this: offer a “free” product and then just sit back and collect all the valuable data users turn over.  Next, store this data forever and finally use the aggregate and historical data to develop behavioral and preference models to sell to advertisers.

But the cache of data that Google has amassed is apparently not enough.  Now the company is seeking to get its hands on personal data from non-Google users and they want their current users to help to get it.  Some might call it crowd sourcing a data heist.

Google’s new product, Google +, is their effort to enter the social media space. Incredibly, they have built a tool to import all the personal information obtained from users’ Facebook accounts onto Google servers—where it will remain forever and be used just as Google uses other data streams.  Not just users’ own private information, rather all of the information on their Facebook accounts including names, addresses, phones numbers, interests, birthdays and websites of their friends.

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News today that the FTC is preparing to issue civil subpoenas as part of a broad anti-trust inquiry into Google’s business practices comes on the heels of a similar—and perhaps more in depth– threat from Congress.

In a letter sent to Google on June 10, the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights Senators Herb Kohl (D-WI) and Mike Lee (R-UT) requested the company provide one of their top two executives to testify at an oversight hearing exploring Google’s business practices.

But so far Google has refused and offered to send their legal counsel instead prompting the Senate subcommittee to threaten subpoenas to compel either Larry Page or Eric Schmidt to appear.

It will be interesting to see how Google responds to the FTC subpoenas. But in the case of Congress, Google’s sudden interest in privacy is irony at its best.

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It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the Obama Administration’s view of business — it publically treats corporations with distain while privately promoting crony capitalism helping their favorite corporations with bailouts and subsidies. GM, Chrysler, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and any company trying to make an electric car, solar panel or wind farm. But by far Google is their favorite crony. As Rep. Darrell Issa, the incoming Chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee, plans his oversight hearing schedule, the incestuous relationship between the $22 billion corporate behemoth and the Obama White House should be worthy of some Mr. Issa’s worthy oversight agenda.

It’s no secret that Google was one of corporate America’s biggest Obama backers donating over $800,000 to his presidential campaign. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt actively promoted his candidacy and helped pay for the Obama inauguration.

And what has Google got for its “investment” and relationship in the Administration? In Washington, there is an old saying – “Personnel equals policy.” In the case of Google, it’s clear the tail is wagging the dog. Former Google policy maker Andrew McLaughlin, was named White House deputy chief technology officer in June where he’ll be in a position to shape policy that affects Google’s rivals creating a disadvantage for Google’s competitors.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg.

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Did Google Money & Influence Buy FTC Decision?

Yesterday we reported that the FTC’s decision to close it’s investigation into the Google WiSpy affair came less than a week after President Obama attended a $30,000-plate fundraiser at the California home of senior Google executive Marissa Mayer. It also came four days after Google, after months of denials, admitted for the first time that its “Street View” video cameras were intercepting emails, passwords and website addresses sent by unsuspecting Internet users.

Now we’ve learned that on September 28, 2009, Becky Burr, another Google lobbyist at Wilmer Hale, emailed White House officials Susan Crawford and Andrew McLaughlin asking for a meeting to request the White House’s assistance in urging the Federal Trade Commission to back off on privacy. Ms. Burr’s email request was as follows (PDF of email exchange can be found here See pages 50-52):

“Wondering if we can get together to discuss the movement away from a ‘notice and choice’ privacy paradigm to a more prescriptive normative approach? This is an emerging theme in the academy, and seems to be gathering favor at the FTC. The move has some worrisome implications for innovation, and it seems important for the FTC to have administration input on this… Let me know if this is something of interest.”

Ms. Crawford replied the same day and suggested that White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin – himself a former Google employee who was sanctioned earlier this year for emailing privately through his Gmail account with his former Google colleagues about policy issues that benefited his former employer — should also be a part of that meeting. As documents unearthed by Consumer Watchdog indicate, Mr. McLaughlin agreed to meet with Ms. Crawford and Ms. Burr, suggesting Friday, October 2nd.

The outcome of that meeting is not clear, and while the email exchange occured before the WiSpy scandal broke, what it clearly demonstrates is Google’s willingness to use its close relationship with senior White House officials to pressure regulatory agencies to back off privacy policies it did not like.

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Yesterday, the White House blog asked “as special interest billionaires continued to pour secret donations of millions of dollars each into front groups supporting Republicans, we asked the obvious question: “What do they expect in return?“”   They added, “Congressional Republicans have made clear that lobbyists have a seat at the table even when they are formulating their party’s broader strategy and governing vision.”

