Web Shorts

Ameritrade lays off 170 as president exits
Ameritrade Holdings will lay off seven percent of its workforce, or 170 people, most of whom work in customer service. At the same time as it announced the layoffs, the company revealed that the president and CEO of its online brokerage, Jack McDonnell, stepped down two weeks ago. This round of mass firings is not Ameritrade’s first. In January, it handed pink slips to roughly 350 customer-service employees; 229 of the positions cut were full-time. The company projects that the job cuts will save it $15 million a year. Ameritrade continues to bleed money. It lost $23 million for the quarter ended Dec. 31. Ameritrade has suffered from the dot.com downturn and bear market, which have diminished consumer interest in stock trading--which is still Ameritrade’s main line of business. The average daily trading volume on Ameritrade fell 13 percent between January and February.

Advertisers flee Psychoexgirlfriend.com
Featuring a collection of about 50 angry, profanity-laced phone messages from a just-dumped girlfriend, the web site Psychoexgirlfriend.com has become something of a cult hit online--one of those URLs that people pass around to each other via email. It has also served as a wake-up call for some mainstream advertisers, inadvertently showing them they might want more control over where their messages appear online. Under affiliate programs, the operators of small web sites like Psychoexgirlfriend can receive a percentage of sales whenever visitors to their sites click on a commercial link and buy something. But advertisers use third parties to place the ads, leaving them with little jurisdiction over ad venues. Sports equipment e-tailer JustBalls.com says that it received a number of complaints from outraged consumers about its ads appearing on the site. JustBalls, as a result, withdrew its logo from Psychoexgirlfriend and is denying any connection with the site. Moviefone and Sports Illustrated have also pulled their logos. That Psychoexgirlfriend has sparked outrage is not surprising. In addition to its disturbing voice messages, it also features links to a misogynistic "Is your girlfriend psycho?" quiz and refers to girlfriends as "psychos." Psychoexgirlfriend gets about 1.6 million daily hits.

Study: Web sites lax on kids' privacy
Web sites aimed at children often don't follow federal privacy guidelines, according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center. The study examined 162 children's sites, such as Applejacks.com and Chevroncars.com. Categories of sites examined included food products, video games, children's characters and TV shows. Researchers discovered that half of the web sites didn't feature easy-to-find links to their privacy policies, as required by law. One-tenth of the sites didn't have a link to their privacy policies at all. And most of the privacy policies were long, dense and hard to read--policies took an average 9.4 minutes of reading time. The researchers were looking specifically for statements complying with COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Seventeen of the sites did not link to their privacy policies but collected users' personal information anyway, a straightforward COPPA violation.

DoubleClick clears hurdle in cookie case
A lawsuit against internet ad-serving company DoubleClick over "cookies" has been thrown out by a U.S. district court in New York City. The class-action suit accused DoubleClick of violating several laws by depositing cookies, which are data files that track an internet user's activities, on web users' hard drives. The court ruled that DoubleClick was in the clear because its use of cookies was not a secret scheme but a business plan that had been well-publicized. According to the judge in the case, the plaintiffs were unable to demonstrate that DoubleClick violated either the Wiretap Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. There are still similar lawsuits against DoubleClick pending in California and Texas.

New Mexico to offer online eye test for drivers
Is the big "E" pointing left or right? Click here to indicate your answer. Such a scenario will become a reality in New Mexico, which plans to institute online eye exams for driver's license renewals starting as early as next year. Test takers will need to have videoconferencing cameras and software so that Motor Vehicle Division employees can verify identities. The software was created by a company called VisionRx, which also plans eventually to place eye-exam terminals in public places like libraries and malls. At license-renewal time, the test will gauge distance vision, night vision, peripheral vision and color blindness. The system supposedly will screen out elderly drivers with poor vision.

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