Natalie Cedeno, FriendFinder's former director of human resources, was fired in January without cause, she says, after a series of run-ins with management over practices she believed were improper or illegal.

Cedeno claims the atmosphere at the company changed substantially after Penthouse Media Group acquired Various Inc., the operator of Adult FriendFinder and other websites, in 2007 and changed its name to FriendFinder Networks. Various was buttoned-up, she says, despite operating websites where users planned hookups. Penthouse, by comparison, was pure frat-boy raunch — an attitude which culminated in an incident where a Penthouse Pet draped her boobs on an unwilling female employee in a staged photo meant to humiliate her.

There's more. The complete lawsuit is included below, but here are the highlights — or lowlights:

25. In or about April, 2008 plaintiff received complaints regarding racist comments concerning employees and prospective employees being made by the company's Controller, Al Mercado. Mercado made racially disparaging comments regarding Indians, Asians and people whose spoke English as their second language, which he admitted to Plaintiff. Plaintiff met with and counseled Mr. Mercado on three separate occasions, yet his discriminatory conduct continued. The complaints regarding Mr. Mercado's racially disparaging comments were received from Accounting Supervisor, Brinda Calori who had asked to be given a new assignment because she was distressed by Mercado's conduct. Plaintiff went to Carmela Monti and recommended that Mercado be discharged. Monti refused to terminate Mercado and instead ordered that Ms. Calori be terminated. Plaintiff objected to Monti's decision to terminate Ms. Calori and complained to the Vice-President of Finance who refused to become involved. Plaintiff is informed and believes and thereon alleges that Ms. Calori has filed a complaint with the EEOC for retaliatory discharge resulting from her complaints.

28. In May 2008 FriendFinder brought two Penthouse Pets and a male model into the Sunnyvale office to serve ice cream to the employees. The Pets were dressed in revealing attire that caused a female supervisor to complain that their presence and the fact that they were "porn stars" made her so uncomfortable that she would stay in her office away from this activity. The Pets went up to the supervisor's office and one of them placed her breasts on the employees head while two other employees' took pictures. The supervisor came to Plaintiff's office in tears. She was visibly shaken and upset and informed Plaintiff that she was afraid the photos would be put on the Internet. Plaintiff had previously telephoned Carmela Monti, informed her that the Pets were pinching the nipples of the male employees, rubbing their bare chest and inappropriately touching staff, and asked that Monti allow her to have the Pets removed from the office. Monti had refused Plaintiff's request and after the incident involving the supervisor Plaintiff called Monti again, asking that the Pets be removed because their behavior violated the company's sexual harassment policy. Monti again refused Plaintiff's request that she be authorized to direct the Pets to leave the office. COO Tony Previte appeared supported Monti's decision, stating that the employee who complained was a "trouble maker."

39. In or about August or September, 2008, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Las Vegas office, Jason Rasberry, made inappropriate sexual comments concerning a female employee (TE). The CTO said to 5-6 male coworkers in the presence of TE (the group was standing together on a smoke break) "I've had seen TE naked and her breasts are too small." The CTO admitted having made the comment. The CTO had a history of previous misconduct in the workplace for which he had received disciplinary action. Prior to this incident the CTO had asked a male applicant who was interviewing for a position in the company's Technology Department to "chose any item and he would have one of the girls on cams.com insert it into her vagina."

FriendFinder appears to be facing severe financial trouble. The company filed for a $460 million public stock offering in December, in an effort to pay off more than $400 million in debt incurred during the Penthouse acquisition. That IPO has yet to happen. But the stock market remains unfriendly to IPOs, and FriendFinder has defaulted on some of its debt, according to a new SEC financing. A tipster tells us the company recently laid off eight marketing staffers in an effort to cut costs. And top executives seem to disagree on whether the company can afford to keep publishing the print edition of Penthouse. (FriendFinder's corporate website now softpedals the company's porn business, highlighting G-rated social networks like BigChurch.com instead.)

Cedeno v. FriendFinder - Get more Legal Forms

Shenkman's company, Exigen Group, has 2,000 employees stretching from Latvia to Australia. Like many offshore IT firms, it uses cheap overseas labor to deliver software and IT services more cheaply than local firms can. But Iryna Kharchenko, Shenkman's former executive assistant, has accused her boss of seeking other services overseas.

