Make Money Online

Affiliate marketing is receiving some not so great publicity…again. This time it comes from Rik Ferguson over at TrendMicro blog as he reveals a Facebook Account Upgrade Scam, where fan pages promote a Gold Facebook account upgrade. Of course, there is no such thing as a gold Facebook account.

From Rik Ferguson’s blog post (bolding by me for emphasis):

So what’s the point for the scammer? Well if you follow all the instructions, you first invite all your friends to come and check out this (cough) great deal. Then, if you are credulous enough to click the button, you are informed that in order to access the Account Upgrade page you must complete “1 quick, free survey”, different versions of the scam page offer different surveys, but this is where the money is made.

The survey I tested linked (via a couple of affiliate marketing services) to a “Werewolf vs. Vampire” quiz which promised to tell me which I am (surely I should know that already?) at the end of the ten questions I am invited to enter my mobile phone number to receive my results. If I do that I am agreeing to pay a £9.00 joining fee followed by £9.00 every week until I cancel my membership via SMS.

Of course, I immediately wanted to know which affiliate networks were involved considering TrendMirco’s report of around one million Facebook user’s being subscribed to the numerous fake gold account fan pages.

The Gory (Albeit Probably Boring) Details

Although, it was stated that the scam had been reported to Facebook and the content was most likely being removed, I got out my shovel and began digging. A quick Google search showed the content was being removed, but I was able to quickly pull up some of the offending pages courtesy of Google cache (see below).

The first thing I noticed was that the affiliate behind the fake Facebook upgrades appears to be geo-targeting the offers displayed to the end user. While Rik Ferguson obviously received UK cell phone offers, the offers displayed to me were US based offers (see below).

The actual offers differed at times, but all pretty much followed the same CPA network click stream. The irony of one of the quizzes being called “How Dumb Are You” was not lost on me.

The domain responsible for the above display on Facebook is corporate-promo-mfg.com. This domain was consistent throughout all of my research.

The affiliate link on corporate-promo-mfg.com is for CPALead with the publisher id 42109. Whois records for CPALead.com show the company as located in Wisconsin. The contact information on their web site indicates they are located in Las Vegas, NV.

CPALead redirects the click to click2go.org with an affiliate id of 3013 and sub id 42109 (passing the original publisher id). Click2go uses a Privacy Whois service, however the IP Location is tied to TattoMedia.

TattoMedia is certainly a player in these types of SMS ads and I’ve come across them numerous times in connection with adware usage. At this point, CPALead is acting as an affiliate/publisher of TattoMedia.

Click2Go then redirects the click to webventures.directtrack.com with the aff id CD43 and sub id 3013 (the id for CPALead as an affiliate with TattoMedia). Note that at this point, the original affiliate/publisher id is no longer being carried through on the actual tracking links. If you go to webventures.directtrack.com, you are brought to a sign-up page for MundoMedia.com. MundoMedia uses a Privacy Whois service as well, but their web site shows contact information for Toronto and Los Angeles.

MundoMedia  redirects the click to linktrack66.com containing the same aff id and sub id. Linktrack66.com is another tracking domain associated with MundoMedia.

Finally the click is redirected to MyMindQuizzes.com where the actual survey resides. MyMindQuizzes also uses a Privacy Whois service but resides on the same IP address as MundoMedia. Sometimes CPA networks will host a sign-up form for an advertiser on their own servers; other times it may be the CPA network themselves in ownership of the offer.  Looking at the Terms of Service page on MyMindQuizzes, I found mention of the company name Neo Image.

The short version is I found three CPA Networks involved in these deceptive Facebook ads: CPALead, TattoMedia and MundoMedia.

The Plot Thickens

You may be asking yourself “So what, the fraudulent ads were reported and Facebook removed the pages. It’s just a little bit of bad PR that will most likely quickly fade in people’s memory.”

If only that was case. The reality is that people who are making some nice change, regardless of how they are making it, aren’t always willing to give it up quickly. TrendMicro reported the incident on Monday. On Wednesday I did a search through Facebook (not Google but Facebook) and I found several new and active fake Facebook Gold Account fan pages with fan totals in the tens of thousands. When I viewed the profile pictures of one of these new accounts I saw pictures were added Monday. Even while Facebook was removing pages, new ones were evidently being set up.

Some of those pages are now gone, but I see new active pages again today with one simple search.

And while Facebook may be attempting to keep up the affiliate links involved remain active. There does not appear to have been any termination of the affiliate account by the CPA networks. Indeed, if you recall I went from a Google cached page on the account on Facebook to even track which CPA Networks were involved.

