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 9 – U.S. PIRG’s Application for cy pres Funds in In Re: Google Buzz
Privacy Litigation (submitted to the Rose Foundation Mar. 14, 2011)

Application Coversheet
1.

Name of Applicant Organization and EIN Number
United States Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, 52-1384240
Type of organization: x 501c(3)

2.

o Other - Please describe:

Contact Information:
Contact Person, Title Ed Mierzwinski, Consumer Program Director
Address
Telephone

[phone]

Email
3.

218 D Street, SE, 1st Floor
Washington, D.C. 20003

[e-mail]

Financial Information:
(a)

your organization’s overall annual 2011 operating budget
$1.9 million (This figure includes the annual operating budget of
our national 501(c)(3) organization, but not the budgets of the individual state
PIRGs or the Student PIRGs)
(b)
total amount of money spent on Internet privacy or Internet
education programs in 2010
~$34,000
(c)
total amount of funding your organization received, if any, in
contributions from Google,
Inc. or the Google Foundation in 2010
$0
(d)
4.

amount of funding you are requesting from this Settlement fund
$1,000,000 towards two-year program

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.

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U.S. PIRG Education Fund has worked on Internet privacy issues for more than 10 years,
and we have acted to quickly respond to emerging threats to Internet privacy at the
federal and state level and on college campuses, despite minimal dedicated funding for
this program area (only $7,500 during 2010, for instance). Our federal and state policy
staff have released reports on identity theft and security breaches; highlighted compliance
with data breach laws; and partnered with allies to petition the FTC to take action on
Internet privacy, mobile privacy, real-time auctioning/ behavioral targeting of consumers
and the collection of medical information on the Internet by health and drug marketers. In
addition to educating the public about the merits of policy solutions to Internet privacy
risks, we have also seized on opportunities to raise awareness and provide resources in
response to emerging threats. For instance, to address student complaints and questions,
the Student PIRGs created and distributed a students’ guide to navigating Facebook’s
privacy controls, titled FAILBook, which was viewed by more than 14,000 students
within just the first week of its release.
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.

U.S. PIRG Education Fund seeks support to ramp up our efforts over the next two years
at the national level, in 26 states, and on 100 college campuses to educate more than one
million consumers about safeguarding their personal information on the Internet and to
conduct research into rapidly evolving Internet privacy issues. We will release reports
and surveys; improve our websites to serve as one-stop shops for Internet security tips
and information; use our canvass operation to disseminate our educational materials; and
develop rapid response capacity to quickly analyze and educate the public about
emerging threats and solutions. Our existing base of supporters and the broader audience
of more than 675,000 households our grassroots education efforts will reach will include
many Gmail users and similarly web-savvy consumers who will directly benefit from the
resources we provide for protecting consumer privacy online. In fact, we know that
approximately 60,000 of our email activists have Gmail accounts and that Google is the
top method of referrals to our websites – referring more than 345,000 visits to our
websites over the last two years. We have well over a half million email activists, more
than 30,000 followers and fans via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and
had more than 2.3 million visits to our websites over the last two years. This web
presence positions us well to educate the types of Internet users that constitute the Class.
U.S. PIRG Education Fund requests $1,000,000 from the Google Buzz Privacy
Settlement Cy Pres Fund to ramp up existing efforts over the next two years at the
national level, in 26 states, and on 100 college campuses to educate more than one
million consumers about safeguarding their personal information on the Internet and
conduct research into rapidly evolving Internet privacy issues.
Need

