BERLIN — As Wall Street prepares for a record, multibillion-dollar initial stock sale from Facebook, the social networking site, a meeting with the potential to shape the economics of the deal was set to take place Monday in Vienna.

Richard Allan, a former member of Parliament in Britain who is the European director of policy for Facebook, and another executive from Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, will meet with Max Schrems, a 24-year-old college student.

Mr. Schrems, a law student at the University of Vienna and a user of Facebook since 2008, has led a vocal campaign in Europe against what he maintains are Facebook’s illegal practices of collecting and marketing users’ personal data, often without consent.

In less than a year, Mr. Schrems’s one-person operation has morphed into a Web site, Europe Versus Facebook, and a grass-roots movement that has persuaded 40,000 people to contact Facebook in Ireland, where its European headquarters are located, to demand a summary of all the personal data the U.S. company is holding on them.

Mr. Schrems and his crusade have become a cause célèbre in parts of Europe, attracting the attention of lawmakers in Brussels as the Continent begins a lengthy debate over tough new proposed restrictions on personal data, which could affect Web businesses like Facebook.

Last month, the author of a proposed European data protection law, which would update a 1995 statute to reflect the realities of the digital age, cited Mr. Schrems’s case as an example of why European lawmakers should adopt tightened controls over Web businesses.

The plan put forward by Viviane Reding, the European justice commissioner, would give E.U. residents the right to opt out more easily of standard data collection practices used by businesses like Facebook. It would also compel companies to expunge all personal data, permanently, at a consumer’s request.

Both elements have the potential to hamper the data-harvesting engine that is at the heart of Facebook’s advertising-driven business, and of its value.

Facebook said in a statement that its data practices followed European law and that the company had gone out of its way to meet Mr. Schrems’s request for personal information. The company also noted that Facebook users could easily obtain a copy of their information on Facebook by using a function within their personal account settings.

The company said a report in December from an Irish regulator demonstrated “how Facebook adheres to European data protection principles and complies with Irish law.” It says it is not only fully compliant with E.U. data protection laws, but “we also strongly believe that every Facebook user owns his or her own data and should have simple and easy access to it.”

Mr. Schrems appeared on Facebook’s radar last June when he filed a complaint against the company with the Irish regulator, the office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, in Port Arlington, Ireland. He alleged 22 violations of European law. Mr. Schrems filed the grievance after using a provision of Irish law to obtain from Facebook a copy of all of the information the company had been keeping on him.

Facebook sent Mr. Schrems a computer disc containing 1,222 pages of information.

The disc, Mr. Schrems said, showed that Facebook was routinely collecting data that he had never consented to give, like his physical location, which he assumes was determined from his computer’s unique address identifiers, which can be traced geographically. Facebook was also retaining data he had deleted, Mr. Schrems said.

Irish officials began an audit based on his complaints and in October visited Facebook’s offices in the Hanover Quay section of Dublin, where the company employs more than 400 workers to direct many of its global operations outside North America.

On Dec. 21, the Irish regulator, which has a staff of only 22 employees, released a 150-page report that gave Facebook until July to make a series of changes in the way it collects and retains data and how it explains to users how their information is being used.

Page 2 of 2
Mr. Schrems, during an interview last week, said the Irish inquiry and the regulator’s agreement with Facebook had not addressed “90 percent” of his complaints. Mr. Schrems said he planned to request a “formal decision” from Irish officials, which would give him the legal basis to challenge the regulator’s findings in Irish court.

Gary Davis, the deputy Irish data commissioner who led the audit on Facebook, said his agency had obtained significant concessions from Facebook that had had positive effects for the 854 million active global users of the site. After 40,000 people requested their own data from Facebook Ireland, the company responded, Mr. Davis said, by creating a software tool in October on the Web site that gives all users a quick overview of the data being kept on file.

Facebook announced improvements to that tool last week, Mr. Davis said, to provide more detailed information, and has committed to providing even more by July, when the regulator will revisit Facebook’s offices to check whether it has honored its commitments.

That visit could coincide with Facebook’s I.P.O., which could take place as early as May, depending on the length of the regulatory review in the United States.