According to a lawsuit filed in California Superior Court Monday, Shenkman systematically harassed Kharchenko over the course of almost five years, starting with a job interview where she says he stared fixedly at her breasts, and leading up to an alleged sexual assault in the office. Kharchenko's charges against Shenkman include sexual battery, harassment, discrimination, wrongful termination, and retaliation.

Shenkman is a wealthy software entrepreneur who sold a telecom startup to Alcatel in 1999 for $1.5 billion. Leslie Stahl profiled his workaholic habits for 60 Minutes. When he demonstrated his in-shower email display to Stahl, he accidentally wetted the newswoman down.

Kharchenko, like Shenkman, is a native of the Ukraine. She says she dreamed for years of finding a job in the U.S. She won a scholarship to a South Carolina college and then returned to the Ukraine to work. In January 2004, she applied for a job at Exigen in Moscow. After a group interview in a room full of "model-like women," she got the job on an H-1B visa, and Shenkman moved Kharchenko to an apartment he owned just outside San Francisco.

H-1B visas are popular with Silicon Valley employers like Exigen. Unlike more general work permits, they are tied to a specific employer, making the employee dependent on a boss's good graces. Kharchenko's complaint charges:

Defendants Shenkman and Exigen appeared to be abusing the immigration visa system in order to procure a steady stream of young, eastern European women to satisfy Defendant Shenkman's sexual desires.... these young women would find themselves tied to Exigen ... trapped thousands of miles from home without families or friends, and at the mercy of a wealthy and influential sexual predator who does not know how to take "no" for an answer.

Among other incidents of sexual battery detailed in the complaint, Kharchenko alleges that Shenkman touched her vagina, groped her breasts, ordered her to give him a hand job in his home, and threw her up against a wall and pressed his body against her at the office. Kharchenko says that she tolerated the harassment for years because she feared losing her job.

Kharchenko plans to present evidence that Shenkman fraudulently abused the H-1B program which requires that foreign workers only be granted visas if they possess skills unavailable in the U.S. Her application describes her as an "executive legal analyst." Yet the job she applied for was that of an executive assistant, and her duties were those of an executive assistant.

According to Kharchenko, she knows of as many as eight women at Exigen who were harassed by Shenkman. She says that three complied with his demands for sexual favors. Five, like Kharchenko, resisted. According to her complaint, one woman gave Shenkman massages with his shirt off in the office. He routinely unbuttoned women's shirts and rubbed their stomachs, Kharchenko says.

Why did the alleged harassment persist for so long? It could have something to do with the fact that Exigen's director of human resources, Tanya Veshnyakova, was formerly Shenkman's executive assistant — and was also in the U.S. on an H-1B visa. She frequently accompanied Shenkman on business trips to New York. When she returned to the San Francisco office with new outfits, Veshnyakova told Kharchenko that Shenkman had bought them for him and called him her "sugar daddy."

When Kharchenko told Veshnyakova of her concerns over Shenkman's harassment, Veshnyakova told her that she had gone through "similar experiences," and said that every employee must make her own decision on how to handle it. Kharchenko filed a complaint with California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing in September 2008. In December, she was fired.

Veshnyakova is still the company's director of human resources.

Update: A source inside Exigen tells us that the company held a three-hour sexual-harassment seminar last week for all employees, conducted by outside lawyers from Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini.

Excerpts of the complaint:

The full complaint:

Iryna Kharchenko's Complaint

Natalie Cedeno, the company's former HR director, says that company executives retaliated against her for pointing out violations of labor laws. She was a top executive at the Internet side of the business, deeply involved in its operations for eight years, before FriendFinder fired her without cause in January, she says. She claims the company then tried to withhold the two years of pay she was owed under her contract unless she agreed to stay silent about FriendFinder's misdeeds — a move her lawyer characterizes as "extortion." Cedeno plans to file complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing next month.

And a juicy complaint it will be. FriendFinder Networks used to be called Penthouse Media Group before it acquired Various Inc., the operator of Adult FriendFinder and other online personals sites, in 2007 for $500 million. While they're both porn companies, the office cultures of Florida-based Penthouse and Silicon Valley-based Various Inc. — where Cedeno worked before the merger — couldn't have been more different. That became obvious on May 2, 2008, when the ex-Penthouse executives, now in charge of the combined business, decided to ship in a passel of Penthouse Pets to the old Various offices.

When management announced that the venerable porn magazine's stable of nude models would be stopping by the office to serve ice cream, one female employee objected, as Cedeno tells the story. When they arrived, one of the scantily clad Pets made a beeline for the dissenter. "They came into her office and placed her breasts on her head in an attempt to humiliate her, and they had someone ready to take pictures," Cedeno says. The employee quit soon after the incident.

