links for 2010-02-14
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“People are surprised that Google treated a private [e-mail] contact list as a public ‘friends’ list,” said Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He said that the list should not automatically be made public, and that he would lodge a Federal Trade Commission complaint next week. In a blog post on Thursday evening, Google said it was making changes to Buzz deal with this issue. These included making it easier for users to change their privacy settings to limit who can see their personal lists of contacts. However, the contact lists will still be public by default until changes are made, and it was unclear whether the concessions would do enough to quiet the critics.
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Dubai's five-year credit-default-swap spread—a measure of credit risk—rose close to 0.5 percentage point to trade up at 6.32 percentage points in late trading Friday. These elevated levels indicated that Dubai is considered one of the riskiest sovereigns in the world behind only Argentina, Venezuela, Ukraine and Pakistan. The wider spread means that it now costs $636,000 a year to insure a notional $10 million of Dubai's sovereign debt against default for five years, up from $585,000 at Thursday's close.