Mr. Davis said that Facebook, as a result of Mr. Schrems’s campaign, had agreed to cut the amount of time it retains data on most user activities on the Web site to less than one year. Queries typed into Facebook’s search field are deleted within six months, in conformance with European law. Previously, Mr. Davis said, the company had no comprehensive policy on data retention, with times often dictated by the perceived level of security threats and cyberattacks on the business.

“We still view Max very favorably for the issues he has raised, which were very specific and well prepared and have led to concrete improvements in how Facebook does business,” Mr. Davis said. “I obviously think we have achieved a lot in Ireland by getting Facebook to improve its transparency and data protection practices.”

Mr. Schrems said the concessions from Facebook had been insufficient. At the time of its release, Thilo Weichert, the data protection commissioner in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, criticized the Irish regulator, saying it had identified infractions in Facebook’s handling of consumer data but had not taken a harder line or imposed financial penalties.

The main issue, Mr. Schrems said, is that no one, including the Irish regulator, is independently verifying whether Facebook is doing what it says it will do in terms of permanently deleting personal information and shortening data retention times.

“No one is actually looking into the computers,” Mr. Schrems said. “The regulators are just getting statements from different parties and deciding based on a vacuum.”

Mr. Davis, the Irish regulator, said Facebook had given him full access to the data it kept.

MIAMI (AP) – Univision and Disney are in talks to create a 24-hour news channel for Latinos in English, two sources close to the negotiations said Monday.

Both sources declined to go on the record because they were not authorized to speak.

The goal would be to begin broadcasting before the November presidential election. That would give the network plenty of time to provide political coverage geared toward Hispanics, who are considered influential swing voters in states like Florida, New Mexico and Colorado.

Univision is the nation’s largest Spanish-language media company, and it has long prided itself on its Spanish-language content. In recent years, officials have quietly acknowledged that in order to maintain and expand viewership, they also need to provide content to second- and third-generation Latinos who speak English as their first language.

Univision officials and ABC News spokesman Jeff Schneider declined to comment on Monday.

The move comes in response to the 2010 census, which showed U.S. born Latinos made up nearly 60 percent of the growth in the nation’s Hispanic population over the last decade.

The proposed deal also reflects the stepped up efforts of mainstream media companies to target Latinos. Fox News added its Fox News Latino website in 2010 and Huffington Post now has an online Huffpost LatinoVoices site. Meanwhile, NBC Universal has increased the cross-pollination between its NBC News division and that of its Spanish language network, Telemundo.

Top Telemundo news anchor Jose Diaz-Balart has anchored NBC News and MSNBC programs. NBC also recently unveiled its NBC Latino tumblr website in English. Univision News also has a tumblr English site, and a small but growing social media presence.

Jorge Plasencia, vice chair of the National Council of La Raza and CEO of the Hispanic marketing firm Republica, which includes Univision among its clients, said he believes that a news channel in English would fulfill a niche.

“There’s nearly 50 million Latinos in the U.S. They do want to know what’s going on in Mexico, Puerto Rico and all over Latin America. The major networks don’t cover that news,” he said. “It’s hard for those networks to go into those issues in depth because they’re trying reach all of America.”

Univision and other Spanish-language networks have provided significant coverage of Latin America for their viewers. Plasencia believes second- and third-generation Latinos are still interested in that coverage, but they want it in English.

For Latinos who live in cities like Los Angeles, New York and Miami that have large Hispanic populations, local broadcasts often have Latino anchors and cover stories that are particularly relevant to the Hispanic community. But the national broadcasts are lagging in that type of coverage, he added.

“That’s why I think this and Huffpost LatinoVoices exist, because there’s an appetite,” Plasencia said.

Last month, SiriusXM’s Cristina Radio channel launched a new all-English political show, hosted by top Democratic and Republican Latina analysts, as well as a bilingual foreign affairs program out of Washington. Other online news sites are continuing to pop up.

Voxxi, a new Hispanic online news magazine, was throwing its launch party Tuesday at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

Plasencia noted that the controversy regarding Arizona’s Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, over his aggressive efforts to seek out illegal immigrants, has received significant coverage on Spanish-language networks but not so much in English.

“This network will take our issues and make them mainstream because many other people besides Latinos may be watching,” he said.

Roberto Suro, a professor of journalism and public policy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, says finding the right audience may be tricky.