The evening before Cedeno was terminated last month, she says she brought up at a meeting of executives an employee who had charged thousands of dollars in lapdances to the company — an expense the company's pre-Penthouse management wouldn't have tolerated. "The president laughed and said the CEO had paid for lapdances for investment bankers with company money last weekend," Cedeno says.

But wait a second: Aren't we talking about a company whose main product is porn? What are a few workplace hijinks at a business which makes money off of naked ladies? Well, there's much more than Cedeno's pay at stake. FriendFinder filed to go public last year. It desperately needs the $460 million it hopes to raise in an IPO in order to pay down $420 million in debt. If the company has legal problems and labor issues beyond what it disclosed in its SEC filings, its executives could face heavy penalties, and the IPO would likely be scotched.

FriendFinder Networks CEO Marc Bell did not return a message left requesting comment on Cedeno's allegations. The SEC restricts what companies in registration for an IPO can say publicly about their business outside of regulatory filings, a requirement known as the "quiet period."

According to Cedeno, Various operated Adult FriendFinder and other X-rated adult sites for seven years without drawing a single sexual-harassment lawsuit from employees. The company was as buttoned-down as nearby NASA contractors. Office rules restricted employees from posting any photos on office walls, or even having naughty screensavers. Cedeno says the company's longtime postman had to ask her, after six years of delivering mail, what the company actually did. And founder Andrew Conru, who took no venture capital and therefore owned almost all of the company, is famously mild-mannered. (The raciest he gets: He once told a magazine he'd had a ménage-à-trois.)

Valleywag had previously heard rumblings of discontent at the company. Over the summer, Anthony Previte, a Penthouse executive who was COO of the company, reportedly prompted a mutiny among the Sunnyvale employees by trying (and failing) to replace most of the operations team. We also heard of a messy firing in the sales department. But that was just the tip of the iceberg, according to Cedeno.

Everything changed after Penthouse bought the company and changed its name to FriendFinder Networks, she says. Within four weeks, FriendFinder had its first labor complaint, and soon drew two more. The company's former controller plans to file an age-discrimination lawsuit, Cedeno says.

Cedeno says new management was unresponsive to her concerns. When she pointed out violations of overtime law, the company's VP of operations emailed her, "This garbage stops now." (He meant her complaints, not the violations.) She says she was then ordered to lie and blame pay discrepancies on the company's outside payroll vendor. She refused.

She also says that in January 2008, Rob Brackett, president of the company's Internet group, told her that CEO Marc Bell had complained to him in December — the first day he came to visit Penthouse's new acquisition — that the women in FriendFinder's technology department were "ugly" and that Cedeno should get rid of them and replace them with more attractive workers to keep the male employees happy. Brackett pressed Cedeno, asking her how she was going to satisfy Bell. She refused the request.

The company has admitted in its S-1 filings that it failed to collect taxes owed on Internet purchased in the European Union for years. It has already charged $64 million against the purchase price of Various. (It now reports the acquisition as costing the company $401 million, down from $500 million, thanks to this and other charges.) But it has not disclosed the full extent of its pending tax bills. Cedeno says the back taxes in Germany alone come to $40 million and the company owes $10 million in another European country.

FriendFinder seems to have made a formidable enemy. Cedeno has hired Amanda Metcalf, a former prosecutor now in private practice who's best known for her role in a lawsuit against Death Row Records. I asked Metcalf why she took on Cedeno's case. "Woman done wrong," she replied. If Cedeno proves her allegations in court, FriendFinder's executives will learn a hard lesson: It's one thing to profit from women. It's another to take advantage of them.

The Recorder, a San Francisco legal publication, has details of the case, which is now being considered by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: Eulonda Skyles (left), the first black woman hired in Yahoo's 200-person legal department, says she was mommy-tracked after a maternity leave in 2005, and treated worse than white women who had also taken time off for pregnancy and childcare.

Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan told the Recorder that Skyles's charges were meritless. And yet Yahoo pushed Skyles's supervisor, Reggie Davis, out of the legal department altogether and into a dead-end job hundreds of miles away from headquarters. Callahan claimed that Davis's new job was "a great career opportunity." Another lawyer, Lynn Loeb, left the company after Skyles pointed out that she was overseeing work by an outside law firm where her husband works, a possible ethics violation. Again, Yahoo said that was unrelated.

