Finance Geek

It’s human nature to want something for nothing. But when it comes to web services, that tendency seems to often blossom into a veritable psychosis. In the brick and mortar world, personally identifiable information has long been mashed into a commodity that is sliced, diced and sold. So is the situation better or worse for us in the digital realm? From the hue and cry over ‘Do Not Track,’ you might think the latter. You would be wrong.

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Most of the posts I write are optimistic and upbeat. Not this one. I have just come from an excellent breakfast hosted by Qualcomm where we had half a dozen talks about the future for mobile. We heard about the potential for NFC, augmented reality, mobile commerce, and mobile operating systems, but the presentation that really caught my eye was about the growth in mobile malware.

We heard that the number of new mobile malware threats identified in December 2011 was equal to the total number of threats ever identified through the end of 2010. A quick web search found many other people saying the same thing, including ZDNet who recently produced the chart below.

In short, mobile malware threats are growing almost unbelievably fast. They are not yet a fact of life for many, and I can’t recall anyone I know suffering from an infected phone, but at these growth rates it won’t be long before we have all experienced an attack.

Unless your phone is an iPhone that is. Kaspersky has only ever found two iOS threats and they were in 2011, and they targeted jailbroken phones.

Android users are far and away the most vulnerable, due to the open-ness of the system and the large numbers of devices that cyber criminals can target. If you are going to build a virus you might as well build it on the platform that offers the most potential victims.

The reason I’m posting this is that when something grows as fast as this I take notice. Rapid change creates opportunity. I’m not sure how this one will play out, but as a consumer I want to protect myself, and as an investor I want to understand who will profit from it.

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The Occupy Wall Street movement returns to the streets this week, targeting some of the biggest corporations in America. Dubbed the “Shut Down the Corporations” rally, protesters will chant, shout and march in unison in more than 70 cities to bring attention to corporate power and greed. The so-called “National Day of Action” zeroes in [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Apple (AAPL) crossed an amazing milestone in after-market trading yesterday, when its market capitalization exceeded $500 billion for the first time. Apple is one of the only companies in history to break this mark, and unlike others that have briefly traded in this neighborhood–Microsoft (MSFT) and Cisco [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Stocks were flat Wednesday morning, a day after the Dow closed above 13,000 for the first time since May 2008, the S&P had its highest close since June 2008 and the Nasdaq reached heights unseen since December 2000. In the spring of 2008, you may recall, the [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Mitt Romney scores big in the latest round of primary voting Tuesday and slows any momentum Rick Santorum gained from his shocking three-way win in the last round of voting. (See: Ralph Nader’s Advice to Gingrich on a Third Party Run: “Go for It!”) The former Massachusetts [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! With the notable exception of housing, the U.S. economy has been on a fairly strong uptrend in recent months. But this is “as good as it’s going to get,” says Srinivas Thiruvadanthai, director of research at the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, predicting the economy will cool considerably [...]

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Brace yourself, Windows users. Microsoft’s operating system is poised for stunning, dramatic change. Today Microsoft releases its public preview of Windows 8, and it’s a radical departure — not just for Microsoft, but for everything we know about so-called desktop computing.

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It’s the economy, stupid. The catchphrase coined by James Carville during Bill Clinton’s successful campaign against incumbent George Bush in 1992 has been repeated innumerable times since, and holds just as much significance today as it did 20 years ago. The U.S. economy has been on an uptick over the last few months and Americans [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! As voters in Michigan and Arizona head to the polls Tuesday in the latest round of primary voting ahead of Super Tuesday, all eyes are on Mitt Romney’s home state of Michigan where he and Rick Santorum are in a virtual tie. In the latest polling, Romney [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Oil and gas futures dipped Monday but the relentless surge in energy prices is very likely to continue in the days and weeks ahead, according to Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst at Oppenheimer. In fact, Gheit believes oil prices could go “much higher” — with Brent crude [...]

