By Kyle Alspach

It’s not easy to get Americans talking about far-off crises like the one in Tibet. Human rights organizations can tell you all about this.

Yet in the case of Tibet, Groupon has apparently pulled it off, at the company’s own expense. Groupon’s jokey treatment of the Tibet crisis in its Super Bowl ad has people outraged – and talking – today.

And if there are others out there like me, they’re reading up about Tibet as result.

Which is ultimately a good thing for Tibet, right?

But many people probably haven’t looked beyond the ad, content to be upset about its insensitivity. Which means they probably haven’t learned that Groupon is actually a supporter of the Tibetan people, and in fact created the ad as part of a fundraising campaign for Tibet and other social causes at savethemoney.groupon.com.

The company probably should have mentioned this in the ad. Overall, if Groupon was trying to promote itself with the ad, it obviously fell short.

But if the company was trying to get attention for Tibet — and I think that was part of the equation — I’d say the company succeeded.

By Rodney Brown

Seriously, people, how many more red flags do we need to pop up over Facebook before we realize it could be a real-life Nigerian/Kenyan/Indonesian barrister? The company whose founder states that we all should be living in an open, transparent world, operates like a scam artist so slimy we wouldn’t believe it if it were a film character.

Over the weekend, Facebook killed its latest unannounced attempt at getting you to give up your private information. Apparently, the site had added two new info items to the things you “opt-in” to share when you agree to running some Facebook applications — your main contact phone number and home address. You may have seen the controversy over this bubbling over on Facebook and Twitter, but maybe not – it didn’t seem to get the same level of outrage as Facebook’s change of its profile pages.

What is more disturbing is that, in its statement on a developer blog saying they were suspending the “feature,” Facebook also said, “We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks.”

That’s right, they plan to tweak it and bring it back.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, an AdAge article about Facebook’s advertising revenue — $1.86 billion in 2010 is the estimate — let out that the third largest advertiser on the site behind AT&T and Match.com is an unknown website called Make-My-Baby.com. (Warning, don’t go there.) The folks at ReadWriteWeb tracked down this stealthy high-spender and discovered it is an old-fashioned bait-and-switch site that, under the guise of a cute application that allows you to put mustaches and glasses on baby pics, actually changes your homepage and your default search to Bing. According to RWW, Make-My-Baby.com then makes a small amount of money every time you do a Bing search.

All of this is happening while Facebook has figured out a way to use the ever-so-trustworthy Goldman Sachs to get IPO level money — estimated at up to $1.5 billion — without ever having to reveal any financial data as required by a real IPO. To help keep the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from investigating this idea of Goldman Sachs buying a ton of Facebook stock and then reselling to private investors, the firm has said it will only sell the stock to “foreign investors.” Since it only sells any of its investment products to high net worth (i.e. rich) individuals, this move will have almost zero effect on who gets to buy the stock. Show me a Goldman Sachs customer that doesn’t have a Swiss or Cayman Islands financial operation that can buy the Facebook stock, and I will show you someone that won’t be a Goldman Sachs customer for long.

To sum up, Facebook says, we want to raise billions, but we won’t tell you anything about even a single dollar we bring in. And we will bring in those dollars by selling ads to scam artists and delivering your private information to our customers without telling you that we are going to do it.

When is the SEC finally going to investigate this incredibly shady operation? When RealNetworks was installing spam applications with every download of RealPlayer back in the wild West 1990s, the government could not care less because the number of people affected and the dollar amount was negligible. Facebook has one-twelfth the entire population of the planet as users, and it is valued at $50 billion. Now is the time to get them to stop their insidious practices or shut them down.

By Galen Moore

It’s one thing to prosecute leakers of sensitive government documents. But can a free society take action against those who publish leaked material?

Mastercard, Visa and Paypal have cut off WikiLeaks from donors. Can you imagine them doing the same to New York Times subscribers? Wait: Do you imagine what the New York Times, if it got its hands on diplomatic cables, would do other than vet and publish the information, as Wikileaks has done? History tells us otherwise.