And now we hear another top Yahoo executive may have lost her job over the Skyles case.

The Recorder article, written by Zusha Elinson, has a detailed, negative account of Skyles' on-the-job performance which comes from a document generated during confidential settlement talks between Skyles and Yahoo in 2006. (Skyles disputes Yahoo's negative claims about her, as do former colleagues who worked with her at Yahoo.)

How did Elinson get his hands on the confidential document? We're told that Callahan, the Yahoo general counsel, provided it to Jill Nash (left), Yahoo's top flack, and from there, it made its way into the reporter's hands. According to an email Skyles sent to Bartz, that leak was a violation of both the confidentiality of the settlement and labor laws restricting what an employer may say publicly about an employee's performance.

Skyles sent the email the morning of February 2 — more than two weeks before Elinson's story would be published — demanding that Bartz take action against the person who leaked the document.

That afternoon, Nash announced her departure from Yahoo. A flack always chooses words carefully; in her goodbye email, Nash did not say she had "quit" or "resigned" — only that she was leaving. She had no new job lined up, nor did she disclose any future plans.

Coincidence? Perhaps. Nash had worked under three different CEOs in the space of two years, and dealt with a hostile takeover attempt by Microsoft and a bruising proxy fight with corporate raider Carl Icahn. But, significantly, Bartz has launched a fearsome campaign against leaks inside Yahoo, going as far as to offer a $1,000 reward to any employee who snitches on a leaker. If Nash really left Yahoo because of the Recorder, we think Bartz needs to write Skyles a check.

To settle the complaint, eHarmony is also launching Compatible Partners, a gay dating site. But the Compatible site, as proposed is not just separate; it's also unequal.

eHarmony executives have long insisted that they didn't want to serve gay daters because their site used an algorithm based on long-term studies of straight couples. Compatible Partners, which must launch by March, will use the same questionnaire as eHarmony — but the company admits it has no idea if it will work to find good matches. Compatible Partners users will see a warning to this effect: "The statement lets customers know that eHarmony, Inc. has not conducted research on same-sex couples so that they have the information they need to decide whether to use our service."

If anyone shows up that is; eHarmony will give away 10,000 free accounts, but it's hard to think that a dating service chaired by a conservative Christian will prove much more popular than, say, Manhunt, the gay personals site whose chairman donated to John McCain's campaign.

The politics of sex aside, the website's clearly going to suck. This should sound so familiar to people who build websites for a living: A poorly thought-out product, based on insufficient research, rushed out on an artificial deadline. But in this case, it's the government, not inept managers, who are ordering it up. They're from the government, and they're here to help your dating life! If gays can't get married in California, don't they at least deserve the benefit of their own pseudoscientifically valid hookups?

(Photo via Magicmud.com)

Right: Because it's an awesome branding opportunity. The draft is a self-parody of corner office drama, full of Honorary Co-Chairs, Leaders, and Former CEOs. But the real story is: Who's missing? Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt are here, but not Larry Page. Twitter's Ev Williams is here, but not Digg's Kevin Rose. Federated Media: Present. TechCrunch: Absent. Mark Zuckerberg is not here, but Sheryl Sandberg pulled a John Hancock: She's right up top, where Owen can't miss her. Oh, look, she's trying to make nice! She's going to be sorry.

For example, a now-yanked video of him singing a karaoke version of Britney Spears's "Baby One More Time." (Allington is wearing glasses, at right.) The occasion appears to be a party for coworkers in Hyderabad, India, where Allington helped open up a customer-support office for Google. How charming: This fellow has gone from sharing the worst of American culture in India, to showing the worst of Google's toxic insideriness at home.

Bad managers are everywhere in corporate America. But Google's supposed to be different — a new model of management, driven from the bottom up, where ideas, not rank or hierarchy, are what matter.

Ramsey Allington never got that memo, according to his employees. Google's famous for its 360-degree reviews, where ratings from underlings matter as much as bosses. But Allington's employees say they were never asked to review him until very recently this year — and the negative results of that lone review process were ignored.

His job was not easy. Online sales and operations, the area in which Allington worked, was famously called a "toilet" by top Google executive Shona Brown when Sheryl Sandberg, now Facebook's COO, ran it. Sandberg, Brown suggested, flushed people through the system. Eager young graduates from top schools who wanted to add Google to their resume signed up to answer email and field phone calls, in the hopes that they'd be able to transfer to other departments. Allington's job, more or less, was to keep them down on the farm, doing customer support.

