you buy FACEBOOK??? $100 BILLIONS!!!!!!!!

[kopiuncle]

Facebook is preparing itself for an IPO that could easily top $100 billion, according to a new report.

At $100 billion, Facebook’s impending IPO would be one of the largest in history, quadrupling Google’s $23 billion IPO in 2004.

CNBC says the social networking giant is likely to go public during the first quarter of 2012, less than nine months from now. That falls in line with a May 2012 deadline when Facebook will be required to publicly report its financial information, regardless of whether it’s a private or public company.

The $100 billion valuation isn’t a surprise — there were reports last month that Facebook’s IPO could easily top $100 billion, thanks to huge consumer and investor appeal. In fact, if LinkedIn’s stellar IPO is any indication, Facebook’s valuation could hit the stratosphere the day it hits the public markets.

Goldman Sachs is in the driver’s seat to underwrite the IPO, thanks to its $450 million investment in Facebook earlier this year. Facebook and Goldman might want to hurry, though: The social network’s growth is apparently slowing down.

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[kopiuncle]

waulau!!!!!! cyber grand master delusion..........you buy???

 

[Narong Wongwan]

analyst only put the real value closer to a third of that one......dun buy into hype

 

[Mdm Tang]

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http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/01/technology/facebook_ipo_zuckerberg/index.htm?iid=HP_River




Zuckerberg's Facebook stake is worth at least $16 billion

By David Goldman @CNNMoneyTech February 2, 2012: 10:18 AM ET



NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- At age 27, Mark Zuckerberg is about to officially become a paper billionaire.

In the IPO paperwork Facebook filed Wednesday, the company reported that its founder and CEO owns more than a quarter of the company. Zuckerberg holds roughly 534 million shares.



What those shares are actually worth is a question for the open market to sort out when Facebook begins trading its shares publicly later this year. But Facebook said in its IPO paperwork that its own internal valuation puts their current value at $29.73 per share.

That means Zuckerberg's stake is worth $16 billion -- enough to make him one of the 50 richest people on the planet, by Forbes' calculation.

But Facebook's valuation is fairly conservative. Analysts have ballparked the company's market value at $85 billion or more.

If that higher valuation holds up when the company goes public, Zuckerberg would be worth $24 billion or more. That'll put him in Forbes' top-10 list.

He's not the only one poised to make bucketloads on Facebook.




Accel Partners, the first major venture capitalist to fund Facebook, owns around 11% of the company. It invested $12.7 million in April 2005 and now has a stake worth roughly $6 billion, as of Facebook's last valuation.

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz owns the third-highest number of shares, with 134 million. His 8% stake in the company is worth roughly $4 billion.

The Russian venture capital group DST Global's 131 million shares -- a 5% stake -- are worth roughly $3.9 billion. And investor Peter Thiel, who put up $500,000 to get Facebook through its first summer of operations, now owns a 2.5% stake worth $1.3 billion.



Who owns Facebook?


Though Zuckerberg only controls a 28% stake in the company, every other major shareholder -- including Breyer, Moskovitz, DST and Thiel -- has agreed to allow Zuckerberg to act as a proxy to vote with their shares.

That gives Zuckerberg voting control over 57% of Facebook's shares. The unusual arrangement means he'll essentially have sole decision-making power over Facebook.

Most of Zuckerberg's wealth is on paper. As the dot-com boom-and-bust illustrated, paper gains can vanish fast if a company's market value plunges.

But Zuckerberg has also collected some cold, hard cash over the years. Last year, he made $483,000, took home a $220,500 bonus, and received additional perks like private jet travel valued at $783,000.

His regular paycheck is about to be slashed, though. As of next year, Zuckerberg will make just $1 a year.

He didn't receive any more stock in 2011, and likely won't get any additional stock-based compensation after the company goes public. Facebook said in its filing that the company's directors believe Zuckerberg's current stock "sufficiently aligns his interests with those of our stockholders."