The Implications

There are several implications to this type of situation. The most obvious is  while the incidents were initially reported in the UK, they are now happening in the US as well. There is no way this ad promotion will meet the FTC guidelines regarding deceptive advertising practices. You don’t have to be a lawyer to figure that one out. When you start hitting numbers of consumers in the million plus range being potentially impacted, it’s almost like screaming for the FTC big stick to head your way. Everyone in the click stream trail is at legal risk.

What about those consumers? If you look at the last screen shot I posted, you’ll see that Facebook groups against this one particular scam are beginning to form. I’ll hazard a wild guess and say consumers aren’t happy about it either.

Is it a wonder that security companies tend to be less than affectionate towards affiliates? This type of activity certainly doesn’t help our case, particularly when they have seen affiliate links tied to scams, adware and the such for years now.  It should be noted that Rik Ferguson didn’t say “CPA Network affiliates”, he said “affiliate marketing”.

The lack of transparency build into the sub-affiliate model should be neither an inherent excuse nor a mechanism to hide behind when it comes to ensuring fraudulent activities do not tarnish and stain our whole industry. It’s not like we are talking about an affiliate who is capable of generating only a limited number of ad views.  If a network cannot monitor traffic from an affiliate at that level, then they probably shouldn’t be a network.  CPA Networks must become more active in establishing acceptable marketing practices, monitoring their programs and taking action on offenses within the industry and as an industry, we must be clear to those outside of our industry, including consumers, that these types of fraudulent marketing practices are unacceptable.

These types of incidents impact our industry as a whole and how we function and navigate within it.  Please stay tuned for Part Two of the post.

I wish that I could say “the end” but it’s not the end of story.  That’s will Part 2 of this post.

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Black Hat Affiliate Tactics in the Facebook Era

Merit Solutions Australia is bringing job application
training and management coaching to Cairns,
North Queensland.

Merit HR Consultants have worked with over 5,000
Government selection panels over 13 years.

They will be sharing their knowledge and experience
in two workshops in Cairns:

1. Winning Government Jobs
Success Strategies for Job Applicants
Breakfast Presentation
Friday 26 March -

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Success Strategies for Job Applicants and the Leadership Capability Framework – Cairns, North Queensland

Like usual the combination Danica Patrick and bikini clad models got Go Daddy’s commercials a lot of attention during the Super Bowl; even the ad that was banned. Now Go Daddy is hoping to leverage their same customer base that made its provocative videos into viral hits to help drive sales; announcing this week that they are launching a new internal affiliate program.

“Our customers are our greatest marketers,” said Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. “They use our products, know the quality of Go Daddy’s customer service and can speak to the experience firsthand.”

The new affiliate program will run in tandem with their long standing (since 2005) affiliate program with Commission Junction. The CJ program, which has a five bar out of five bar rating on the network, will continue to cater to professional affiliate marketers. According to Yong Lee, Vice President Business Development & Reseller Group for Go Daddy, “Go Daddy has a great relationship with Commission Junction and currently has no plans to change this.”

The new in-house affiliate program will cater specifically to Go Daddy customers, a bit like a referral system focusing on ease of use. “Go Daddy is looking to serve people who already use Go Daddy services and want to make a commission for recommending our products and services,” said Yong. “We setup our new Affiliate Program to be easy-to-use and approachable allowing customers to suggest Go Daddy products and services to site visitors, friends and family with almost no effort.”

The program is free to join and offers a 20 percent commission a 45-day cookie. Considering it is the largest ICANN-accredited registrar in the world, if the program can leverage its user base like Amazon did with its associate the upside for Go Daddy could be huge.

The ubiquity of Go Daddy’s services, which have become an easy one-stop shop for new web users, should make this program spread fairly quickly, especially among affiliate newcomers.  For users who have had a good experience with Go Daddy, it should be no-brainer – the endorsement of Web site services on your Web site? Naturally.

For Go Daddy, it’s the latest advertising push. After its annual titillating Super Bowl ad, Go Daddy has also recently announced a social media driven ad campaign. The affiliate program should continue to spread a bigger footprint for the raucous domain register online.