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Consumers’ personal information has become a commodity in the online marketplace.
Who we are, where we shop, what we like, and how to get a hold of us are valuable
pieces of information for marketers looking to pitch us on their latest product, as well as
identity thieves hoping to steal this information for illicit uses.
Currently, consumers do not have enough control over what information gets out or who
has access to it, nor do they have an adequate understanding about the ways their
personal information may be at risk. These problems are compounded in the largely
unregulated marketplaces and social spaces of the Internet.
Web-savvy Internet users – like Gmail users, students, and young professionals – are the
earliest adopters of Internet technology. This population is on Facebook around the
clock; uses the Internet for banking, shopping, and other financial transactions; and
increasingly uses mobile devices to get online. Unfortunately, web savvy does not
necessarily translate into a firm awareness of the risks associated with making so much
personal information available online. Furthermore, online vendors too often fail to
adequately safeguard users’ personal information, increasing the opportunity for
consumer privacy to be compromised online.
To protect individuals’ privacy online, both consumers and vendors need to be aware of
the risks to personal information on the Internet, and the tools available to safeguard this
information. U.S. PIRG Education Fund has experience running public education
campaigns on threats to Internet privacy, and has seen firsthand how eager Internet users
are to have easy access to resources for protecting themselves. For instance, in the week
following the release of the Student PIRGs’ guide to managing Facebook’s privacy
settings this summer, nearly 14,000 people downloaded the guide or reviewed an online
version of it.
Track Record
U.S. PIRG Education Fund draws on almost 30 years of ongoing work around privacy
issues, and more than a decade of work on Internet privacy.
• U.S. PIRG Education Fund’s groundbreaking reports, several authored jointly
with CALPIRG Education Fund, on credit bureau mistakes, identity theft and
security breaches helped lead to major state and federal reforms, including the
federal right to a free annual credit report and rights in nearly every state to
security breach notification and a security freeze.
• More recently, U.S. PIRG Education Fund has partnered with the Center for
Digital Democracy in a series of four petitions to the Federal Trade Commission
(our work is cited in the FTC’s recent staff report on privacy). The petitions
provided a framework for action on Internet privacy, mobile privacy, real-time
auctioning/ behavioral targeting of consumers and the collection of medical
information on the Internet by health and drug marketers.
• In 2002 CALPIRG Education Fund helped create the groundswell of public
support needed to pass the nation’s first ever data breach notification law. After
the data breach law took effect, we surveyed different companies to determine

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their compliance with the new law. When we released a report analyzing the
survey results in 2007 we were able to point out companies with bad practices and
publicize consumers’ new rights under the law to our members and to the public
at large through corresponding media stories.
Following a joint U.S. PIRG Education Fund and Consumers Union campaign
during 2004-2006, state PIRGs worked to ensure that nearly every state passed
security breach and security freeze legislation. Over the years, U.S. PIRG
Education Fund has also partnered with Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the
Identity Theft Resource Center and others on privacy research, advocacy and
education projects.
In response to student complaints and questions, the Student PIRGs created and
distributed a students’ guide to navigating Facebook’s privacy controls, titled
FAILBook. In roughly one week, the guide was viewed by more than 14,000
students. Following up on this effort, the Student PIRGs distributed an updated
version of the guide in February, and asked students to weigh in on an FTC
proposal to make it easier for consumers to avoid having their information tracked
while browsing online. Students from across the country submitted more than
1,000 comments to the FTC asking for easier ways to avoid being “tracked”
online. The response to the Student PIRGs’ recent FAILBook guide to protecting
your Facebook and Internet privacy and to its request for petition signatures to the
FTC on privacy has demonstrated that – contrary to ad network and web publisher
claims – young people do care about their privacy and want to control it.

Capacity
U.S. PIRG Education is positioned to significantly ramp up our existing Internet privacy
program over the next two years with an influx of funding from the Google Buzz Privacy
Settlement Cy Pres Fund.
We benefit from the expertise of one of the field’s leading privacy advocates and policy
analysts – Ed Mierzwinski. As U.S. PIRG Education Fund’s consumer program director
for 21 years, Mierzwinski has authored or co-authored the above-mentioned reports on
privacy, testified before Congress and state legislatures on privacy protection and
participated in numerous NGO, private, governmental, international and other privacy
fora. Among numerous consumer recognitions, he holds Privacy International’s Brandeis
Award for Privacy Protection.
Ed will continue to share his expertise with the network of 26 state PIRG organizations
within U.S. PIRG Education Fund’s network. Our state organizations share resources
and best practices, and as a result the good work one of our state or national advocates
pioneers in one location can be quickly exported and private labeled by state staff
throughout the country. So each report we research or educational material we produce
has impact far beyond the boundaries of one office or state. For instance, this model
allowed CALPIRG Education Fund to inject local data into our 2004 nationally-produced
report Financial Privacy in the States which documented concerns about financial
privacy, presented a survey of state laws that have helped fill regulatory gaps in the

