Tag: Google

Compliance and Google+

google-plus

Over the past few weeks, Google+ has exploded as a new social web platform. We had friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter. Now there are Circles on Google+.

What does this mean from a compliance perspective?

Not much for right now. Google+ does not seem to present any new issues that we haven’t already seen in social media. My general impression is that it’s a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. This is both in terms of privacy and the way communications flow.

I expect there will be a few hiccups with the privacy settings as we have already seen with Facebook. The use of “circles” allows you limit who can see your communications. But since anyone in that circle can then share it with people in their circle, any message can easily become public. If you want to keep you message a bit more private, there is a button that can check to prevent sharing.

To the extent you have a social media or communications policy you should make sure it takes into account Google+. To the extent you need to archive and preserve messages, you will need to take Google+ into account. Hopefully Smarsh and the other vendors will get access to the API so they can find a way to preserve the messages.

If you block access to social networking sites, Google+ is a little trickier to deal with. It looks like it operates as a subdomain on Google.com. I don’t think too many c0mpanies want to block access to Google.com. Your blocking software will need to make sure it only limits the plus.google.com subdomain. And it’s https:, not http:.

Will Google+ live long enough to be a concern for compliance? Maybe. I have a hard time believing people will use Facebook, Twitter and Google+. I suspect that Google+ will need to take users away from Facebook and Twitter to be successful.

I don’t suspect it will cause many people to abandon Facebook. Google+ is slicker, but Facebook has the bigger user base. As Andrew McAfee once told me, the new tool can’t just be a little better, it has to be many times better for people to switch.  I don’t find Google+ to be that much better than Facebook. Most importantly for me, Facebook has the largest collection of close friends and family. (My “Family” circle on Google+ is empty, my “Friends” only has a few handfuls of people, and my “compliance” circle has a single person.)

Twitter is the most likely victim of Google+. It removes the 140 character shackle and threads conversations together. Twitter still has better integration with other platforms. On the other hand, there is the possibility that Google+ could tie together many of Google’s other platforms.

It will be hard to kill Twitter. All of the news coverage about placing the valuation of Twitter in the billions of dollars are tied to Twitter’s latest round of raising money from investors. I would guess that the company is sitting on a big pile cash that will take a long time to burn through, leaving them plenty of cash to improve the product and find ways to generate revenue.

Google+ will cause more compliance headaches. For now, it doesn’t appear to create any new headaches.

Sources:

Don’t Be Evil: Imagination at Work with Google and GE’s Compliance Programs

I am attending the Global Ethics Summit 2010, hosted by Dow Jones and Ethisphere. Here are my notes from this session:

General Electric and Google are two very different, yet equally substantial powerhouses with varying businesses to each company’s name. Ensuring compliance with U.S. and foreign regulations while maintaining Google and GE’s respective competitive edges in today’s increasingly complex and competitive marketplace can be daunting, to say the least. Brackett Denniston, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for GE, and Andy Hinton, Chief Compliance Officer and Associate General Counsel for Google, compare notes about how each company tackles critical issues, what has worked and what hasn’t and what issues most concern them going forward.

This session was held during lunch so my notes are sparse.

My first observation is that Brackett showed up in a dark suit, white shirt and a blue tie, looking very GE-ish. Andy was dressed in jeans and sport jacket, looking very Google-ish. (Although Andy came from GE and is a self-proclaimed GE disciple.)

Andy uses lots of measurements in his compliance program. He is trying to model the Google program on his experience at GE. GE has a reputation for lots of measurement

It is important to let people know that their jobs are at risk for compliance failure. You don’t want to just find scapegoats. You need to find the real bad actor.

You also need to reward employees for good behavior. It is important to point out the good stuff and the bad stuff.

Response is they key part of the process. Get the facts fast and disclose fast after you have those facts.

Google relies even more on their brand than GE. It’s hard to replace a nuke reactor. It’s easy to switch search engines.

Without your reputation, it’s hard to business. Your company’s reputation is a big part of a company’s value.

Build a case for value. You are better off missing the numbers than creating a reputational risk. Balance the risk and cost of the violation against the small dollar value of the gain from the bad act.

As long as you have board and CEO buy in then you can do a lot with limited resources.

You want to hire and promote people you can trust and that live and breathe the company culture.

The compliance group at Google is not trying to be cutting edge, unlike the rest of the company. The want to be block and tackle.

In regulated enterprises you need to have heightened awareness and a different approach to compliance. And there is more regulatory risk coming. Even China is promulgating thousands of regulations.

You have to be better than merely meeting the base regulations.

Google’s New Privacy Dashboard

google Dashboard

Have you ever wondered what data is stored with your Google Account?

Over the past 11 years, Google has focused on building innovative products for our users. Today, with hundreds of millions of people using those products around the world, we are very aware of the trust that you have placed in us, and our responsibility to protect your privacy and data.

…

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we’re delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard. Watch this quick video to learn more and then try it out for yourself at www.google.com/dashboard.

I think it’s great that Google makes available all this privacy data in a single place.

You might be surprised how much Google knows in case you’ve already forgotten a service or two you’ve signed up with. Keep a close eye for the items on the page with this little blue icon meaning “this bit is public”. At the bottom of the page, Google disclaims that 16 additional products are not yet available in this dashboard.