You can listen to live webcast via the Senate Commerce Committee’s website at http://commerce.senate.gov.

The Washington Post reports that a vast majority of Internet users (eight out of 10 respondents) in the U.S. want the ability to opt out of Internet tracking from a single location – similar to the “do not call” list available for phones.

With all of the recent high profile data breaches including Sony PS3 network and the consumer uproar over Facebook privacy settings, it will be interesting follow the legislation that may follow.

The Witness List Includes:

Witness Panel 1

• The Honorable Julie Brill
  Commissioner
  Federal Trade Commission
• The Honorable Cameron F. Kerry
  General Counsel
  U.S. Department of Commerce
• Mr. Austin Schlick
  General Counsel
  Federal Communications Commission

Witness Panel 2

• Mr. Scott Taylor
  Vice President and Chief Privacy Officer
  Hewlett-Packard Company
• Mr. Stuart Pratt
  President and CEO
  Consumer Data Industry Association
• Ms. Ioana Rusu
  Regulatory Counsel
  Consumers Union
• Mr. Tim Schaaff
  President
  Sony Network Entertainment International
• Mr. Thomas M. Lenard Ph.D.
  President and Senior Fellow
  Technology Policy Institute

Google’s long awaited social networking service,  the Google+ project, debuted this past Tuesday, albeit as an invite only service at this point.

Google+ is looking to differentiate themselves from rivals, Facebook and Twitter, by emphasizing privacy and user customization, which are much publicized Facebook issues of late and are often described as confusing, self-serving, and in a constant state of flux.  Case in point, where is that darn button to turn off my “Likes”?!  To be fair, you can “Unlike” if you are on the page you once liked, but how many know that…  It can all be very confusing.

The Google+ network is designed around users’ social circles (called +Circles) and lets users selectively share with specific groups within their personal network, rather than sharing with all their social connections at once.  In Google’s own words, Google+ allows “you to share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.”

With that said, Google is a big corporation with a focus on profits same as Facebook.  A closer look at Google+’s privacy policy states in their own words, “We will record information about your activity – such as posts you comment on and the other users with whom you interact – in order to provide you and other users with a better experience on Google services,” the policy reads.”  Wired’s own Ryan Singel writes, “While the language seems to be plain-spoken, it’s very unclear what this actually means. “Google Services” has grown to be a huge category, including such a range of diverse products that includes search, e-mail, maps, advertising, and even a high-end women’s clothing shopping site.”

With that said, I believe Google is addressing consumer privacy concerns with their Circles feature and is a first attempt to solve one of the major weaknesses associated with other  social networking services; protecting your personal information and online identity.  Now that Facebook has a credible competitor to push them to innovate once again (MySpace Dead?), I am looking forward to the future of both services.

The Pew research study included 800, 12 – 17 year olds and found:

• 93% Use the Internet
• 75% Own a Cell Phone
• 58% of 12 Year Olds Own a Cell Phone
• 73% Use Social Networking Sites
• 54% Use Text Messaging Daily, since 2006

The Girl Scouts survey was conducted with 1,026 girls ages 14 – 17 years old.

Highlights include:

• 68% of girls have had a negative experience on a social networking site
• 85% of girls have talked with their parents about safe social networking behavior
• 50% admit they aren’t as careful as they should be
• 94% of girls agree that “most girls my age use social networking sites to make themselves look cooler than they are.”

The upside:

• 56% of girls agree that social networks help them feel closer and more connected to friends
• 92% of girls would give up all their social networking friends to keep their best friend.

Conclusion and Tips from the surveys:

• Social Networks aren’t going away
• Parents should communicate with their children about safe social networking
• Parents should familiarize themselves with social networking
• Parents should monitor online activity and chat sessions on social networking services

Research on younger children is limited, but anecdotal evidence shows that many of them are also logging on.

A recent news story run by The New York Times interviewed Cristina Flores, 44, a nurse in San Francisco, who said she had decided to allow her 11-year-old son to get onto Facebook rather than deny it to him and risk that he would sign up behind her back. Besides, she said, she did not realize there were any age restrictions on the site.

“It’s not like there’s a legal age limit for being on the Internet,” Ms. Flores said.

Her son Jake said he had told Facebook that he was 15: “I just picked something random.”

In one of Jake’s fifth-grade classes at Commodore Sloat Elementary school, 15 of the 30 students said they had Facebook accounts.

In two surveys reported  by Pew Internet Research in 2009 — of 700 and 935 teens, respectively — 38 percent of respondents ages 12 to 14 said they had an online profile of some sort.  While 61 percent of those in the study, ages 12 to 17, said they use social-networking sites to send messages to friends, and 42 percent said they do so every day.

Considering the data used in the survey is a few years old, it’s not a stretch to assume those numbers are much higher in 2011.

By contrast, here are the official ages as reported by Facebook and Twitter profiles.  Twitter now requires users to be age 18+.

