Hibnick v. Google Inc.

Filing 121

OBJECTIONS to re 120 Proposed Order by Electronic Privacy Information Center. (Attachments: # 1 Appendix 1, # 2 Appendix 2, # 3 Appendix 3, # 4 Appendix 4, # 5 Appendix 5, # 6 Appendix 6, # 7 Appendix 7, # 8 Appendix 8, # 9 Appendix 9, # 10 Appendix 10, # 11Appendix 12, # 12 Appendix 13, # 13 Appendix 11)(Friedman, Philip) (Filed on 3/30/2011) Modified on 4/1/2011 (cv, COURT STAFF).

Appendix 4 – The Center for Digital Democracy’s Application for cy pres Funds in
In Re: Google Buzz Privacy Litigation (submitted to the Rose Foundation Mar. 14,
2011)
IN RE GOOGLE BUZZ PRIVACY SETTLEMENT
CY PRES FUND APPLICATION FORM
Application Coversheet
1.
Name of Applicant Organization and EIN Number: Center for Digital
Democracy, 52-2311577
Type of organization:  501c(3)
___________________________

o Other - Please describe:

2.

Contact Information:
Contact Person, Title Jeffrey Chester, Executive Director
Address
1220 L St. NW #300
Washington DC 20005-4053
Telephone
202-986-2220
Email
[e-mail]

3.

Financial Information:
(a)
your organization’s overall annual 2011 operating budget:
$306,500
(b)
total amount of money spent on Internet privacy or Internet
education programs in 2010:
$176,076
(c)
total amount of funding your organization received, if any, in
contributions from Google,
Inc. or the Google Foundation in 2010: none
(d)
amount of funding you are requesting from this Settlement fund:
$450,000
For questions 4 & 5, you may submit a narrative response up to 4 pages, BUT YOU
MUST submit a brief description of no more than one paragraph. The
coversheet must fit on one page.

4. Briefly describe any of your organization’s existing policy or education programs
concerning Internet privacy issues—make sure to include the number of years you have
had programming focused on Internet privacy. The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD)
is recognized as one of the leading consumer privacy organizations in the United States.
Since its founding in 2001 (and prior to that through its predecessor organization, the
Center for Media Education), CDD has been at the forefront of research, public

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education, and advocacy on protecting privacy in the digital age. Its impact has been
highly significant, fostering widespread debate, educating a spectrum of stakeholders,
and creating a legacy of government and self-regulatory safeguards across a variety of
Internet and digital media platforms. CDD’s public education programs are focused on
informing consumers, policy makers, and the press about contemporary data collection
and behavioral targeting issues.
5. Briefly describe the particular program that funding from this Settlement would
support and describe how it would benefit the Class by furthering policy or education
concerning Internet privacy. Social media data collection involves an array of complex
and largely stealth techniques that can track a consumer’s behaviors, including their
online interactions with others and geographic location, often without the individual’s
knowledge. This lack of transparency raises particular concerns when it involves
financial, health, and other sensitive kinds of information, and when data are collected
from children and adolescents. CDD’s project will develop a series of online consumer
education resources focused on social media privacy in three key areas: Internet and
mobile phone-based consumer financial services; 2) health and pharmaceutical
marketing; and 3) the special needs of children and adolescents.

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Since its establishment in 2001 (and before that for seven years as the Center for
Media Education), CDD has played an important role educating consumers—
from children and adolescents to their parents and other adults—about the new
digital technologies and online services that affect their privacy. Our
groundbreaking 1996 report on online marketing to children, “Web of
Deception,” ignited a national debate and led to the passage of the Children’s
Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in 1998. CDD’s 2007 report on the role
of data collection, interactive advertising, and the promotion of youth obesitylinked products—“Interactive Food & Beverage Marketing: Targeting Children
and Youth in the Digital Age”—was the first major analysis of the relationship
between privacy issues and food and beverage marketing. CDD’s policy research
into the privacy issues raised by behavioral targeting and related interactive
marketing techniques, submitted to the Federal Trade Commission in 2006 (with
2007 and 2008 follow-ups) led directly to that agency’s current inquiry into the
issue (and helped the agency staff develop its newly proposed principles for
consumer privacy protection and online marketing). Last year, three CDD
reports—on data collection practices in the new online health marketplace, on
privacy risks to underage youth from alcoholic beverage sites, and on new
methods of tracking and selling a consumer’s data online—led to investigations
by the FTC. Our work on social media medical marketing and privacy issues has
triggered a review by the FDA concerning its rules governing health marketing on
Facebook and other services. CDD’s 2009 report on mobile marketing privacy
led to the FTC establishing a mobile privacy “forensics” lab. As a result of these
various achievements, CDD has won praise from policymakers, the news media,
consumer groups, and the public, who have come to rely on our organization as a
source of well-researched information and analysis on the digital marketing
industry and its impact on consumer privacy.
Today, the public has to maneuver through a complex array of increasingly
personalized interactive services, including mobile and location-based
applications, online videos, and social networks, as they seek information and
engage in various transactions. Social media data collection practices include a
host of ever-expanding techniques that capture both the personal information of
an individual, along with one’s friends, other personal relationships, and outside
“third-party” services. As CDD observed in one of its FTC filings, users of social
media applications and services (such as Google Buzz) are particularly
vulnerable: “As social networks have become increasingly popular in recent
years, social media monitoring, a form of online surveillance, has become a
common practice…. Social networks…. have taken behavioral targeting to
another level, allowing marketers to target users based both on their online
activities as well as on self-disclosed profile information. Few social media users
understand the wide range of data tracking and targeting that operates on and via
these networks.”