Facebook's No. 2 Sheryl Sandberg is actually the most handsomely paid at the company. She took home about $300,000 last year, with a $90,000 bonus, but received $30 million in stock grants.

Sandberg owns fewer than 2 million shares now, but she is sitting on stock grant of 38 million shares that will finish vesting in April 2013. That would make her another Facebook-created billionaire.

David Ebersman, the company's chief financial officer, had the same cash bonus and salary as Sandberg, and got $18 million in stock-based compensation last year. Facebook's chief engineer, Mike Schroepfer, made a total of about $25 million last year in stock and cash, and the company's lawyer took home a cool $7 million.

 

[youtalkcock]

Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world. Some of these so-called whitehat infosec firms are working for authoritarian governments, such as those of Egypt and Syria.

Everything you do on Facebook stays on Facebook regardless of your “privacy” settings, and deleting your account is impossible, even if you “delete” your account, all your personal info stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time. Changing the privacy settings to make your Facebook account more “private” is also a delusion. Facebook knows more about you than your family.

http://www.physorg.com/news170614271.html
http://itgrunts.com/2010/10/07/facebook-steals-numbers-and-data-from-your-iph….

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-11-15/facebook-privacy-tracking-data/51225112/1

Facebook tracking is under scrutiny

By Byron Acohido, USA TODAY
Updated 11/16/2011 9:03 AM​

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In recent weeks, Facebook has been wrangling with the Federal Trade Commission over whether the social media website is violating users' privacy by making public too much of their personal information.

​

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a keynote during Facebook's developer conference in San Francisco in September.

<more style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); ">Far more quietly, another debate is brewing over a different side of online privacy: what Facebook is learning about those who visit its website.
Facebook officials are now acknowledging that the social media giant has been able to create a running log of the web pages that each of its 800 million or so members has visited during the previous 90 days. Facebook also keeps close track of where millions more non-members of the social network go on the Web, after they visit a Facebook web page for any reason.

To do this, the company relies on tracking cookie technologies similar to the controversial systems used by Google, Adobe, Microsoft, Yahoo and others in the online advertising industry, says Arturo Bejar, Facebook's engineering director.

Facebook's efforts to track the browsing habits of visitors to its site have made the company a player in the "Do Not Track" debate, which focuses on whether consumers should be able to prevent websites from tracking the consumers' online activity.

For online business and social media sites, such information can be particularly valuable in helping them tailor online ads to specific visitors. But privacy advocates worry about how else the information might be used, and whether it might be sold to third parties. New guidelines for online privacy are being hashed out in Congress and by the World Wide Web Consortium, which sets standards for the Internet.

If privacy advocates get their way, consumers soon could be empowered to stop or limit tech companies and ad networks from tracking them wherever they go online. But the online advertising industry has dug in its heels, trying to retain the current self-regulatory system.

Online tracking involves technologies that tech companies and ad networks have used for more than a decade to help advertisers deliver more relevant ads to each viewer. Until now, Facebook, which makes most of its profits from advertising, has been ambiguous in public statements about the extent to which it collects tracking data.

It contends that it does not belong in the same camp as Google, Microsoft and the rest of the online ad industry's major players. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made this point to interviewer Charlie Rose on national TV last week.

For the past several weeks, Zuckerberg and other Facebook officials have sought to distinguish how Facebook and others use tracking data. Facebook uses such data only to boost security and improve how "Like" buttons and similar Facebook plug-ins perform, Bejar told USA TODAY. Plug-ins are the ubiquitous web applications that enable you to tap into Facebook services from millions of third-party web pages.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes says the company has "no plans to change how we use this data." He also says the company's intentions "stand in stark contrast to the many ad networks and data brokers that deliberately and, in many cases, surreptitiously track people to create profiles of their behavior, sell that content to the highest bidder, or use that content to target ads."