I think we can all agree that the numbers are skewed in favor of older Users.  Question of course remains, what are the potential affects of kids on Facebook?  Other than the obvious lying, we would like to hear your opinion.

In an effort to better address the problem of teen Sexting, Texas Governor Rick Perry last week signed a bill (Texas Senate Bill 407) designed to limit the criminal penalties of teenager Sexting.  Currently, any person who possesses or transmits a nude image of a minor (including kids sending their own picture to another kid) can be prosecuted for felony child pornography possession or child trafficking.  Convicted youths face prison time and lifetime registration as a sex offender.  Because of the life-long consequences associated with child pornography felony charges, Senator Kirk Watson in partnership with Attorney General Greg Abbott sponsored a Bill to provide prosecutors “an alternate remedy that would discourage children from sexting but not ruin their young lives.”

Under the bill, first-time violators under the age of 18 would face a Class C misdeamonr for sexting.  You can learn more [pdf] by visiting www.texasattorneygeneral.gov.

As a parent of teenagers and owner of a business that develops eyeGuardian technology to block Illicit Images from mobile text messages, I am constantly aware of the many dire consequences associated with child Sexting.  With that said, I am very encouraged that Texas is taking a leadership position in finding ways to address the problem without ruining a kids life.

Tips to Help Parents Talk To Your Kids About Sex and Technology

Things to Think About Before Pressing “Send”

The obvious winners are Employers who rely on company’s such as  Social Intelligence Corp. (SIC) to monitor and track public online records of employees as well as screen potential candidates.  “We store records for up to seven years as long as those records haven’t been disputed,” Geoffrey Andrews, SIC’s COO, said in an e-mail to Forbes. “If a record is disputed and changed, then we delete the disputed record and store the new record when appropriate.”  View  Social Intelligence Corp. policy.

Since I love stories with Morals we should conclude with this one – what you say and the images and videos you post online are NOT private.  Your reputation can depend on it.  Need help setting up your Facebook privacy settings, AllFaceBook as a great tutorial.

Also, consider becoming a beta customer for ImageVision’s EyeGuardian for Facebook – beta launching July 5th.  More details coming soon, but yes, the service will include our Award Winning Visual Filtering technology.

As of earlier this week, you can now add the Amish to the list getting in on the Sexting bandwagon.  “Indiana’s Connersville Police Department allege Willard Yoder, 21, used to send 600 texts, as well as nude photos and explicit videos to the phone of a 12-year-old girl, which was blessedly apprehended by her parents before she became overly exposed.” – Helen A.S. Popkin MSNBC.

I think I can hear Brett Favre mumbling something about “If Only I Had EyeGuardian Visual Filtering…”

note:  any and all puns above are purely in the head of the writer

1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
2. In 10 years over 40% of the Fortune 500 will no longer be here
3. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
4. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
5. 1 in 5 couples meet online; 3 in 5 gay couples meet online
6. 1 in 5 divorces are blamed on Facebook
7. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest and 2x the size of the U.S. population
10. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%

Source:  Socialnomics

The 10 Facebook Privacy Settings You Need To Know

Several of my kids have Facebook accounts as do myself, my wife, siblings, and parents – yes my whole family.  I even have a brother and brother-in-law who work at Facebook in Austin.  Needless to say, my wife and I are big fans of the service as apparently are most of the online world.  Latest statistics show that if Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd largest.  Give them a few years and I’m sure they will be number one!

With that said, I hear many parents asking if ImageVision can help monitor their kids Facebook account.  It’s not that the parents asking don’t want the responsibility, but that it has become a 24/7 job trying to monitor their children’s social network.  With all those “friends of friends” and privacy stealing apps, it’s a no wonder this has become a hot topic.  So much so that California has proposed SB 242 that will require social networking sites such as Facebook to guard residents private information as the default setting rather than a hidden setting.

As a Facebook subscriber and a parent of kids on Facebook, I know how difficult Facebook privacy settings are and am glad to see States getting involved to force improvements, especially where minors are concerned.

As reference, here are examples of the types of offending ad content.

Image Vision Labs iRecognize product is used by many online websites to filter this and other types of ImageSPAM – text saved as an Image.

What makes ImageSPAM so difficult to detect is that most automated filtering technology used by email providers and web advertisers analyzes only textual content for keywords and phrases to filter.  However, many online and email advertisers get get around this by saving the text as images.  While OCR technology is able to analyze formatted image documents, analyzing text in natural images is a much harder problem to solve.

Examples of the challenges include:

• Varying fonts and sizes
• Varying colors and illuminations
• Image noise and blur
• No defined page layout
• Occlusions due to graphics and images

Our iRecognize solution incorporates  a number of unique algorithms to solve these challenges in order to extract text and other image features to filter content such as ImageSPAM, Copyrighted Content, Logos, and many other objects.