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Social media and other forms of online marketing pose new challenges to consumers,
since such marketing is able to combine ongoing data collection about individuals as they
interact with entertainment and information sites and with other users. Digital “profiles”
of consumers, used to track and then target them for products and services—including
loans, credit, and even pharmaceuticals—can incorporate wide-ranging amounts of
information. Behavioral profiling may contain data related to one’s ethnicity/race, income
status, neighborhood, family status, interests, and propensity to spend (“shopping cart”
behavior). With the rapid growth of mobile and location-based marketing services,
individuals can be tracked and targeted in a “hyper-local” geographic area, often with
little or no understanding of how the process works. While such practices are troubling
for all consumers, they raise particular concerns for young people, who are especially
avid users of social media and mobile phones, yet remain largely uninformed about the
nature and extent of data collection and behavioral targeting on these platforms.
To address these vital privacy issues and, equally important, to prepare consumers
to confront these issues themselves, CDD submits this general support proposal
for $450,000 for a two-year, multi-faceted public education project addressing
three key areas of personal privacy connected to the growth of social media: 1)
Internet and mobile phone-based consumer financial services; 2) health and
pharmaceutical marketing online; and 3) the special needs of children and
adolescents in the digital era.
I. Online Finances: Protecting Consumer Privacy in Sensitive Financial
Transactions Online
A new era in financial marketing has emerged, with consumers increasingly
relying on the Internet to research and apply for loans, credit, and engage in other
financial transactions. According to a recent study, four out of every five online
consumers now bank online. Mobile banking is dramatically growing as well,
with more and more adults using their cell phones to conduct transactions.
Financial service advertisers spent some $2.8 billion last year to target U.S.
consumers online—for mortgages, credit and credit cards, insurance, and loans
for education. Increasingly, lending services are relying on social media to help
generate “leads” for loans and credit card applications, as well as to foster
favorable online “buzz” about a product or service. While the Internet can help
inform consumer decision-making about financial products (and be tremendously
convenient, especially on mobile devices), it can also be a confusing—and
sometimes intentionally misleading—sales medium. Few consumers are aware of
how the online financial marketing system operates, such as the role data
collection plays in targeting individual consumers for specific loans or financial
products. In order to make better decisions when using online financial services,
consumers should have a clear understanding of the privacy issues involved as
they conduct their fiscal affairs via the Internet.
Over the last several years, CDD has been conducting research to assess the
technologies and techniques used in online financial marketing, including newly

