Google apparently is ending an egregious privacy breach involving people who buy apps from its Google Play store using Google Wallet to pay. Consumer Watchdog filed a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission with a copy to California Attorney General Kamala Harris about what Google was doing. The complaint  alleged that the Internet giant was violating its privacy policies and its “Buzz” consent agreement with the FTC.

Rep. Hank Johnson, D-GA, also questioned Google about what it was doing.  Google was sending to apps developers the name, email address and address of people who bought apps on Google play.  It tried to claim that the the information was necessary for the transaction, but that’s clearly not the case when talking about downloading an app from its app store. Neither Apple nor Microsoft provide such personal information about people who buy apps from their stores. Google’s response to Rep. Johnson, confirmed what Google was doing and actually showed it was unnecessary.  Consumer Watchdog sent a second letter to the FTC with a copy to California Attorney General Harris when Google answered Rep. Johnson’s letter.

On Tuesday WebProNews and DroidLife reported Google was addressing the concerns on a new Wallet Merchant Center it is rolling out and no longer sending the personal information about apps buyers.

I’m glad the change is coming, but I’ve got questions.

What role did the Federal Trade Commission or the California Attorney General’s office play in this change?  Why did Google only act when formal complaints were filed? Will there be fines?

Google has become a serial privacy violator.  You’ll remember that new sooner was the ink dry on the “Buzz” consent agreement than it was caught hacking around the privacy settings on the Safari browser used on iPhones, iPads and other Apple devices.  It ultimately cost Google a fine of $22.5 million, which is pocket change to a company that has annual revenue of around $50 billion. It’s like giving a $25 parking ticket to a person who makes $50,000 a year.

Google is simply figuring that fines are a cost — and a minor one at that — of doing business.  In case you missed it, on Monday Germany hit Google with a $189,225 for the Wi-Spy incident where its Street View Cars sucked up emails, URLs, passwords, account numbers as they snapped photos around the world.

In describing the fine The New York Times‘ Claire Cain Miller wrote:

Regulators in Germany, one of the most privacy-sensitive countries in the world, unleashed their wrath on Google on Monday for scooping up sensitive personal information in the Street View mapping project, and imposed the largest fine ever assessed by European regulators over a privacy violation.

The penalty? $189,225.

Put another way, that’s how much Google made every two minutes last year, or roughly 0.002 percent of its $10.7 billion in net profit.
It is the latest example of regulators’ meager arsenal of fines and punishments for corporations in the wrong. Academics, activists and even regulators themselves say fines that are pocket change for companies do little to deter them from misbehaving again, and are merely baked into the cost of doing business.

The fact Google is changing Google Wallet’s practices makes it clear Google violated the Buzz Agreement.   Google claims that it is taking privacy seriously now that it is operating for 20 years under the Buzz Agreement. It isn’t and the regulators aren’t holding Google’s feet to the fire.

The company’s executives need to be held to account in a meaningful way. I’ve always argued the way to get corporate executives’ attention is to hit them with jail time when they flout the law.  It’s not going to happen here, but a meaningful fine for the second Buzz violation sure would be nice.

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Posted by John M. Simpson, Director of Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project. Follow Consumer Watchdog online on Facebook and on Twitter.

Reports were circulating in the tech press Friday that serial privacy violator Google is about to cut a deal with state attorneys general to close their investigation of the Wi-Spy scandal.

Remember what happened?  Google sent specially equipped cars to travel the highways and byways of the world snapping photos of everything they passed.  What Google did not say was that were also sniffing out Wi-Fi networks and sucking up private data on those networks.

They got passwords, account numbers and email messages, including in France a couple trying to arrange an extramarital affair.

When first confronted, Google executives denied sucking up the data.  Then they said it was all a mistake.  Then they said it was the work of a rouge engineer. Consumer Watchdog was among those to call on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate. The FTC did, but dropped the probe after Google essentially said, we’ll be nice.