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financial privacy sphere, and provided an estimate of the economic burden consumers
bear as a result of inadequate privacy safeguards
In implementing our Internet privacy program, U.S. PIRG Education Fund will further be
aided by our unique canvass capacity, along with the variety of other grassroots outreach
tools at our disposal. Through our canvasses, we have the ability each year to knock on
more than one million doors, talk face-to-face with as many as 725,000 individuals, and
distribute educational literature to some or all of these households. Thanks in large part
to our decades of canvassing, there are more than 800,000 current supporters and activists
we are able to educate about Internet privacy issues, through email alerts, our websites,
and targeted outreach to specific constituencies within our broad supporter base, as well
as the hundreds of thousands of potential supporters we can reach through our canvass.
For instance, we can send out an email targeting self-identified “mom” activists likely to
want information on how to protect their children’s personal information online. In
addition to making our educational materials available to these supporters already in our
network, continued canvassing will allow us to publicize our websites and disseminate
educational materials about Internet privacy to a very broad and diverse cross-section of
the general public.
Finally, the Student PIRGs have permanent, student-funded and student-directed civic
and political engagement programs on college campuses at more than 100 schools across
the country. On these chapters, our campus organizers team up with student volunteers to
run broad-based education efforts on pressing public interest issues, and, in the process,
identify hundreds of students who want to take action. Our ability to quickly educate and
mobilize young people will be particularly useful as we ramp up our Internet privacy
program, since they represent such a significant constituency of avid Internet users.
Two-Year Plan
With funding from the Google Buzz Privacy Settlement Cy Pres Fund, U.S. PIRG
Education Fund will dramatically expand the scope and scale of our ongoing Internet
privacy program, to advance our goal of improving consumer privacy online. Our
strategy is to use broad-based and targeted education to inform Internet users about the
need to protect their personal information online, the various threats posed by exposing
their information online, and simple options for avoiding unwanted exposure of that
information.
As mentioned, U.S. PIRG Education Fund has a long track record on privacy issues and
identity theft, and has used our experience and expertise in this broad area to quickly get
involved in Internet privacy as it has emerged as a new and popular marketplace and
social space. We are uniquely situated to employ a coordinated education strategy to
improve Internet privacy thanks to our presence and access in both D.C. and the states,
and our 40 years of working to engage college students – one of the most substantial
online constituencies. We can reach broad audiences of Internet users through our
grassroots canvasses, a tested earned media strategy, our activist lists and those of
coalition partners, our websites, and our social networking pages. We can complement

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these wholesale outreach approaches with more targeted education and outreach to key
constituencies like students that may be disproportionately impacted by particular threats
to Internet privacy.
To implement our two-pronged strategy on a large scale, we will research and release
reports and surveys; dramatically improve our websites to serve as one-stop shops for
Internet security tips and information; bring our unique canvass operation to bear in
disseminating our educational materials and driving consumers to our websites for more
tools; and develop rapid response capacity that will allow us to quickly analyze and
educate the public about emerging threats and solutions.
This strategy is well-designed to serve the Google Buzz Privacy Settlement Class, as our
outreach techniques allow us to connect with, educate, and engage a broad audience of
individuals likely to be the type of moderate to intense Internet users who have Gmail
accounts. In fact, we know that approximately 60,000 of our email activists have Gmail
accounts, that Google is the top method of referrals to our websites – referring more than
345,000 visits to our websites over the last two years, and that more than 60% of our own
staff use Gmail as their personal email provider. Furthermore, we maintain a strong
online presence, with well over a half million email activists, more than 30,000 followers
and fans via social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and more than 2.3 million
visits to our websites over the last two years. This presence positions us well to connect
with the types of Internet users that constitute the Class.
Research Tools: We will develop at least two in-depth reports or surveys each year, as
well as several smaller-scale research products like tipsheets or guides. Our current ideas
for these projects include:
• Internet Privacy Threats Reports: U.S. PIRG Education Fund Consumer Program
Director Ed Mierzwinski will coordinate the production of a series of reports
analyzing threats to Internet privacy – from mobile marketing and dynamic
pricing to the real-time sale of consumer financial and medical information to ad
networks – and making recommendations for avoiding and preventing these
threats.
o We will release these reports nationally and in two dozen states across the
country, making our findings available to the media, coalition partners,
and to the general public via our websites.
o One of the reports will focus on warning consumers about changes to
terms of use and privacy policies, a common practice that leaves Internet
users to figure out the implications to their online privacy of the new
conditions. In addition, we will report to state and federal non-legislative
officials on our findings and recommendations
• Tip-sheets: We will develop easy-to-understand tip-sheets with practical steps
individuals can take to safeguard their personal information online.
o We will make these available via the websites of U.S. PIRG Education
Fund, 26 state PIRG organizations, and the Student PIRGs.
o We will distribute these tip-sheets via our grassroots canvasses in 20
states.

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Guidelines for State Officials: State PIRG advocates in at least 12 states will
collaborate to develop Internet privacy guidelines and distribute them to state
decision-makers.
Privacy Rankings: We will research and rank the privacy policies and practices of
popular online sites and services, such as Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, and
make those rankings available via our websites.
Student Guides and Surveys: Student PIRG national program staff will research
and produce a series of materials geared toward helping young people protect
their information online.
o Each semester, campus organizers will publicly release at least one of
these research resources at a majority of our 100 campus chapters, and
will make additional materials available electronically via the Student
PIRGs websites, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, and email action lists.
Through the public releases and other dissemination methods, we will
share our research resources with the media, decision-makers, and campus
administrators.
o We will professionally design each of these guides, surveys, factsheets,
and fliers, including catchy web graphics and buttons.
o We will create easily-navigable online versions of each research product
and make them available on our websites and social networking pages. We
will print and distribute hundreds of hard copies of a subset of these
materials, such as the student Internet privacy survey, each school year.