Conflicting pressures

Rather than appease its critics, Facebook's public explanations of how it tracks and how it uses tracking data have touched off a barrage of questions from technologists, privacy advocates, regulators and lawmakers around the world.

"Facebook could be tracking users without knowledge or permission, which could be an unfair or deceptive business practice," says Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., co-sponsor with Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, of a bill aimed at limiting online tracking of children.

The company "should be covered by strong privacy safeguards," Markey says. "The massive trove of personal information that Facebook accumulates about its users can have a significant impact on them — now and into the future."

Noting that "Facebook is the most popular social media website in the world," Barton adds, "All websites should respect users' privacy." After Zuckerberg appeared on the Charlie Rose TV show last week, Markey and Barton sent a letter to the 27-year-old CEO asking him to explain why Facebook recently applied for a U.S. patent for technology that includes a method to correlate tracking data with advertisements. They gave Zuckerberg a Dec. 1 deadline to reply.

"We patent lots of things, and future products should not be inferred from our patent application," Facebook corporate spokesman Barry Schnitt says. Facebook is under intense, conflicting pressures. It must prove to its global financial backers that it is worthy of the hundreds of millions of dollars they've poured into the company, financial and tech industry analysts say. Those investors include Microsoft, Goldman Sachshttp://content.usatoday.com/topics/...king,+Financial,+Insurance,+Law/Goldman+Sachs, the Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, Hong Konghttp://content.usatoday.com/topics/topic/Places,+Geography/Towns,+Cities,+Counties/Hong+Kong financier Sir Ka-shing Li and venture capitalist Peter Andreas Thiel.

The success of the company's initial public offering of stock, expected sometime next year, hinges in part on Facebook's ability to move beyond the bread-and-butter text ads that appear on members' home pages and emerge as a key player in graphical display ads and corporate brand marketing campaigns, says Rebecca Lieb, advertising media analyst at the Altimeter Group. In advertising, knowing more about consumers' preferences is key. "More data means better targeting, which means more revenue," says Marissa Gluck, managing partner of the media consulting firm Radar Research.

To meet rising expectations, Facebook must increase its annual revenue, now estimated at about $4 billion, by double-digit percentage points for years to come, Gluck says. The company is striving to keep its options open to do this. In doing so, it is bumping into pressure from critics who are concerned that leaving online privacy standards entirely in the hands of corporations might not be the best idea.

Ground rules needed

Companies are incorporating tracking data into new business models "without necessarily appreciating the long-term and collective consequences," says Craig Spiezle, executive director of the non-profit Online Trust Alliance. Last week, consumer reporter Ric Romero of station KABC in Los Angeles showed how insurance companies monitor Facebook and Twitter, looking for reasons to raise premiums and deny claims. Previously, ABC News reporter Lyneka Little reported on how employers use Facebook information as part of the recruitment process.

Meanwhile, researchers at AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute have documented how tracking data culled from Internet searches and surfing can be meshed with personal information that Internet users disclose at websites for shopping, travel, health or jobs. Personal disclosures made on social networks, along with preference data gathered by new apps for smartphones and tablet PCs, are being tossed into this mix, too.

Privacy advocates worry that before long, corporations, government agencies and political parties could routinely purchase tracking data from data aggregators. "Tracking data can be used to figure out your political bent, religious beliefs, sexuality preferences, health issues or the fact that you're looking for a new job," says Peter Eckersley, technology projects director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "There are all sorts of ways to form wrong judgments about people."

So far, it does not appear that this sort of data correlation is being done, at least not on a wide scale. But in the absence of ground rules, technologists, regulators and privacy advocates worry that companies involved in collecting tracking data could succumb to the temptation to cash in. Says Michael Fertik, founder and CEO of Reputation.com: "We can only imagine that an advertising company with a richer trove of data will sell more and more of that data."