People in glass White Houses shouldn’t throw stones.

• “Google’s Marissa Mayer is hosting President Obama for a Democratic party fundraiser tonight. Tickets are $30,000-a-head….” – San Francisco Chronicle, October 21, 2010

• “After analyzing the unencrypted WiFi payload data captured by its Street View cars, Google now admits that the system captured entire e-mails, URLs and even user passwords.” - ZDNet, October 23, 2010

• “The Federal Trade Commission [has] closed its investigation into Google’s collection of consumer data through its Street View cars….”  San Francisco Chronicle, October 27, 2010

The FTC decision is a classic DC whitewash, but it a pattern for this administration which has repeatedly given Google “get out of jail free” cards, no-bid contracts and undisclosed lobbying and business access to top administration officials.  And when Big Government exposed the administration coordinating privately with Google, what happened?

Nothing.

That isn’t true everywhere.

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In the battle over media and communications freedom, no group poses a more serious threat to a free and independent press than the insultingly misnamed regulatory activist group Free Press. Along with their founders, the prolific neo-Marxist media theorist Robert W. McChesney and Nation correspondent John Nichols, Free Press has engaged in relentless agitation for a truly radical media and communications policy agenda, and their influence is now spreading throughout the Obama Administration.

The Free Press-McChesney blueprint for media “reform” reads more like a script for State servitude. On the regulatory side, they call for media ownership restrictions, “localism” mandates, “Net neutrality” regulations, price controls on broadband, advertising and copyright restrictions, and layers of additional regulatory edicts.  Once all that red tape smothers the life out the independent press and private communications providers, they plan to have the State step in become the primary benefactor of the Fourth Estate and high-tech infrastructure. For starters, McChesney and Nichols advocate a $35 billion annual “public works” program for the press modeled after the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal era. Their media WPA would include a “News AmeriCorps” for out-of-work journalists, a “Citizenship News Voucher” to funnel taxpayer support to struggling media entities, a significant expansion of postal subsidies, a massive new subsidy for journalism schools, corporate welfare for newspapers sufficient to pay 50 percent of the salaries of all “journalistic employees,” municipal government ownership of press and infrastructure, and many more bureaucratic programs. (more…)

Anthony Weiner honed his political craft working for New York Senator Charles Schumer, and it shows in his recent attack on Glenn Beck and his sponsor Goldline.

Weiner and his comrades’ views are well reflected when he says in his Goldline Report:

…during troubling economic times it seems there is always someone ready to take advantage of the situation and profit from people’s fears.

In the past there is always the “product” that is either the next big thing (the dot com boom) or the investment that will never go down in price (the housing market), and in the past much of the media has failed in its duty to conduct due diligence, but never before have they worked so hand in hand to cheat consumers.  Commentators like Glenn Beck who are shilling for Goldline are either the worst financial advisors around or knowingly lying to their loyal viewers.

Goldline’s high pressure sales tactics and fear mongering about big government as well as their ability to hire sales staff and spokespeople who misrepresent their roles are case studies in why entities like the SEC and FTC are necessary.

Of course, it is the unscrupulous businessmen and their shills in the media who are preying on people’s fears to make a buck.  Guess what Mr. Weiner? It is because people like you are running our nation that is precisely why people are turning to gold, and precisely why places like Goldline can charge a premium.

You see, the reverse is true when it comes to your argument that because of the sales representatives at Goldline who “misrepresent their roles,” the SEC and FTC are necessary entities.  We need gold and thus gold salesmen because agencies like the SEC and FTC, along with you and your colleagues in Congress and over at the Fed help sanction and blow the very bubbles that you speak to and debase our currency, stealthily taxing us and leading us on a path to monetary and fiscal collapse.  It is because of your “consumer protections,” that consumers are made unsafe.  It is because of your regulations that we have distorted markets and the moral hazard that encourages imprudent risk-taking.

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Tons of news in the market today as we unpack the surprisingly good job numbers, the Senate holds placed on Ben Bernanke’s renomination, and the massive Comcast-NBC deal and what it says about the new realities for mass media. Today’s the 99th edition of Coffee and Markets, a daily podcast from The New Ledger on politics, policy and the marketplace with Francis Cianfrocca, brought to you by BigGovernment.com.

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Related Links:

On Bernanke: Vitter, DeMint, Corker, Bunning
FTC on Media Bailout
New Realities for Mass Media
The FTC’s Shallow Dive into Journalism’s Future
The Real Reason Comcast is Buying NBC
Mainstream Media’s Broken Business Model