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Danica Patrick Grabs the Headlines But Affiliates Make the Sales

Bread Making Tips | Dough Temperatures | Mixing The Dough Dough Temperatures In a bakery, maintaining the correct temperatures for preferments—generally cool—and proof boxes for dough rising are critical for consistency of flavor and an efficient daily baking routine. The ideal dough temperature is around 75 degrees, and to keep it at this temperature requires an ambient temperature of

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Bread Making Tips | Dough Temperature | Mixing The Dough | Bread Healthy

Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you’re a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer’s market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information. Starting today, we’ve added the ability to refine your searches with the “Nearby” tool in the Search Options panel. One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don’t have to worry about adding “Minneapolis” to your query and missing webpages that only say “St. Paul” or “Twin Cities.” Check it out by doing a search, clicking on “show options” and selecting “Nearby.”

You can choose to see results nearby either your default location or a custom location, and you can narrow down to results at the city, region or state level. Try these examples:

[things to do on st. patrick's day] – In the Minneapolis region
[food blogs] – Near you
[farmers market] – Near the city of Ithaca
[dmv] – In the same state as Tucson

The new “Nearby” search option is available now on the google.com domain in English.

Posted by Jackie Bavaro, Product Manager

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Refine your searches by location

According to their own statistics, Facebook currently has more than 400 million active users. Of those users, more than 20 million become fans of Facebook pages every single day. It’s already been happening with Twitter, and now, Google is indexing Facebook Fan pages and displaying them in their search results.

We experimented with this a little bit today to find out whether or not this is already impacting Google search results. In order to come up with a result that all of us here recognized as a Facebook page and we know to be a very popular one, we did a Google search for “can this pickle get more fans than nickelback”. At the time we did our search, the actual Facebook fan page did not show up until the third page of results. Still, it’s better than not being there at all, as before, but I had expected for it to come up a little sooner, which sparked a discussion here on how Google is assigning authority to Facebook Fan pages.

Will you get more authority in Google if you have more fans, or is it just going to be based strictly on the requirements that Google has been using all along?

Either way, at some point I realized that on the Facebook Fan page they had actually changed the spelling of Nickelback to Nickleback to avoid any legal issues, so another search of “can this pickle get more fans than nickleback” moved the Facebook Fan page result up to page two of the results, given that it’s two letters more relevant. Pretty good, or at least, better.

Update: As of Friday morning, each of these search results put the Facebook fan page at number two on the list of results.

But it still didn’t satisfy my own curiosity of how Google would be assigning authority, or giving PageRank to a Facebook page. There has to be a little something else in the Google algorithm that is going to decide whether or not it’s going to be featured as a top result. So, I did a Google search for “how will google assign authority facebook pages”. Incredibly, the first result was actually a Facebook Note that was written by a person with a Facebook Fan page for their business. Well, that worked out well for them, didn’t it? However, I still don’t have an answer to my question.

So, what does it mean for those of us working in affiliate marketing world? It means one more opportunity for brand recognition, another opportunity to build links back to your own site and yet one more opportunity for people to find your page when they’re searching for content relevant to the goods or services that you provide.

Now, what I want to know is, when will I be able to check how many visitors I am getting to my Facebook page? Is Facebook ever going to provide us with some kind of analytics program?

What do you think of this latest addition to the Google algorithm, and how is Google indexing Facebook Fan pages affecting your business? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Google Indexing Facebook Fan Pages

Do you ever sit down to write a blog post, fresh out of ideas and scratching your head until that light bulb turns on? Or are you planning to start a blog but not really sure what to write about? It happens to all of us at some point, so don’t feel like you are alone. Here are some tips to get those blog writing gears going:

1. Set goals for yourself. Although this may seem like the obvious, it is easily overlooked. Why begin a blog writing expedition without an end game?
2. Do some planning. As part 2 to setting your goals, plan out your blog posts for the next week or month – whichever goal you set for yourself. The focus of this exercise is preparation.
3. Research. There are many sites out there that aid in curing writer’s block. Bookmark these sites to reference in those times of need.
4. Read! The more you read the more your brain muscles will flex. Reading will expose you to different writing styles and topics. Go ahead and set a goal for yourself with this as well – start a bit ambitious, such as reading a book a week, so you have plenty to strive for.

So, don’t get stressed or flustered. Even putting one of these tips into effect will result in blog writing improvements. Take a stand – combat writer’s block by proactively taking advantage of those days that flourish with ideas; and most importantly have fun!

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At work, we do these status reports and they’ve been helpful keeping everyone briefed in a large org w/o wasting time. I’ve been doing them w/my kids in the afternoons on the way home from school. Their feedback was that we needed another section for complaints.

Grace listed several complaints and I had to keep telling her to stay on track!