The Federal Communication Commission opened a probe ultimately fining Google $25,000 for hindering its investigation.  The FCC also found that the Wi-Fi snooping had been deliberate and that senior managers had been aware of it.  The FCC said it could not determine if the law had been broken because the engineer who designed the Wi-Fi snooping exercised is Fifth Amendment rights and declined to testify.

Google tried to spin the FCC probe by saying the commission found they had not broken the law. That’s not what happened; the FCC said they could not determine if the law had broken. A big difference.

Meanwhile, under the leadership of then Connecticut Attorney Richard Blumenthal, more than 30 state attorneys general launched their investigation of the incident, which is really the largest case of wire tapping in history.

It’s that state attorneys general probe that is reportedly about to be settled for $7 million.  That may sound like a lot, but it’s not even pocket change to the Internet giant, which made $10.7 billion profit on revenues of $50.2 billion in 2012. Divide the fine among the states and it comes out to about $230,000 for each.

I asked Susan Kinsman, spokesperson for Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen, now heading the investigation, about prospects for a deal.  She said, “I spoke to our attorneys for a status report. As we’ve stated before, the Google investigation is active and ongoing. I can’t comment about any prospect for a settlement.”

Nonetheless, there are enough sourced reports out there, focusing on the $7 million deal that it sounds like it’s accurate.  It was probably leaked on Friday by Google itself. That’s the way they usually play the PR game. By the time the settlement is officially announced it will be old news.

What’s important, by the way, is not the measly $7 million fine.  It’s understanding what’s really happening. Once again it looks like Google, the serial privacy violator, is buying it’s way out of a jam with what for the Internet giant is pocket change.

We’ll need to see what other provisions the settlement contains.  Will the state attorneys general give Google the same sort of pass that the FTC did when it allowed Google to explicitly deny it broke the law in the Safari hacking scandal and charged Google $22.5 million? What will happen to the data Google sucked up? Will there being any meaningful injunctive relief?  Given Google’s record of repeated privacy violations and of bamboozling regulators, I’m not optimistic that much of anything significant will emerge.

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Posted by John M. Simpson. John is a leading voice on technological privacy and stem cell research issues. His investigations this year of Google’s online privacy practices and book publishing agreements triggered intense media scrutiny and federal interest in the online giant’s business practices. His critique of patents on human embryonic stem cells has been key to expanding the ability of American scientists to conduct stem cell research. He has ensured that California’s taxpayer-funded stem cell research will lead to broadly accessible and affordable medicine and not just government-subsidized profiteering. Prior to joining Consumer Watchdog in 2005, he was executive editor of Tribune Media Services International, a syndication company. Before that, he was deputy editor of USA Today and editor of its international edition. Simpson taught journalism a Dublin City University in Ireland, and consulted for The Irish Times and The Gleaner in Jamaica. He served as president of the World Editors Forum. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from Harpur College of SUNY Binghamton and was a Gannett Fellow at the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii. He has an M.A. in Communication Management from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.

A pro-consumer candidate to the Federal Trade Commission, who had the backing of the entire public interest community, really wanted the job. But this candidate didn’t want allies to go public for fear of alienating the White House. What happened?  Today POTUS hosed us and gave the keys to the FTC to corporate attorney Edith Ramirez.

The lesson: if you want to speak for the public, you have to speak publicly.

It’s just too easy to get caught up in the quagmire of worrying about alienating powerful people. Back channels and back room are the domain of those who want to turn their back on the public, not advocates for the public.

And the lesson, which came in healthy helpings this morning, can even be lost on those of us who typically have no control of our tongues.

Consider Ron Shinkman’s remarkable report today in Payer and Providers about the pathetic record of California Department of Managed Health Care Director Brent Barnhart.  We didn’t expect much from a former Kaiser lawyer Governor Brown appointed to regulate HMOs, but perhaps a healthy tongue lashing on the front end would have up-ended this record.

As Shinkman records:

Between 2009 and 2011, the Department of Managed Health Care issued nearly 1,000 enforcement actions against health plans, fining them nearly $9 million for a variety of misdeeds and demanding they take corrective actions to protect the interests of their enrollees.