Facebook's trove of data

Facebook for the first time revealed details of how it compiles its trove of tracking data in a series of phone and e-mail interviews conducted by USA TODAY with Bejar, Noyes and Schnitt, as well as engineering manager Gregg Stefancik and corporate spokeswoman Jaime Schopflin. Here's what they disclosed:

• The company compiles tracking data in different ways for members who have signed in and are using their accounts, for members who are logged-off and for non-members. The tracking process begins when you initially visit a facebook.com page. If you choose to sign up for a new account, Facebook inserts two different types of tracking cookies in your browser, a "session cookie" and a "browser cookie." If you choose not to become a member, and move on, you only get the browser cookie.

• From this point on, each time you visit a third-party webpage that has a Facebook Like button, or other Facebook plug-in, the plug-in works in conjunction with the cookie to alert Facebook of the date, time and web address of the webpage you've clicked to. The unique characteristics of your PC and browser, such as your IP address, screen resolution, operating system and browser version, are also recorded.

• Facebook thus compiles a running log of all your webpage visits for 90 days, continually deleting entries for the oldest day and adding the newest to this log.
If you are logged-on to your Facebook account and surfing the Web, your session cookie conducts this logging. The session cookie additionally records your name, e-mail address, friends and all data associated with your profile to Facebook. If you are logged-off, or if you are a non-member, the browser cookie conducts the logging; it additionally reports a unique alphanumeric identifier, but no personal information.

Bejar acknowledged that Facebook could learn where specific members go on the Web when they are logged off by matching the unique PC and browser characteristics logged by both the session cookie and the browser cookie. He emphasized that Facebook makes it a point not to do this. " We've said that we don't do it, and we couldn't do it without some form of consent and disclosure," Bejar says.

Bejar also acknowledged "technical similarities" in the cookie-based tracking technologies used by Facebook and the wider online advertising industry. "But we're not like ad networks at all in our stewardship of the data, in the way we use it, and the way we lay everything out," Bejar says. "We have a very clear and transparent approach to how we do advertising that I'm very proud of."

Even so, Facebook's public descriptions of its tracking systems have not satisfied some critics — particularly European privacy regulators. Ilse Aigner, Germany's minister of consumer protection, last month banned Facebook plug-ins from government websites and advised private companies to do the same. And Thilo Weichert, data protection commissioner in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, expressed alarm at how Facebook's technology could potentially be used to build extensive profiles of individual Web users.

"Whoever visits Facebook or uses a plug-in must expect that he or she will be tracked by the company for two years," Weichert said in a statement. "Such profiling infringes German and European data protection law."

Adding fuel to such concerns, Arnold Roosendaal, a doctoral candidate at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Nik Cubrilovic, an independent Australian researcher, separately documented how Web pages containing Facebook plug-ins carried out tracking more extensive than Facebook publicly admitted to. Noyes says Germany doesn't understand how the company's tracking technologies work. And he blames "software bugs" for the indiscriminate tracking discovered by Roosendaal and Cubrilovic.

"When we were made aware that certain cookies were sending more information to us than we had intended, we fixed our cookie management system," Noyes says. However, researcher Roosendaal says Facebook's tracking cookies retain the capacity to extensively track non-members and logged-off members alike. "They have been confronted with the same issue now several times and every time they call it a bug. That's not really contributing to earning trust."

Some corporate security executives have become concerned about cybercriminals getting hold of tracking data relayed by Like buttons, then using that intelligence to steal intellectual property. They've asked firewall supplier Palo Alto Networks to identify and block traffic from Facebook tracking cookies, while enabling their employees to continue using other Facebook services.

"The concern is that Facebook has rich personal information, which Google doesn't have," says Nir Zuk, founder and chief technology officer for Palo Alto Networks. "Combining that personal information with Web browsing patterns could be revelatory."

</more><iframe width="640" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/AVSPOS-eBe4?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><more style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); ">
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[jw5]

$100 billion worth of vanity.

 

[no_faith]

speculate that Facebook, the social networking site is hoping to sell your info for S$150 to advertisers.
http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/3-ways-facebook-ipo-exploit-users-172215377.html