Also, note how important food is to them! Each of them included it in their successes…

Cady (12) — The drill sgt got hers out in 2 mins, and then critiqued everyone else’s

Successes

• Got 4 desserts on her field trip today
• Spoke her spanish conversations almost perfectly
• Won Battleship game after school

Needs to Improve

• Falls too much (up the stairs today, landed on her butt Tuesday)
• Shy

Burning Issue

• Objects to being put in the front row during gym

———–
Grace (9)

Successes

• Everyone liked the presents she made for her friend’s birthday
• Had cake after lunch
• Wrote a song on the piano

Needs to Improve

• Talks too fast (ironically she had to repeat this so we could understand it)
• Doesn’t drink all of her drink at lunch (no idea why she wants to improve this)

Burning Issue

• Struggling w/multiplication

————
Jacob (7) — I loved how pithy his responses were. All boy…

Successes

• Didn’t hit anyone today (I guess this is considered a success… LOL That one really made me laugh)
• Got a perfect score on his quiz
• Enjoyed after school snack (then came promptly home and ate a huge bowl of cereal)

Needs to improve

• Patience
• Running in school

Burning Issue

• None

——-
Ruby (4)

Successes

• Enjoyed nap (she never enjoys naptime)
• Ate all of her grapes at lunch

Needs to Improve

• Going to bed without arguing (she got mad at this point and refused to continue—she keeps this up I’m going to have to fire her)

Social Bookmarking

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An all star line up of panelists representing major verticals focused on online lead generation shared their thoughts on the outlook of the industry. Bruce Eatroff, Partner, Halyard Capital moderated this panel at LeadsCon 2010, held at the Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

The session started off with a reap of last year and it should come as no surprise that 2009 was a tough year for the mortgage and finance industries.

Ty Taylor, Group President of Experian InteractiveSM, began by sharing some of the challenges Experian faced last year, “2009 was definitely challenging, so much of lead gen was focused on mortgage.  Those companies that diversified, leveraged their scale and sell leads down multiple channel and verticals had success.”

Continuing the theme Thomas Evans, President & CEO, Bankrate, Inc., shared insights on the mortgage industry which seemed to be one of the largest verticals represented this year at LeadsCon. Evans also felt 2009 was a tough year, “it was a challenge, CD’s were a good business, credit cards were awful and insurance was good.”

According to Ronald Pruett, Jr., Chief Executive Officer, MercuryMedia, “financial services and health care took a dip, debt settlement and health and beauty went well, however the end of 2009 saw some advertisers pull back (on their marketing spend).”

There was a lot of insightful information in this session and below I will highlight the top three things discussed in this panel. Most sessions at LeadsCon are limited to 30 minutes which makes it challenging to fully dive into a topic.  Thankfully this session was 45 minutes, but it could have gone on much longer.

1. Lead generation marketing emerging into a multi-channel approach
2. Impact of FTC regulations
3. Industry trends to watch for

A lot of time was spent discussing the emerging channels for lead gen in 2010 and beyond.  Leads were historically driven to a call center, however they are now also driving consumers to a website, mobile and social media channels.  Taylor shared that the volume of leads isn’t as high in these additional channels, however the quality is much higher.

Mr. Evans had this to say add,“Lead gen is the hot new thing, it was almost a dirty words a couple years ago and now we are sitting in a room full of smart people. People buying leads only want to deal with a few people through direct, large relationships”.

Matt Coffin, Investor, Coffin Capital discussed some of the impact from the recent FTC regulatory guidelines that passed December 1^st, 2009.  He had this to say about it, “Some of the bigger names are filing Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  It is happening in direct response TV”.  Mr. Evans was able to provide some perspective from the banking industry regarding this matter, “People in Washington are trying to be sure consumers are protected regarding violations of privacy and integrity of data.  As a result, legislators will try to over correct this”.

As for industry trends to watch for everyone agreed that there would be more consolidations of companies, however some felt it would involve a lot of small acquisitions.  Mr. Pruett felt that the application of web and television would be important going forward.  He added this, “You can build great brands through lead gen, it is quickly becoming main stream.  When you can quantify it, you can sell it.”

There was a lot of great information in this session, I hope this recap provided some insight into content this all star lineup provided.  If you attended LeadsCon and would like to add to this, I’d love to read your comments below.

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Our latest Ten Golden Rules Internet Marketing Podcast features Ten Tips for Getting Started on Twitter.

