Amazon may have introduced its digital locker music service, the Cloud Player, before similar services from rivals Google and Apple (that are widely believed to be launching this year), but that doesn’t mean it will be an easy existence. Not long after the company published a note on its Web site inviting users to give Cloud Player a try did one of the major record labels offer a warning. “We are disappointed that the locker service that Amazon is proposing is unlicensed by Sony Music,” a Sony spokesman said. Is Amazon on a collision course with the music industry, and if it is, could that be a good thing for consumers?

The Amazon Cloud Player gives users the ability to listen to their music collection from anywhere they have an Internet connection, either via a Web app that’s compatible with all major browsers or an Android app. (The service is officially incompatible with iOS devices such as the iPhone, but users have nonetheless reported partial success using Mobile Safari.) Users upload their music files, either in MP3 or AAC format, to their online account (or “locker”), and can thenceforth access these files with the Cloud Player. It’s your music anywhere and everywhere you happen to be. Amazon gives everyone with an Amazon account—and who doesn’t have one of those?—5GB of free storage, with premium options available for more storage space. (Not that hard drive space is expensive these days. Scroll to the bottom of your Gmail inbox and you’ll see that Google already gives you more than 7GB to play with by default.)

The idea of streaming music isn’t new. Services like Spotify in Europe and Rdio in the U.S. have long given users the ability to stream music using a variety of desktop and mobile applications. The key difference between these services and the Amazon Cloud Player is that Amazon’s allows you to upload your own music to its servers (“the cloud”), and then access those as you see fit. If you have an old Rolling Stones CD ripped to your hard drive you can’t upload those files to Spotify’s cloud, but you can upload them to Amazon’s. The record labels, which have hardly been friendly to the digitization of music since the days of Napster, don’t necessarily approve of this feature, saying that Amazon doesn’t have the proper licensing agreements in place to offer that kind of capability.

Sony Music has been the most vocal opponent thus far. It told Reuters that it didn’t think its licensing agreement with Amazon would permit streaming music. (The record labels differentiate between giving users the ability to download a song once versus being able to call upon that same song as you see fit. Think you own a song when you download it from iTunes? Think again, as you’ve only purchased a license to download the file once. Ownership of digital music is a thing of fiction.) More ominously for Amazon, it also said that it was “keeping its legal options open.” But what type of problems could Amazon run into?

Julie Samuels, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that Amazon may model its defense on how Cablevision successful argued for its remote storage digital video recorder, or RS-DVR, in 2006TKTK. Users would use the RS-DVR as they would a traditional DVR—pause live TV, rewind, re-watch recorded content, etc.—except all of this content was stored on Cablevision’s own servers. Cablevision argued that despite the fact that the hard drive in the DVR was located somewhere else, its functionality was identical to that of a traditional DVR. Amazon could argue the same thing, that all its doing is putting somewhere else the users’ hard drive that otherwise would be sitting on their desk.

Perhaps to avoid all of that, Amazon is now said to be “aggressively” courting the record labels to ensure that the service doesn’t land the company in a federal court.

Amazon’s not the only company that’s offering such a service. MP3Tunes.com also offers a digital locker, and an assortment of desktop and mobile applications to access that locker. It just so happens that EMI, one of the big four record labels (and founding member of the Recording Industry Association of America), has been fighting the service in court since 2007.

But if Amazon is able to convince a judge that what it’s doing is just that, merely giving users access to a hard drive that just so happens to be available somewhere else.

Unless the record labels are prepared to argue that it’s illegal to set up a Web server (thisismymusiccollection.com) and access its files, in which case the nation’s copyright laws are truly uselessly antiquated.

Source : http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/04/01/amazons-cloud-player-tests-the-limits-of-the-record-labels-patience/

Facebook is the slowly-warming pot of water and we, my friends, are the frog. By the time we noticed our peeling skin, another hunk of our privacy is long gone.

"Facebook will be moving forward with a controversial plan  to give third-party developers and external web sites the ability to access users' home addresses and cell phone numbers in the face of criticism from privacy experts, users, and even congressmen," the Wall Street Journal reports.

Is anybody surprised? Really?

This is how Facebook rolls: Strip away a huge chunk of your privacy, cry "Our bad!" and roll it back when users and/or privacy advocates complain. Then wait awhile, and do whatever it is Facebook planned to do anyway.

Voila! Boiled frog.

"We expect that, once the feature is re-enabled, Facebook will again permit users to authorize applications to obtain their contact information," Marne Levine, Facebook vice president of global public policy, wrote. "However, we are currently evaluating methods to further enhance user control in this area."

The statement is a response to a Feb. 2 letter from  U.S. Reps. Edward Markey, D-Mass. and Joe Barton, R-Texas, who objected to the latest chunk of user info offered up to Facebook’s third-party developers.

"Facebook needs to protect the personal information of its users to ensure that Facebook doesn’t become Phonebook," said Rep. Markey wrote. "That’s why I am requesting responses to these questions to better understand Facebook’s practices regarding possible access to users’ personal information by third parties. This is sensitive data and needs to be protected.” 

Facebook points out in its response that prior to activating a third-party application on Facebook (FarmVille, birthday notes, quizzes, etc.), users are presented with a prompt that describes the information they agree to share by using the app, and can choose not to authorize that app if they don’t want to share — that’s pretty much how it’s worked for a while, though true enough, many don’t read that for comprehension.

Minors especially don’t care about fine print, and to that end, Facebook stated that it’s considering "whether to enable applications to request contact information from minors at all. Further, "Facebook’s terms prohibit use of the service by minors under 13, and we employ various technical measures to implement that prohibition."

In a 29-page letter sent to the Federal Trade Commission last month,Facebook asked the FTC  to consider consumers’ changing attitudes towards online privacy — increasingly "whatevs" attitudes the social network has had a large part in pushing for via its bit-by-bit dissolution of the privacy it once offered users and the "No biggie! We don’t care about monetizing your personal info! This is what’s best for you! We love you!" face it shows its users.

Last week, Facebook posted a draft of its simplified privacy policy  to appease ongoing complaints about the counterintuitive and ever-changing mess privacy advocates have complained about for years. It’s pretty much the same policy that continues to push the boundaries of your privacy-sharing standards, but written in a way that’s much easier to understand.

"It is very good for companies to actually be making privacy policies easier to understand," Nicole Ozer, a policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California told the Wall Street Journal. "But users should be looking for privacy policies that are not only readable, but actually protect their privacy."

Helen A.S. Popkin is always going "blah blah blah" about online privacy, then she asks you to follow her on Facebook and/or Twitter … because that's how she rolls.

Facebook has acquired the mobile messaging company Beluga, according to a note on Beluga's website. Financial details were not disclosed.

Beluga's application allows groups of friends to communicate in private using their smartphones. A user can create a so-called pods, to which friends can be invited.

Within a pod, users can send messages and share images and locations, according to Beluga's website. The free application is available for Apple's iPhone and Android-based smartphones.

For now, Beluga's application will continue to function as it does today. Existing accounts and data will not be lost, the company writes.

Recently, Facebook has stepped up its smartphone push. The company has, for example, worked with HTC and INQ on smartphones with tighter Facebook integration. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent a video message to HTC's news conference at the Mobile World Congress last month -- where it launched the Salsa and the ChaCha -- to say users can expect many more phones with much deeper integration with Facebook to arrive this year.

Today, there are more than 200 million active users accessing Facebook via their mobile devices.

What Facebook's plans are for Beluga and its three founders -- all of whom have at one time worked at Google -- remains to be seen, but more details will be released in the coming weeks, according to Beluga.