We have written previously regarding the pitfalls of online contract formation, including where website operators fail to implement website terms in a manner that requires users to expressly accept such terms. A recent...more
Block party. Twitter has revamped its anti-harassment policies to make it easier to report harassment on the network or to block another account. The change follows recent highly-publicized instances of “Twitter harassment,”...more
Yik Yak arrests. For several months now we at Socially Aware have been writing about how college students have been using the purportedly anonymous messaging app Yik Yak to communicate deeply offensive remarks and threats of...more
12/4/2014
/ Anonymity ,
COPPA ,
Criminal Prosecution ,
Data Collection ,
Google ,
GPS ,
Mobile Apps ,
Offensive Language ,
Privacy Concerns ,
Students ,
Uber ,
Video Recordings ,
YouTube
Are parents now liable for what their kids post to Facebook? According to a recent decision in the Georgia Court of Appeals, they are.
The Georgia Court of Appeals held that the parents of a seventh-grade student...more
Invisible hits. What could possibly be meant by the following tweet? “CA-40/43-44/49-44/44-50/36-44/49-10/16/14-52–>49/476-10s.” According to a recent CNN report, GOP groups tweeted such seemingly meaningless gibberish in...more
Commercial free content. Would you pay to diminish the number of ads that appear on your screen while you surf the Web? Google is testing a service that will allow users to do just that. The service, called Contributor, will...more
..A saving grace for search results. In the first case since 2007 to address the issue, a California state court judge recently held that Google’s search results are in fact protected by U.S. free speech laws, and that Google...more
..Laundry time. Make sure you are getting what you’re paying for. That’s good advice in a lot of areas of human endeavor and it’s certainly true of online advertising. We wrote last month about efforts by the online...more
..Lyfted documents? Uber and Lyft, two ride-sharing companies that are both expanding rapidly and trying to take business away from traditional taxis in cities across the nation, have never been on the best of terms. Their...more
11/7/2014
/ Advertising ,
C-Suite Executives ,
Confidential Information ,
Facebook ,
Former Employee ,
Lyft ,
Native Advertising ,
Online Advertisements ,
Social Media ,
Twitter ,
Uber
..Bad chords. A European musician’s attempt to stop a negative concert review from continuing to appear in Internet search results is raising questions about whether the EU’s “right to be forgotten” ruling could prevent the...more
..Unfree speech? In the United States, the First Amendment would likely prevent the prosecution of someone who posted racist or anti-Semitic messages on a social media platform. But social media platforms operate worldwide,...more
..Clearing the air. Aereo, the startup broadcasting service that lost big in the U.S. Supreme Court last June, just lost another, and possibly its last, court battle. A U.S. district judge in the Southern District of New...more
..Time change. Until now, Twitter has made a clear distinction between people you follow and people you don’t follow: You only saw tweets from those whom you followed. Now, the service, in what it calls a “timeline...more
..Doctor in the mouse. What if you could input a list of your current symptoms to Google, and quickly be connected with a doctor for a brief consultation? For a limited trial period, Google seems to have set up such a system...more
..Big Brother isn’t just watching. A single mother in upstate New York was surprised to find that she had a Facebook page in her name, complete with photos of her, her son, and her niece. She hadn’t actually set up the page....more
10/10/2014
/ DEA ,
Facebook ,
First Amendment ,
Google ,
Government Investigations ,
Information Requests ,
Internet of Things ,
LinkedIn ,
Microsoft ,
National Security ,
Settlement ,
Twitter ,
Yahoo! ,
Zipcar
Operators of social media platforms and other websites must manage a large number of risks arising from their interactions with users. In an effort to maintain a degree of predictability and mitigate some of those risks,...more
10/6/2014
/ Barnes and Noble ,
Browsewrap Agreement ,
Clickwrap Agreements ,
Contract Formation ,
Disclaimers ,
Dispute Resolution ,
Facebook ,
Risk Mitigation ,
Social Media ,
Terms of Use ,
Websites
..Filling a gap. Gap Inc., the clothing retailer, is using social media to establish a web presence focused on feminism, equal pay for equal work, and progressive values. For example, the company produced an Instagram video,...more
..Where are the CEOs? According to a new study, fully two-thirds of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 have no personal social media presence at all. And of the ones who do participate in social media, two-thirds use only one of the...more
Status check. In the recently released Corporate Directors Survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers, 41% of corporate board members reported that their companies monitor social media for adverse publicity. That’s up from 32% in...more
..Is Tumblr trendier? A survey released by Tumblr says the users of that social media platform have higher average incomes than users of Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, and a report from Adobe says that this translates into...more
9/19/2014
/ Facebook ,
Google ,
Joint Venture ,
Online Videos ,
Pinterest ,
Privacy Laws ,
Software ,
Software Developers ,
Square ,
Tumblr ,
Twitter
..Disappearing ink. Facebook is testing, for a small group of users, a feature that will permit a user to schedule a post for automatic deletion after a specified period of time. It seems that the period can range from an...more
..What’s not to like? The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that an employee’s Facebook “like” approving of another employee’s statements about their employer may constitute “concerted activity” under federal labor...more
“Web scraping” or “Web harvesting” — the practice of extracting large amounts of data from publicly available websites using automated “bots” or “spiders” — accounted for 18 percent of site visitors and 23 percent of all...more
..Beyond wearables. Wearable Internet devices like Google Glass have made an impact. Could “nearables” be the next new thing? That’s the name that some people are giving to sensors or “beacons” attached to ordinary objects or...more
..Reality test. Facebook has begun to test a new feature that marks as “satire” material from satirical or comedic websites that appears in the guise of “fake news.” Some users, evidently unable to tell reality from clever...more