But after Aug. 11, 2011, when Gov. Jerry Brown appointed former health plan lawyer and lobbyist Brent A. Barnhart to head the agency, enforcement actions dropped almost immediately. The DMHC issued only 74 such actions during the remainder of the year, compared to 433 in the portion of 2011 prior to his appointment – although an agency official said that number should be condensed.

In 2012, the DMHC issued 90 enforcement actions, well below its historical average dating back more than a decade. The most significant action of the year was taken not against a health plan, but against the Accountable Care IPA, a medical group that had been using non-physicians to make medical coverage determinations.

Moreover, financial penalties levied against the plans dropped dramatically in 2012. Last year, $451,000 in fines were issued, or just over $5,000 per enforcement action. That’s a stark contrast to 2010, when $2.2 million in fines were issued, an average of more than $20,000 per action. In 2008, fines exceeded $18 million, which included several significant enforcement actions against insurers.

New rule, or old rule remembered: When in doubt, speak out.

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Posted by Jamie Court, author of The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell and President of Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

Consumer Watchdog Wednesday called on the Federal Trade Commission to ask Congress to pass Do Not Track legislation because “the self-regulatory effort to design Do Not Track is virtually dead in the water.”

In a letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz John M. Simpson, the nonpartisan nonprofit public interest group’s Privacy Project Director wrote:

“Almost a year ago with great fanfare in the media you said a Do Not Track mechanism would be in place by the end of last year.  You and you colleagues opted to rely on a self-regulatory process to implement Do Not Track, but alluded to the possibility of legislation if that process failed.  Not surprisingly the self-regulatory effort to design Do Not Track is virtually dead in the water.  After a year nothing has changed for the consumer.  You tried to use the bully pulpit, but the advertising industry did not heed your call. The time for words has passed; if you expect Do Not Track to be implemented, the Commission must endorse Do Not Track legislation now.”

Read Consumer Watchdog’s letter here

“As the Commission advocated in its report, Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change, a Do Not Track mechanism would offer people control over whether data about them was collected,” Simpson wrote.

Consumer Watchdog noted that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an Internet standards setting organization, has been trying to develop specifications about how the Do Not Track message would be sent and what the obligations would be for a website that receives it.  “Talks have dragged on more than a year with weekly conference calls and six face-to-face meetings, while the W3C’s Tracking Protection Working Group has grown to 102 members,” Simpson wrote. “Another round of meetings is scheduled next month. Talks can at best be charitably described as stalled.”

“You and the Commission repeatedly put faith in self-regulatory efforts and predicted that a Do Not Track mechanism would be in place by the end of the year,” Simpson wrote.  “Unfortunately that optimism has proved to be unwarranted.”

The letter concluded:

“The end of the year as passed. Your words have gone largely unheeded by the advertising industry. The bully pulpit has not brought about a Do Not Track standard. Lest your words be taken as empty threats and given the logjam in the World Wide Web Consortium process, the time for decisive action by the FTC has arrived.  Sen. Jay Rockefeller, (D-WV) introduced a Do Not Track bill in the last session of Congress.  We understand he intends to re-introduce the bill this session.  We call on you and the entire Commission to endorse the urgent need for Do Not Track legislation.  If nothing else, the threat of legislation could be the stick that prompts a recalcitrant advertising industry to stop its foot dragging and re-engage in real negotiations.”

The letter cited numerous times that Leibowitz had predicted the implementation of Do Not Track by the end of last year and raised the possibility of legislation if the effort failed.  For instance, the letter noted:

“‘We are definitely at a critical point in whether folks will be able to come together and develop a real Do Not Track option for consumers,’ you told Politico in October. You said the lack of consensus was ‘encouraging the possibility of legislation — maybe not today, maybe not in the lame duck, but soon.’ You also told The New York Times, ‘It is time to drop some of the bluster and work toward compromise.’