But Allington went too far, his employees say, in blocking their efforts to move up or transfer within Google. He may even have broken the law: He's said to have demoted one woman after a pregnancy leave, moving her from an account-management job into an entry-level position answering email — an allegation which may be a violation of the Family Medical Leave Act, which generally requires that employees who take leave be allowed to return to their same job.

Several employees under Allington have taken medical leave for stress because of the hostile work environment they say he has created. They also say he demonstrated a pattern of retaliating against employees for expressing their concerns about the workplace, punishing them in employment reviews as showing a negative attitude.

Allington is what they call an "IPO lottery winner"; he joined Google in 2002, two years before it went public, allowing him to make a tidy profit on stock options. Though he only holds the title of manager, he's well-connected in the company. He's said to have the favor of top executive Jonathan Rosenberg — who's something of a tyrant himself. Allington is also married to Shaluinn Fullove, a high-profile Googler recently written up in Fortune.

Connections in the tight-knit Googleplex may well have let him escape scrutiny for years. He was close friends with his immediate supervisor, Laura DeBonis. By the time his employees raised concerns about Allington with her, DeBonis had a foot out the door; she left in early 2008. Her replacement, Doug Cook, responded to the complaints by ordering, for the first time, reviews from Allington's employees — but ended up backing him.

Employees finally complained to David Fischer, the online sales and operation executive who oversees Book Search, who started a formal investigation. Turnover in HR slowed the process. One HR staffer told an employee that Google's human-resources department was ill-equipped to deal with complaints of discrimination because it was "such a young department."

Google recently celebrated its 10th anniversary.

But it's understandable that Google's management is ill equipped to deal with bad Googlers. People at the Googleplex take it as a matter of faith that their coworkers and superiors share the company's "Don't be evil" values; if you're a Googler, you're good by definition. There are processes in place that, in theory, route around dysfunctional managers like Allington. In practice, those processes are easy to game.

And why not game them? Those in the tight-knit coterie of IPO lottery winners, like Allington, have convinced themselves not just of its goodness, but of its superiority; Googlers who joined the company too late to make a fortune must just not be as smart as them. Their bank accounts prove it. Why not discriminate against them? the market already has.

At any well-run company, Allington would have been long gone, I believe. But the question isn't whether Allington should have been fired for sexual discrimination. It's how many Ramsey Allingtons there are at the Googleplex. And how long it will take us to find them.

We hear that CEO Jerry Yang wrote a long, rambling, presumably uncapitalized email to the troops explaining why the company, which is otherwise outspoken on gay rights, is not taking sides on the issue. Gay employees at Yahoo are purple with rage. Will someone forward us the memo? We'd love to read Yang's explanation of why, once again, he can't make a decision one way or another. (Disclosure: I got married to my husband last month, and recently held a fundraiser in opposition to Proposition 8.)

Mayer makes a convincing argument, at least on the surface, that gender-neutral policies are the best way to advance women's careers. It would have been more impressive if she'd talked honestly about the very real discrimination women — or at least women who aren't Marissa Mayer, ex-girlfriend of cofounder Larry Page — face at Google; how unevenly those policies are enforced by poorly trained managers; and how Google's culture shunts many women into classicly female roles like sales and operations.

Looking for FreshGrads Only in Oracle's EBS Integrations Group

Hello Everyone,

We have multiple openings for our newly formed EBS Integrations group at Oracle but we have a restriction to hire only fresh graduates from outside. So if you know someone who has just graduated and willing to join Oracle, please send me a copy of their resume.

Here is the job desc:
—————————-

Group: EBS Integration Development Team

Description:

Newly formed EBS Integration Group is currently looking for bright and talented people to deliver EBS solutions for various Process Integration Packs (PIPs). As a member of our staff you will be playing a vital role in designing, implementing and supporting the integration packs for Business processes defined by AIA team. If you are looking for an opportunity to enhance your skills and work on latest cutting edge technologies like WebServices, BPEL Process manager, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) , XML and XSL then we will provide you that opportunity.

Candidate should be a self-starter, smart thinker and able to find information from vast Oracle information resources.

We currently have multiple openings in HQ and IDC.

* Design, Develop and support EBS integrations (ERP and CRM) with various products like Seibel, Psft, Glog, Retek, and Portal etc.

* Ability to quickly learn and contribute, solve complex problems and meet aggressive time deadlines.

