Daily Archives: August 17, 2013

The Snowden effect (contd.)

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The Snowden effect continues. And affects not just companies getting nervous of the US cloud, but alsop, apparently, American internet users. Which in due course will affect US advertisers.

In the days after one of the most damning intelligence leaks since the birth of the Internet, polls were showing that average Americans felt sort of “meh” about the whole NSA-monitoring-our-calls-Skype-emails thing. But according to a new analysis from Annalect, a digital data and analytics firm, two months of ongoing discussion about online privacy have actually had major impacts on consumer behavior. Online consumers, riled by political sentiments or not, are changing their privacy and tracking settings–and if the trend continues, the advertising industry could be dinged in a significant way.

On June 10, nearly four days after journalist Glenn Greenwald published the Snowden scoop in the Guardian, a Washington Post-Pew Research Center Poll found that 56% of Americans felt that NSA monitoring was a-okay. In fact, government monitoring could go even further, 45% said, if it prevented terrorist attacks. Seven weeks later, the Annalect study, which began as a longitudinal investigation into consumer awareness of online privacy in early 2013 (before the Snowden kerfuffle), shows that collective sentiment may have shifted–consumer concern about online privacy actually jumped from 48% to 57% between June and July.

“This jump is largely from unconcerned Internet users becoming concerned–not from the normal vacillation found among neutral Internet users,” researchers wrote.

Unintended consequences of NSA surveillance (contd.)

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This from a law professor.

You can consider the National Security Agency’s data-gathering programs a grim necessity to protect the nation or an outrageous violation of privacy. What is unquestionable is that they are reshaping the tech marketplace.

Yet it should have been obvious that so extensive a system of surveillance, no matter how benignly intended, would have unintended consequences. Some of the ill consequences are even predictable.

Consider cloud computing. Worldwide spending on the cloud is expected to double over the next three years to more than $200 billion. U.S. firms have been leaders in developing the technology. According to a new report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, however, global worries about NSA surveillance are likely to reduce U.S. market share.

The report’s admittedly loose estimate is that U.S. cloud-computing firms will lose $21 billion to $35 billion in revenue between now and 2016. According to the report, some 10 percent of non-U.S. members of the Cloud Security Alliance said they’ve canceled a project with a U.S. company since the disclosure of the NSA’s surveillance. In addition, 56 percent indicated “that they would be less likely to use a U.S.-based cloud computing service.”

These are scary numbers for one of the few true growth areas in the tech sector. But they are precisely what should have been expected in the wake of the disclosures. “If I were an American cloud provider, I would be quite frustrated with my government right now,” Neelie Kroes, the European Union’s commissioner for digital affairs, said in the ITIF report.

Google becomes just another big corporation

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Interesting Quartz story:

Google’s “20% time,” which allows employees to take one day a week to work on side projects, effectively no longer exists. That’s according to former Google employees, one who spoke to Quartz on the condition of anonymity and others who have said it publicly.

What happened to the company’s most famous and most imitated perk? For many employees, it has become too difficult to take time off from their day jobs to work on independent projects.

This is a strategic shift for Google that has implications for how the company stays competitive, yet there has never been an official acknowledgement by Google management that the policy is moribund. Google didn’t respond to a request for comment from Quartz.

Interesting also to see how the company has achieved this. Not by formally cancelling the 20% ‘right’, but simply by requiring that managers have to approve a request to devote 20% of employee’s time on a personal project. And if just so happens that everyone is 100% committed on whatever corporate project they’re currently assigned to.

Neat, eh?