“In November you used the bully pulpit again to tell Politico, ‘If by the end of the year or early next year, we haven’t seen a real Do Not Track option for consumers, I suspect the commission will go back and think about whether we want to endorse legislation.’ ”  

Google may have only received a tap on the wrist from the Federal Trade Commission when the agency closed the U.S. antitrust investigation without taking action against the Internet giant for skewing search results to favor its services, but it’s looking increasingly likely that Google will face strong action on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Financial Times reports that Google will have to change the way it presents search results or face antitrust charges for “diverting traffic.” Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia told the newspaper:

“We are still investigating, but my conviction is [Google] are diverting traffic. They are monetizing this kind of business, the strong position they have in the general search market and this is not only a dominant position, I think – I fear – there is an abuse of this dominant position.”

Almunia has told Google that it must make changes to address European concerns or that it will face a formal statement of objections.  Late last year he warned that Google would have to offer remedies this month.

I think you can take Almunia’s strong statements Thursday to The Financial Times as a sign that the European Commission is serious.  While he says he’d prefer a settlement, European law gives the antitrust enforcer a huge stick.  After filing a formal statement of objections, the Commission  can impose a fine amounting to 10 percent of Google’s revenue or about $4 billion. That’s almost as effective to getting executives attention as sending them to the slammer. Unlike the FTC, the European Commission doesn’t have to make its case in Court.  It can simply impose the fine.

As The Financial Times headline read on one story about the situation, “EU Antitrust Chief Holds All the Aces.” Almunia hinted that the antitrust settlement may play out differently in Europe because the law is different.  It’s also true that the Internet giant’s dominance in search is even greater in Europe at 90 percent of the market than the 70 percent share it commands in the United States.

And there is still a strong possibility of meaningful action in the United States.  Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is actively pursing a case.  His staff has appropriately worked to obtain key Google documents that Google tried to claim were privileged and did not need to be turned over in response to Civil Investigative Demands. From all appearances the FTC staff was nowhere near as diligent in its investigation.

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Posted by John M. Simpson. John is a leading voice on technological privacy and stem cell research issues. His investigations this year of Google’s online privacy practices and book publishing agreements triggered intense media scrutiny and federal interest in the online giant’s business practices. His critique of patents on human embryonic stem cells has been key to expanding the ability of American scientists to conduct stem cell research. He has ensured that California’s taxpayer-funded stem cell research will lead to broadly accessible and affordable medicine and not just government-subsidized profiteering. Prior to joining Consumer Watchdog in 2005, he was executive editor of Tribune Media Services International, a syndication company. Before that, he was deputy editor of USA Today and editor of its international edition. Simpson taught journalism a Dublin City University in Ireland, and consulted for The Irish Times and The Gleaner in Jamaica. He served as president of the World Editors Forum. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from Harpur College of SUNY Binghamton and was a Gannett Fellow at the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii. He has an M.A. in Communication Management from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.

Says Action Necessary To Restore Faith in Agency As Effective Antitrust Enforcer

Consumer Watchdog today called on the Federal Trade Commission to release the 100-page staff report on the 19-month Google investigation as the only way to “restore a modicum of public trust in the Commission’s ability to serve as an effective antitrust enforcer.”

“I call on you to release the FTC staff report to help make clear what was behind the Commission’s otherwise unfathomable action,” wrote John M. Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project director in a letter to Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz and Commissioners Julie Brill, Edith Ramirez, Maureen Ohlhausen and Joshua Wright.

“Media reports suggest that the Commission’s tap on the Internet giant’s wrist was the result of a ‘calculated and expensive charm offensive,’ ” Simpson wrote.

Read Consumer Watchdog’s letter here.

“Put another way, by all appearances, the Internet giant played an insiders’ game and bought its way out of trouble,” Simpson wrote. “Perhaps, the Commission managed to ignore the charm offensive and decide the case on the merits.  Sadly, we cannot know the true situation because we don’t have the details of the 19-month staff investigation.”

Consumer Watchdog’s letter quotes articles in Politico and The New York Times about the Internet giant’s $25 million lobbying campaign and its efforts to cozy up to the Obama Administration and other Washington insiders. “It was a multiyear campaign focused on this very moment, knowing as the company grew these issues were going to come up,” Alan Davidson, Google’s former top lobbyist, told Politico.