The podcast was recorded for an Internet Marketing Club Wednesday Webinar and it featured famous Twitter experts Warren Whitlock, author of Twitter Revolution, Gail Goodwin from Inspire Me Today and Huffington Post and iconic88 a Twitter Superhero with a semi secret identity.

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New Podcast features Ten Tips for Twitter

Already, tens of thousands of AdSense publishers have used Google Ad Planner to share information about their website with advertisers. We are continuing to invest in the product in order to provide the deepest, most accurate data possible. To that end, we have improved how we calculate site traffic by over 10%, upgraded the way we publish opt-in Google Analytics data from publishers, and renamed the product to DoubleClick Ad Planner. Visit the DoubleClick blog to read more about the new product features and new name.

As always, anyone can use the newly renamed DoubleClick Ad Planner whether or not they are a DoubleClick customer. The product remains free and open for everyone. The URL for publishers to update their profile remains the same: www.google.com/adplanner/publisher.

If you are new to Ad Planner, we invite you to learn more about claiming your site.

Posted by Wayne Lin – Product Manager, DoubleClick Ad Planner

See more here:
Better site traffic data and new name for Google Ad Planner

I dropped my iPhone yesterday and shattered the screen. I’ve dropped it numerous times in the past and nothing ever happened to it. I have to admit I didn’t realize how dependant I was on my iPhone until it went to the big tech graveyard in the sky. I used “her” for everything from accessing my email, Twitter, Google Buzz, Foursquare, and Facebook to name a few. Yes my phone is female and believe it or not I named her. I’ll give you a buck if you can guess her name correctly.

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As the world’s premier athletes assembled in Vancouver for the Winter Games, Googlers in the equally snowy Zurich, Switzerland were preparing for a prestigious event of a different sort. On February 8, 100 top academics from 62 leading universities throughout EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) descended upon our Zurich engineering headquarters for our third annual Faculty Summit — three days of in-depth technical presentations, discussions and networking sessions, all targeted at strengthening partnerships with EMEA’s foremost computer science thinkers. Like their athletic counterparts in Vancouver, Faculty Summit attendees face big challenges. EMEA is a huge and very diverse region where companies and universities alike have huge mountains to climb. By sharing information about our projects, plans and initiatives, we hope to foster mutually beneficial relationships with our academic colleagues and their universities — working together to solve the big problems and drive technology forward.

We designed the Summit to allow maximum potential for debate, networking and reflection. Attendees participated in day-long “stream” discussions on themes ranging from privacy and security — with the participation of leading researchers such as Ross Anderson (University of Cambridge) — to natural language technologies, featuring NLP expert Fred Jelinek (Johns Hopkins University). Academics selected from a range of opt-in “teach the teacher”-style workshops on Google tech (including mobile platforms, MapReduce and web technologies). Additional events included a Google Wave demo geared towards educational use and special sessions for guests from Africa and the Middle East, showcasing Google’s ongoing work in these regions. This year, we added extra time for 1-1 break-out sessions, in which academics and Google engineers met, chatted and developed ideas in an intimate, face-to-face setting.

The Summit also gave us a chance to see long-term relationships maturing and generating concrete outcomes inside and outside academic settings. Notable guests included keynote speaker Professor Andy Hopper, Head of the Cambridge Computer Lab, whose research initiative Computing for the Future of the Planet (CFTFP) received a Google Focused Research Award earlier this month. Andy’s project promises major results in the areas of privacy and green computing research. We were also happy to welcome back former Google Visiting Faculty member Professor Hannah Bast (University of Freiburg). Hannah recently completed a year-long sabbatical with our Zurich development team for Transit in Google Maps, contributing major improvements to an application that started out as a 20 percent project and is now available in over 400 cities around the world. Privacy and security expert Dr. Frank Stajano (University of Cambridge) — our newest Visiting Faculty member — and Sara Adams, Anita Borg Scholar, former Google intern and current software engineer, joined us from the Munich office where they’re working on privacy-related projects. We also had several Faculty Research Award winners in attendance, including Dr. Simon Harper (University of Manchester), Dr. Miles Osborne (University of Edinburgh), Lawrence Muchemi (University of Nairobi) and former Visiting Faculty member Dr. Hinrich Schuetze (University of Stuttgart). The Faculty Research Award supports academics working within universities on areas of mutual interest; for instance, Lawrence’s Award-funded project creates a new mobile application development course for Kenyan students, while Hinrich and his Stuttgart team are improving search engine results by investigating the structure of queries. Hinrich, Lawrence and our other awardees offer examples of how partnerships can lead to amazing results, on local to global scales. We hope their stories inspired both academic and Googler attendees to take advantage of existing programs and help build new opportunities for all tech users.