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emerging mobile and location-based applications, behavioral data collection and
targeting, and social media. Few consumers, however, know about such
techniques, including the role of “online lead generation”—where data collected
via the Internet are used to identify consumers as prospects for the sales of
products, including loans and credit cards—and why they receive certain financial
offers online. Yet some $1.5 billion was spent in 2009 solely for targeting
consumers using online lead generation. Lower-income and minority consumers
are often the targets of various online financial marketing services. The public
should be better informed about the dynamics of online financial marketing
services and practices, including the growing role of specialized Internet-based
credit bureaus that evaluate them when they apply for various forms of credit
online.
CDD proposes to create an online guide to digital financial marketing to serve the
needs of consumers. It will describe, in easy-to-understand language and with
visual illustrations, the various components of a consumer’s online financial
experience (from initially researching a product, such as a credit card or home
loan, to the final sale). The various techniques used in online financial
marketing—lead generators, online credit ratings and bureaus, behavioral
targeting and profiling, mobile and location services—will all be explained. The
goal is to encourage prudent and informed use of what are essential applications
for today’s increasingly Internet-focused financial consumers. Our guide will
include a checklist of privacy-related questions consumers should ask as they go
online to apply for loans and other forms of credit, along with other useful
resources. We will also create a Spanish-language version of the guide.
II. Digital Health: Protecting Consumer Privacy in the Online
Pharmaceutical Marketplace
Growing numbers of Americans are relying on the Internet, especially social
media sites, to obtain information and support related to medical issues, including
specific conditions, pharmaceuticals, and forms of treatment. Nearly $1 billion
was spent in 2010 for health and medical online advertising in the U.S. Drug and
medical marketers argue that consumers are “empowered” to make better and
more informed decisions regarding their health. A consumer, they say, can
conduct a search on a specific drug, gain insight from other patients through
postings on social media, and even download a discount coupon for their
prescription using their mobile phone. However, many online health marketers
use the same set of data-collection techniques, including behavioral targeting, that
have already raised concerns over privacy. The data collected from a user or
patient on health sites can include what some would consider very personal
information, including their interests or concerns about serious diseases or
illnesses, such as depression, COPD, arthritis, and diabetes. Many health sites use
social media techniques that are designed to ensure data collection, but fail to
meaningfully inform the patient or consumer about how that personal information
may be used.

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As part of its ongoing analysis of the interactive advertising marketplace, CDD
has been able to document numerous consumer data collection practices through
research analyzing drug company sites, social media services such as Facebook,
digital health marketing trade publications, marketing research reports, and the
services provided by digital health advertising companies. As with financial
services, consumers seeking health information online should be much better
prepared to navigate these still-uncharted waters. Our project proposes to meet
these needs with an online guide to the digital health and pharmaceutical arena
and the ways in which consumers can guard their privacy online. It will explain
what consumers need to know when seeking health information online, such as
when to consider keeping sensitive matters as private as possible. The guide will
provide health consumers and patients with a reliable reference tool on data
collection techniques in the new online health marketplace.
III. Children and Youth Online: Protecting the Privacy of the Internet’s
Most Vulnerable Users
Children and teenagers are at the epicenter of the new “digital marketing
ecosystem,” based on their use of personal computers, social media, cell phones,
mobile music devices, instant messaging, videogames, and virtual, three-dimensional
worlds. Nearly 75 percent of all adolescents use social media, increasingly accessing
social networking sites through their mobile phones. Many young people rely on social
networks to seek help for their personal problems, to explore their own sexual
identities, to find support groups for handling emotional crises in their lives, and
sometimes to talk about things they do not feel comfortable or safe discussing with
their own parents. Yet, for the most part, neither youth nor their parents fully
understand how information is collected from them online, and how marketers and
others use it. Data collected from young people online, often via non-transparent
means, are used to track and target them wherever they go online.
Although children under 13 have some safeguards related to their online activities
thanks to COPPA, there are currently no rules governing how data can be
collected from them via such new technologies as mobile phones and online
games. Nor are adolescents, who are generally treated as adults in terms of
interactive data collection and online marketing, afforded online privacy
protections, even though they have their unique developmental vulnerabilities.
For example, recent research on adolescent brain development shows that the
ability to address the privacy and marketing implications of online services occurs
much later than was previously thought. Teens are also highly susceptible to
influence by their peers, often engaging in risky behaviors without fully
understanding the consequences of their actions. Our project will help this age
group—who are the focus of a very powerful digital marketplace—to master the
information and tools they need to navigate safely through the digital marketing
ecosystem.
CDD will create online interactive guides that will help children and adolescents
gain a clearer understanding of how digital marketing services designed to target

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youth in particular are created and deployed online. These online resources will
be specifically crafted for a younger audience, and we will also develop separate
materials to assist parents and other adults. We will take children and teens
through a typical online journey, breaking the process down to its basic
components and providing a unique and much-needed overview of how digital
marketing works. The guides will encourage young people to learn how
information about them is collected and used when they are online—especially
via mobile devices, online music services, Internet-connected video games, and
social networks. Our goal is to encourage young people to become more
knowledgeable consumers, developing a more complete understanding of what
has become an increasingly complex and non-transparent process. We will also
produce a report for parents, so they can better understand the process. We will
distribute the report through our partnerships with such leading groups as the
American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child &
Adolescent Psychiatry.

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