Read the Politico article here.

Read The New York Times article here.

The best course of action, Consumer Watchdog said, would have been to file an antitrust suit and bring the case to trial. All the evidence would have been part of the public record.  In a November letter to the FTC Consumer Watchdog warned that a negotiated settlement would inevitably invite cynicism about the results.

Consumer Watchdog’s letter to the Commission today continued:

“Opting to avoid a trial and filing a formal consent agreement would at least have required a complaint, spelling out the violation. Instead you have settled for promises from a company that has a demonstrated record of repeatedly breaking its word.  And it’s not even clear what they did wrong.

“Your only chance of re-establishing the FTC’s credibility on its handling of the Google investigation is to release the 100-page staff report about the inquiry. Releasing the report would put the Commission’s decision in context.

“Moreover, the public has the right to know what the staff recommended and to understand the reasoning of the professionals who conducted the lengthy investigation and the quality of their work.  It could be possible that the staff botched the investigation and you were left with no other choice.  If the report contains Google trade secrets, they could be redacted.”

Department of Justice, State Attorneys General Must Press To End Search Bias

The Federal Trade Commission’s settlement with Google fails to end its most anticompetitive practice, Consumer Watchdog said today and the public interest group called on the Department of Justice and state attorneys general to press forward to end the Internet giant’s monopolistic behavior in search results.

“Google clearly skews search results to favor its own products and services while portraying the results as unbiased. That undermines competition and hurts consumers,” said John M. Simpson, director of the group’s Privacy Project. “The FTC rolled over for Google.  They’ve accepted Google executives’ promises that they will change two practices without even requiring a consent agreement, but Google has a track record of broken promises.  Don’t forget, this fall the FTC fined Google $22.5 million for violating its most recent consent agreement. Why would the FTC take Google at its word?”

The new Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, William J. Baer, should make Google’s abuse of search a top priority, Consumer Watchdog said.

The FTC’s settlement does require a consent agreement regarding so-called Standards Essential Patents held by Google’s Motorola subsidiary.  Google is now required to license these patents to any company on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” terms – known as FRAND terms.

“This will help ensure competition in the manufacture of smartphones and tablets,” said Simpson, “but that was never the heart of the issue. Biased search and Google’s favoring its own properties do real consumer harm. Google is the gateway to the Internet for most people. When Google rigs the game, we all suffer. They need to be stopped.”

Consumer Watchdog expressed concern that FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, who is expected to step down from the commission soon, may have rushed to finish the investigation so it could be concluded under his chairmanship.

The nonpartisan, nonprofit public interest group noted that Google’s monopolistic business practices are under investigation by a number of state attorneys general including Texas, California, New York and Ohio. European Union competition officials are also investigating Google.

When you stare down a $220 billion corporation, it’s hard not to blink. But if the Federal Trade Commission doesn’t deliver on its ultimatum to Google that it settle its antitrust problems soon for real relief or face prosecution, then consumers will never get the open and unfettered online and mobile access to information they deserve.

While the government’s battle with Microsoft in the 1990s was about whether the dominant software company could bundle software and an Internet browser, the antitrust case against Google is about whether one company should have so much control over online information that it can steer us any where it chooses for its own profit.

This is the power to make or break businesses, control online discourse, and steer consumers to the Internet giant’s own websites and affiliated businesses, all based on tweaking an unseen algorithm and holding a network of key online and mobile gateways and properties.

Google’s 70% control of online searches and 90% control of mobile searches, along with its dominant Android mobile operating system, patents, and vast content acquisitions make it the Standard Oil of our time.

The allegations against Google are that it restrains online trade with biased search results that drive consumers to the content it owns (Google Travel, Products, YouTube, Maps, Google+, etc.) or content it chooses, as opposed to that favored organically by the public.

Restraint of trade may be different today than in 1911 when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil broken into parts under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Nonetheless the antitrust principle of preventing dominant players from playing unfairly and hurting consumers by driving out legitimate competition is very real for Google’s 2012 business model.

The principle at stake in the FTC case is critical: If you want to do business online, should you be forced to do business with Google?