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Danny Sulliivan put up a good post yesterday: On Google & Being “Evil”. His main point was that Google is now a very big company and that inevitably means they will make mistakes, including ones which impact their users’ privacy, but they are not any more evil (or good) than any other large company. I agree with that, they are becoming no different to other large vertically integrated service providers like Facebook and Apple. As Danny points out, there is one important historical difference though, and that is Google’s “Do no evil positioning”, which gives the worlds largest search engine much further to fall than its competitors.

Danny’s main point is interesting, but it is his description of Google’s recent problems and the government and public response to them which I am going to focus on today.

Let’s start with a recap on what Google has done.

Most importantly they are changing their privacy policies. If you use any Google services you will have seen a pop-up informing you of this fact, and if you are anything like me you will have seen so many pop-ups that you have started to get annoyed by them. Also, if you are anything like me (and 90% of the rest of the population) you won’t have read them, but you will have caught sight of various headlines suggesting that you should be worried about what these changes mean.

Beyond the privacy changes Google has made a few gaffs recently. Danny lists three:

• they posted that that an anti-Google ad was pulled as being factually incorrect, and it wasn’t
• they over-rode users privacy settings in Safari so that Google+1 ads would work
• they admitted accepting illegal ads for pharmaceuticals in Canada and agreed to forego over $500m in profits

The response to this has been markedly different in different parts of society. On the one hand politicians, journalists and the intelligentsia are outraged, whilst on the other hand the public doesn’t seem to care. The picture at the end of this post shows the top results on a Google News search for “Google privacy policy changes”. The negativity is clear for all to see. Yet Danny Sullivan reports that for the mass public:

there’s no mass movement to abandon Google. Take a tour of its help forums, as I’ve explained before. [Privacy] It’s not a huge topic.

I’ve been having an increasing number of conversations in recent weeks with folk (largely educated, wealthy, middle aged folk) who think that a privacy backlash is coming, but I just don’t see it. Further, when I press these folks on what the precise issue is, or what might precipitate a sudden elevation of this issue in the mind of Joe Public they have no answers.

However, politicians are now legislating for privacy and companies have to deal with that. The important thing to note though is that it is a regulatory issue, not a product issue. Hence internet companies need to deal with privacy issues in the same way as financial services companies have dealt with regulators for years. They need to lobby to make sure they don’t get blind-sided, and many will try to use regulation for competitive advantage.

I was at a dinner for our portfolio company StrikeAd last night. They operate in the mobile advertising industry where everybody is very concerned about the privacy implications of targeting and tracking users. As a result voluntary codes of conduct are being drawn up, they are being endorsed by standards bodies, and those bodies are then certifying vendors as compliant, and listing service providers as qualified to provide certification. If you want to play in certain segments of the market, for example ad verification, then you need to play the game and make sure you are on the list of vendors qualified to provide certification. In other words, for companies in this market lobbying and being part of the regulatory process is as important as it is for banks and telcos.

Privacy is important, and users need to be protected, but as you can see from the story in the paragraph above a lot is being done already to prevent abuse of personal data. I think we will see more regulation in this area and companies will devote increasing resources to making sure personal data is protected and only used in the right ways, but I see no evidence that the greater public cares enough that we will see anything more than that.

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Back in the dark days of 2009, James Altucher of Formula Capital startled everyone by saying that the economy was improving and that stocks were gearing up for a monster run. Altucher stuck with his story all through 2010 and 2011. And then, at mid-2011, he doubled [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Almost two years after the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig spewed nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, making it the largest oil spill in U.S. history, BP (BP) is close to cutting a $14 billion settlement deal with thousands of plaintiffs. A [...]

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Follow Yahoo!’s The Daily Ticker on Facebook here! Warren Buffett released his famous and much-awaited annual letter to investors this weekend. But did he say anything interesting this year? Absolutely not, says Formula Capital’s James Alutcher, also the author of Trade Like Warren Buffett. “What struck me what was not what he said but what [...]

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