Topics for these research materials will likely include:
o Survey of students at half of our 100 campus chapters about the common
mistakes they make with their personal information online, their top
privacy concerns online, and their online user habits (how many/what kind
of accounts they have, etc.)
o Best practices young people can adopt to protect their personal
information online (informed in part by our survey).
o Updated FAILbook guides, in response to future changes to privacy
settings/terms of use by Facebook and other social networking sites.
o Guides for protecting personal information when using online shopping
services and accounts.
o Guides to secure online banking.
o Guides to protecting personal information when using smartphones and
smartphone apps.
o Guides to avoiding attacks by spyware, malware, viruses and other threats
that could target personal and financial information.
Online Tools:
• Upgraded state and national websites: It is only appropriate that the tools we
produce to educate consumers about Internet privacy threats and how to avoid
them should be available in easy-to-use format on our websites. We will upgrade
our national website and 26 state websites to have dedicated and prominent pages
for Internet privacy. As we produce the various materials outlined above, we will
make them immediately available on these websites.

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Student PIRGs online resource center: We will upgrade the Student PIRGs
website to serve as a one-stop shop for young people concerned about protecting
their personal information online.
o We will make all the student resources outlined above available on this
website, along with regular content updates to reflect news and
developments in the area of Internet privacy. We will provide easy
opportunities for students to take action on the issue, such as asking a
targeted company to improve its privacy protections. We will make these
same resources available on a mobi website, for smartphone users.
o We will develop a link button to the Student PIRGs website and enlist
student groups, campus administrations, and other allies to include the
button on their sites, driving a wider audience of young people to the
online resource center.
o We will further publicize the existence of the resource center through
fliers, “clingers” for windows and computers, and other visibility
materials.
o We will use popular online social networking tools to further spread the
word among audiences dominated by young people.
• Interactive online tools: We will develop a variety of tools such as smartphone
apps and widgets to assist consumers in protecting their privacy online.
o We will take advantage of smartphone technology to give consumers
access to privacy information and resources wherever they are. We will
also highlight the privacy implications of smartphones and their apps in
and of themselves.
o We will explore opportunities for other interactive tools we can develop to
provide important privacy tips and information in easy-to-digest formats.
For instance, we might use our websites as clearinghouses to aggregate
privacy alerts – such as notifications of online security breaches – so
consumers can come to a single site to stay abreast of recently discovered
threats. Or, we may develop a widget that allows users of popular social
networking sites to plug in their privacy settings and find out how secure
their personal information is.
• Email alerts: We will communicate regularly about Internet privacy with our
more than half a million email activists, connecting with them using the very
medium that may put their personal information at risk. We have cultivated lists
of supporters in each of our states, nationally, and via the Student PIRGs that we
email about a range of public interest issues and organizationally developments.
We will work to educate these activists about threats to Internet privacy and will
disseminate electronic copies of our educational materials to them.
Public Education through Canvassing:
• Materials distribution: We will distribute some combination of the fliers, tipsheets, and other easily-digestible educational materials directly to at 675,000
households across 20 states through our canvass operation.
• Website promotion: We will encourage the individuals we speak to through this
canvassing to visit our websites to learn more about Internet security and the steps
they can take to protect their personal information while online.
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Rapid Response Capacity:
• Dedicated State Staff Time: In at least a dozen states, our consumer advocates will
dedicate a portion of their time to rapid response activities around Internet
security issues. These advocates will monitor the issue and respond to changes in
Internet security policies (for the better or worse) by key actors, will research
quickly emerging threats, and will publicize these developments through blog
postings, letters-to-the-editor, email action alerts, and other tactics. CALPIRG
Education Fund’s consumer advocate will lead the way in developing materials
and best practices that can be shared by staff in other states quickly and
efficiently.
• Dedicated Student PIRGs Staff Time: Similarly, online organizers and program
staff for the Student PIRGs will dedicate an average of at least one hour each
week to responding to and publicizing emerging threats to Internet privacy as well
as best practices being adopted, with a focus on services that are popular among
young people.
Conclusion
U.S. PIRG Education Fund is committed to continuing to build our Internet privacy
program, and funding from the Google Buzz Privacy Settlement Cy Pres Fund will
enable us to quickly bring our two-year program expansion plan to scale. Should we
receive less than our $1 million request, we could scale down our activities accordingly.

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