Companies like Foundem, Nextag, AsktheBuilder.com and Kayak have been threatened with closing because they have fallen on the wrong side of the assumptions in Google’s Search algorithm. The evidence shows that Google increasingly steers consumers to what it determines to be “quality” web sites – aka those that use Google services and support its business model. If you are not on Page One of a Google Search, your business is not alive, even though you may be the business that consumers prefer in the market, just not Google’s “type” of business.

Counterfeit industries and black markets for prescription drugs, predatory loans and entertainment have also profited because Google has turned a blind eye to the source of its massive advertising dollars and, as a result, companies that play by the rules have been hurt. Example: Google paid the US $500 million last year for illegal pharmacy advertising. Copyright and other intellectual property rights held by authors, artists, musicians, journalists and Hollywood are also increasingly thrown to the wind because of Google’s dominance, bias against respecting them and the money to be made from “free” content and pirated products.

Can such a dominant search and content Goliath really provide open access that isn’t biased toward its ownership interests?

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t think so when they went to Stanford.

“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers,” they wrote in Appendix A of their research paper explaining their search technique. “Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious.”

Consumers often don’t know that they are being steered or why, so it takes an engineer to show them. Recently engineers from Twitter, MySpace and Facebook showed that Google’s new social search feature steers users to less relevant and less popular spots, like Google+, to promote Google services, rather than Twitter and other spots with unquestionably more traffic. Google increasingly wants our world to be its world.

The young Google founders argued in their Stanford research paper that launched Google that overt bias won’t be tolerated, but covert steering would be acceptable. “For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from friendly companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors,” they wrote. ” This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market.”

And this is the most dangerous type of bias in the hands of company as big and controlling as Google.

The European Commission is demanding the Internet giant change its ways or face a formal complaint. The Federal Trade Commission, rumored to be backing away from a staff recommendation in favor of legal action, owes the public a prosecution of Google in order to reveal the evidence it has collected. Help us keep the FTC off the fence – send an email to the Commission today to tell them to file the antitrust lawsuit today!

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Originally posted on November 30th, 2012 on the Hill. Posted by Jamie Court, author of The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell and President of Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.

Should one company be able to control how you use the Internet and what you see?

Google — with 70% of online search and 90% of mobile search markets — is increasingly doing this.  Evidence before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) shows that Google skews its results towards its own services and commercial priorities, when consumers believe they are getting the most “popular” organic result.

After a year’s probe the FTC’s staff has recommended antitrust prosecution, but politics may be stopping the suit. Please send an email today asking the Commission to approve that antitrust suit.

Consumer Watchdog cheered when the FTC took up its antitrust investigation, which we began calling for more than two years ago. Recently there have been reports that the Commissioners are wavering and may not act against the Internet giant.  You can help us make sure the five commissioners don’t cave.

Google uses its monopoly on the Internet and in the mobile space to bias searches in favor of its own products and services, harming consumers and competitors alike.  The time for action is now.  Ask the Commission to adopt its staff’s recommendation and approve an an antitrust suit against Google.

For more information on our support for the FTC’s antitrust investigation read our letter to the Commission here.

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Posted by John M. Simpson. John is a leading voice on technological privacy and stem cell research issues. His investigations this year of Google’s online privacy practices and book publishing agreements triggered intense media scrutiny and federal interest in the online giant’s business practices. His critique of patents on human embryonic stem cells has been key to expanding the ability of American scientists to conduct stem cell research. He has ensured that California’s taxpayer-funded stem cell research will lead to broadly accessible and affordable medicine and not just government-subsidized profiteering. Prior to joining Consumer Watchdog in 2005, he was executive editor of Tribune Media Services International, a syndication company. Before that, he was deputy editor of USA Today and editor of its international edition. Simpson taught journalism a Dublin City University in Ireland, and consulted for The Irish Times and The Gleaner in Jamaica. He served as president of the World Editors Forum. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from Harpur College of SUNY Binghamton and was a Gannett Fellow at the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii. He has an M.A. in Communication Management from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.