Our engineering teams in EMEA and our academic partners have lots of work to do in 2010. This year’s Faculty Summit offered an opportunity to explore new solutions, kick-start collaboration and prove, yet again, that our combined efforts always yield results far greater than the sum of their parts! For more information about how Google supports university programs and partnerships, check out our Google Research site and stay tuned for news of the North America Faculty Summit — planned for late July.

Posted by Nelson Mattos, VP, EMEA Product and Engineering

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A meeting of the minds: Google’s 2010 EMEA Faculty Summit

Paypal has begun expanding its money-swapping services to social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook.

Paypal – a unit of Ebay Inc – is poised to jump on the wave of social media interest and offer its services for payment of various products. Facebook has already partnered with Paypal to offer payment services for advertisements and gifts amongst other things. The international appeal and recognition of Paypal has been a major influence on Facebook’s recent partnership. It is expected to increase advertisement income – a major source of revenue for Facebook.

Paypal has also launched a variety of promotions and contests on Twitter to promote the use of Paypal. Contests include having users Tweet something related to a Paypal contest to be entered in a draw for cash prizes, which are then paid out through a Paypal account.

With the apparent decline of Ebay’s auction-based services, Ebay Inc. will undoubtedly look to its other units for growth and sustained profitability.

Can Paypal successfully utilize its international appeal and become a major player in a quickly growing social media landscape?

Will the shift to mobile platforms be a positive or negative influence on Paypal’s success?

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Paypal Reaches out to Social Media

The balance between security and privacy is again being tested as Google has recently requested the help of the US National Security Agency (NSA) to better secure themselves, and their users’ data, from future cyberattacks.

The request comes on the heels of a recent discovery that two Chinese schools, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, an academic institution in China’s Shandong Province with apparent ties to the country’s military, were discovered to be the source of recent attacks against Google and 20 other large corporations. The attacks against Google were aimed at the Gmail accounts of Chinese and Western human rights activists.

The NSA’s Involvement

While both the NSA and Google at first would not confirm their new partnership, as details were being worked out, an NSA spokesperson has claimed they are working on an “information assurance mission,” that involves a broad range of commercial partners and research associates. However, when the Washington Post looked into this partnership, reporters were assured that working with the NSA does not mean that the government agency will have access to users’ searches or e-mail communications and accounts. Google will not share proprietary data either.

The Nature of the Attack

While the NSA certainly has the ability to help Google, or any company, protect themselves against a cyberattack, it is odd that a corporation with some of the top engineers and most brilliant minds would fail to take the necessary measures to prevent the type of breach that would warrant bringing in the NSA to clean up.

Even with the help of the NSA, attacks like these are nearly impossible to stop. In the case of the Google attack, users at Google, and the other targeted companies, visited malicious sites, that exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the Internet Explorer browser. The exploit downloaded an array of malware to the victim’s computer automatically and transparently. These programs then unfurled themselves into the network using sophisticated encryption to prevent detection.

Reactions

Upon learning of the proposed partnership, Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), was quoted as stating that any relationship between the two would be “very problematic.”

“We would like to see Google develop stronger security standards and safeguards for protecting themselves,” he said. “But everyone knows the NSA has two missions: One is to ensure security, and the other is to enable surveillance.”

In a counter move, EPIC has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking NSA communications with Google regarding Google’s failure to encrypt Gmail and cloud computing services. The purpose of this, according to Rotenberg, is to find out what role the NSA has played in shaping privacy and security standards for Google’s services. This request was followed up by a lawsuit against the National Security Agency and the National Security Council, seeking a key document governing national cybersecurity policy.

In addition to concerns raised by EPIC and other privacy rights groups, the move calls into question Google’s promises made when joining the Global Network Initiative. As a member of the GNI, along with Microsoft and Yahoo!, Google has pledged to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy despite increasing government pressure to comply with domestic laws and policies in ways that may conflict with these ideals.

Not all experts are concerned. James Lewis, director and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), believes that it is unlikely this potential partnership will involve the sharing of personal data. Claiming that Google is more likely to only be interested in having the NSA take a look at its networks and help it identify potential weaknesses, “It has nothing to do with intelligence. That point appears to have been missed,” Lewis said, “I don’t have any direct knowledge, but that is my assumption in this case.”

Credit:
Google, NSA Partnership Brings New Privacy Concerns