* Ability to quickly grasp other products as position requires working in multiple product areas of EBS like Financials, Supply Chain and Manufacturing, CRM etc

* Willing to interact with AIA group, Product Strategy and Product management as position involves working with various cross- functional global teams in US and India.

* Understanding of SOA concepts is a plus.

* Understanding of (all or some) BPEL PM, ESB, Web Services, Java, Jdeveloper, pl/sql and XML is a plus.

* Understanding of EBS Financials, Customers, Supply Chain, Products, ALM, Order Management and CRM is a plus.

One of the most significant employment law cases of 2007 was Reid v. Google, Inc., in which the search giant was charged with age discrimination for terminating PhD. computer scientist Brian Reid at the age of 54. Prior to his firing, Reid was reportedly subjected to a plethora of age-related disparagement, made the butt of jokes, and found himself a fish out of water in a "youthful atmosphere" featuring employee participation in hockey, football and skiing. Reid testified that upon being fired, he was told he was not a "cultural fit."

Google maintained it had simply eliminated Reid's dead end job, but in a unanimous decision last fall, the Court of Appeal for the Sixth District wrote:

We conclude that Reid produced sufficient evidence that Google's reasons for terminating him were untrue or pretextual, and that Google acted with discriminatory motive such that a factfinder would conclude Google engaged in age discrimination.

With the case headed to the California Supreme Court, it's all the more incredible that Google is reprising Enron's work-hard-play-hard motto — a red flag for ageism — in its current recruiting. But anything's fair game after using Hitler in your hiring.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg strikes us as more concerned with her personal PR than with the boring but important operational problems she was hired to solve. Yahoo president Sue Decker can be as Machiavellian as any guy, but her boneheaded reorgs are responsible for much of the company's current straits. Greene was one of the few women leaders in the Valley who seemed worthy of out-and-out admiration. That she was ousted by a jealous man makes the absence of her equals all the more glaring.

The NVCA survey reveals why the problem will not self-correct over time. Most VCs are hired from outside the industry, rather than rising up through the ranks. Underlings, by and large, remain underlings, while VCs hire their buddies out of tech startups. A good example: The all-male, all-white team of Benchmark Capital, which recently added white male Facebook executive Matt Cohler as a general partner. That's not to say that Cohler's hire was undeserved — but it is utterly typical.

Cronyism is alive and well in the venture-capital industry, accounting for the active discrimination evidenced in its demographics. There's no doubt that women and minorities could make venture capitalists. The question is whether the dominant firms of Sand Hill Road will afford them the chance to prove themselves, by taking a shot on hiring someone who doesn't look like the rest of the team — or if those excluded from the industry will have to make the point the hard way, by making more money than the old guard. The latter would be very satisfying to watch happen.

1. Given the growing reliance on online activism by civic organizations, how will Google ensure that it does not abuse the near 90% share of the search market it will most certainly control if it aligns with Yahoo!, which could allow the company to control how Americans access information on key issues?

2. Google has in the past been accused of using its search algorithms to favor certain search results over others. Such accusations are of particular concern to Hispanic-owned small businesses that rely on Internet search for a competitive equalizer in a marketplace dominated by large corporations. How will a company with 90% control of the search market allay fears that small businesses will lose this valuable economic resource?

3. Privacy advocates such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center and consumer groups like US PIRG have raised serious concerns about Google's privacy policies and practices - concerns that are doubled by the proposed deal that would give Google near-total control of the online search market. For Latinos considering subscribing to broadband services, worries about privacy - along with child safety and content filtering - are determining factors. How quickly will Google move to address these concerns?

4. During review of its acquisition of DoubleClick, Google pledged to alter several of its information-gathering techniques to address privacy concerns, including its use of "cookies" to track users' surfing habits. And yet the company has opposed an array of privacy regulations ranging from state laws in New York and elsewhere to adoption of FTC self-regulatory principles. Is Google now backing away from the pledges it made to usher along the approval of the DoubleClick deal, and will it take a similar tack when attempting to gain antitrust approval for the Yahoo! pact?

5. Cyberlaw scholars have noted that Google's disclosure of its privacy policy, which is not easily accessible from the company's home page, may be in violation of California state law. For Hispanic Internet users - the fastest-growing online population in the country - it is critical that privacy policies and other terms of use are readily disclosed, particularly to users who are new to the Internet. How will Google ensure that its disclosures comply with basic common-sense consumer protection principles?