U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman would like to prosecute Julian Assange and any others who publish information that interferes with national security. We’ve been through this before, and I think it was called the Pentagon Papers. That was 1971, a little before my time — but Joe, you were hanging around the Connecticut State Legislature back then. Help me out with this: I’d assumed we learned then that the term “national security” works well, until applied by Richard Nixon and Erwin Griswold. So far, the U.S. Supreme Court has shown a healthy aversion to law allowing that sort of abuse. So … what’s up with this SHIELD thing?

Another thing that’s clear here is that if WikiLeaks is media, so is the U.S. State Department. The diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks read like foreign correspondence of the most interesting color — with a few exceptions.

In media, we generally don’t cable the boss when a double-talking source says something off the record. Cablegate has shown our Mid-East diplomats were doing data dumps from the lips of dictators who were making opposite statements in their own national media. Not since Judy Miller and Valerie Plame has an information gatekeeper allowed such bullcorn to leak through to people who mattered.

Whatever their quality, the cables’ release has apparently caused some glitches in U.S. foreign relations. To blame for that, we can look to the organization out of which the documents were leaked.

Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s. And render unto us, the media, Assange and Wikileaks. He’s one of us, and we claim him. I just hope there’s enough juice left in the display ad business to cover his bail.

By Rodney Brown

The joke around the Mountain Dew cooler (nerds don’t drink water) for years has been that Google Inc. is eventually going to take over the world. While that may have elicited the kind of uncomfortable chuckles one makes when faced with a funny but inconvenient truth, some people took it seriously, such as Microsoft Corp., with the launch of its new search engine Bing.

Now it seems the next stage of Google’s world domination has been revealed. Along with Verizon Communications Inc., Google announced that it had this amazing new proposal to “ensure” Net Neutrality – you know, that idea that no corporation can stop you from accessing any part or function of the Internet, even if that corporation is your ISP, like, say Comcast Corp., and you were accessing Bit Torrent downloads and they decided to shut off your connection because most Bit Torrent downloads are of illegal content, such as movies or songs.

But while the Googizon proposal – available for fun reading here – does on the surface seem to promote Net Neutrality, in fact it removes all wireless access to the Internet from the proposal because the technology is “different.” And the two titanic corporations propose a new, higher-speed Internet that would, in fact, be completely controlled by corporations such as Google, Verizon or Comcast, who would be able to charge more for high-bandwidth applications, like streaming HD movies.

Does that sound familiar? Anybody remember the crazy hype over Google’s decision to create and deploy a Gigabit Internet to select communities around the country?

At the time I (and many, many others) speculated on why Google would want to do such a thing. Its constant marketing drumbeat of “Do no evil” equating to doing good things just to be good had already been tarnished when it rolled out its own cellphone, the Nexus One, with no extra discounts beyond what any carrier like AT&T offers and one of the worst return fee structures on the market.

Now we know. The Google Gigabit fiber plan would allow them to test a tightly controlled, completely locked down, absolutely un-Neutral Internet. The possible goal? You want regular definition YouTube videos, use the “regular” Internet. You want the buffer-less, lossless HD stream of the latest action hit in 3-D? Sure thing, just pay an extra bazillion a month for this here newfangled Super-Internet! Kiss goodbye to any research and development on the regular Internet if that happens, folks.

Do no evil? How about the evil of creating a caste system of Internet access? How do you think that idea plays in urban communities like Dorchester or rural Berkshire communities like Chester that are just now able to look with some real hope at the idea of getting something better than dial up because of the broadband access policies that have ridden in on the stimulus funds from the Obama administration?

And under this Machiavellian scheme you could also kiss goodbye to ever even coming close to the kind of high speed at low cost Internet access other countries in the developed world have. High speed at high cost – sure, we’ll have that!

Google, I feel dirty for ever having bought your hype. You are no different than Enron or AIG – sacrifice the customer for the sake of return to shareholders, all the while trying to get those customers to smile because of all your happy, earnest double-talk, while the knife slips in.