“There are several assumptions here. Is there room for another all-news channel? And within the Hispanic market, is there enough demand for an all-news channel?” Suro said.

Already CNN, Fox and MSNB compete in English. CNN en Espanol provides 24 hour coverage in Spanish.

The new channel would reflect the growing trend toward more niche audiences, but he added that the English-speaking Latino market is much more diverse than the Spanish-language market.

“There’s a longstanding effort to try and create content for English speaking Latinos,” Suro said. “This is a very broad population segment, and the question is, “what is the identity? Is it heavily Hispanic, all about news about Latinos? Or is it who delivers the news? It’s an elusive brand.”

____

AP Television Writer Lynn Elber and AP Business Writer Ryan Nakashima in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

NEW YORK (AP) – Phone company Verizon Communications Inc. will challenge Netflix and start a video streaming service this year with Redbox and its DVD rental kiosks.

Verizon and Coinstar Inc., Redbox’s parent company, said Monday that the service will be national and available to non-Verizon customers as well. It adds another dimension to Verizon’s quest to become a force in home entertainment, and it looks set to compete to some extent with the cable-TV services it already sells.

Unlike competing services from Amazon.com Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the new service will combine Internet delivery of movies with DVDs, the way Netflix does. Dish Network Corp. also offers a similar bundle through its Blockbuster subsidiary.

Specific details and pricing of the new plan weren’t announced.

Late last year, the companies were shopping around a $6-per-month offering that would give subscribers one DVD rental from Redbox per month as well as unlimited streaming of a certain selection of movies, according to a person briefed on the plan then. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

It’s not known whether the plan has changed since then, though the price is likely to be less than the $16-a-month minimum that Netflix subscribers have to pay for a combined DVD-by-mail and streaming plan.

Although consumers would pay less, Redbox’s inventory is limited to what’s in its kiosks, compared with Netflix’s library of more than 100,000 discs, including more obscure fare. Redbox customers will also have to go in person to pick up a disc, which saves the company mailing costs.

Getting an extensive library of streaming content to rival Netflix’s 20,000-plus titles will be expensive. The rising cost for streaming rights is the main reason that Netflix raised its U.S. prices by as much as 60 percent last year in a move that triggered a customer backlash. At the end of 2011, Netflix had video licensing commitments totaling $3.9 billion worldwide over the next several years.

Verizon will handle the streaming negotiations, Coinstar CEO Paul Davis told analysts in a conference call held late Monday to discuss the company’s fourth-quarter earnings. He declined to answer questions seeking more details about how the joint subscription service might work, citing a desire to keep things under wraps for competitive reasons. The streaming service won’t be available until the final half of this year.

Redbox, whose DVD rental kiosks are located in more than 29,000 stores, has been looking to expand into online streaming for more than a year. Its business so far has revolved around renting DVDs for as little as $1.20 per day. Along the way, Redbox says it has accumulated about 36 million email addresses from DVD and video-game renters – information that could be used to promote the new streaming service.

Verizon has its own cable-TV service, called FiOS, in some areas. Its Verizon Wireless subsidiary has also signed a deal to sell service from Comcast Corp. and other cable TV companies in its stores. The cable-TV experience has helped Verizon establish business relationships with Hollywood studios and other content producers, something that could be an advantage in the negotiations for streaming rights.

With the Redbox venture, Verizon is breaking ranks with the cable and satellite industry, which makes its own video streaming services available only to people who also subscribe to its traditional TV feeds. They don’t want households switching to Internet-only services, which are cheaper. Netflix Inc. charges $8 per month for its streaming-only plan, for instance, while the average monthly cable bill is more than $70.

“We’ve made a conscious decision to innovate and get involved with this market because it’s legitimate and growing, and we think the partnership with Redbox gives us huge upside,” said Bob Mudge, president of Verizon’s consumer business.

Verizon’s own FiOS business is relatively small, with 4.2 million subscribers, making it the seventh-largest provider of TV signals to U.S. homes. Meanwhile, its landline phone business is shrinking, so it needs other avenues for growth. Its wireless arm is growing, but it owns only 55 percent of that venture. (Vodafone Group PLC of Britain owns the rest.)

Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, Calif., ended last year with 24.4 million U.S. subscribers. About 8.4 million of those customers pay for Internet streaming and Netflix’s DVD-by-mail rental service.

Verizon and Coinstar said the service is intended to give subscribers access to DVD and Blu-ray discs as well as streaming movies starting in the second half of the year. Subscribers might visit the site to find that the movie they want isn’t available for streaming, but is available at a Redbox kiosk nearby, Coinstar’s Davis said.

To get people to try the service, Verizon and Redbox look set to undercut Netflix’s cheapest DVD and streaming plan of $16 per month, which is 60 percent higher than its $10 monthly rate before prices went up in September.

New York-based Verizon Communications will own 65 percent of the unnamed venture, with Bellevue, Wash.,-based Coinstar owning the rest. Redbox is contributing an initial $14 million to the venture, according to a regulatory filing. It did not say how much Verizon would contribute. The filing indicated the two companies may be called upon to contribute a combined $450 million to the venture – another indication that it will have to pay steep licensing fees.

Coinstar’s stock gained 91 cents, or 1.8 percent, to close Monday at $50.56. The stock then soared more than 16 percent in extended trading late Monday after the company reported fourth-quarter results that indicated Redbox may be picking up some of the Netflix customers who have canceled their DVD rental plans in recent months.

Verizon shares edged up 30 cents to $38.14. After initially falling on the news, Netflix shares gained $2.82, or 2.2 percent, to $129.25.

Netflix already has a couple of powerful competitors with video streaming services. Amazon.com provides a library of movies and TV shows to subscribers to its Amazon Prime shipping services. Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, has a streaming service called Vudu. Neither offers DVD rentals.

Netflix, though, isn’t devoting much attention to its DVD rental service because it’s convinced the discs are destined to become obsolete. Netflix lost 2.8 million DVD subscribers in the final three months of last year alone.

Netflix is hoping to differentiate itself from its rivals with a larger library that is just now starting to include content that hasn’t been available anywhere else. The company’s streaming library consists largely of older movie shows and TV episodes from past seasons. Netflix’s first original TV series, an eight-episode drama called “Lilyhammer,” debuted Monday. Other original TV series are coming in an attempt to make Netflix more competitive with Time Warner Inc.’s pay-TV channel HBO.

The additional competition in Internet streaming comes as Netflix recovers from the customers losses it absorbed last year following its price increase and a botched plan to spin off its DVD service into a separate website.

Redbox now claims to be the biggest DVD rental service in the country.

___

AP Technology Writers Michael Liedtke in San Francisco and Ryan Nakashima in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Facebook is baring its business soul.

The unveiling came late Wednesday when the company that depends on people to share their lives online filed its plans to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering of stock. It’s a revelatory moment that prospective investors, curious competitors and nosy reporters have been awaiting for two years. During that time, Facebook established itself as a communications hub and emerged as a threat to the Internet’s most powerful company, Google Inc.

As with almost anything crafted by a bunch of lawyers and bankers, the 197-page prospectus that Facebook filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission is filled with boilerplate legalese and mind-numbing numbers.

But there were some juicy details in there, too.

Above all, the documents confirmed what everyone had been hearing: Facebook is very profitable and getting stronger. The company Mark Zuckerberg started with some friends in 2004 has seen its annual revenue soar from $777 million in 2009 to $3.7 billion last year. Facebook’s earnings have grown at a similar rate too, ballooning from $122 million in 2009 to $668 million last year.

Facebook ended 2011 with $3.9 billion in cash. That’s a relatively small amount compared to the nearly $45 billion that Google has in the bank.

Facebook’s prosperity has been fueled by a steady expansion of its audience, making its website a more attractive marketing vehicle for ads, which account for most of the company’s revenue. Facebook ended last year with 845 million users, up 39 percent from 608 million at the end of 2010. Those users share their interests and preferences prodigiously. Facebook recorded a daily average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments during the final three months of last year.

Facebook has become so addictive that more than half its audience – 483 million users – log in every day.

Facebook’s revenue total disappointed some people who pored through the documents. One reason: The company generates about $4.39 in revenue per user. “That is a surprisingly low number,” said University of Notre Dame finance professor Tim Loughran, who studies IPOs. Google’s annual revenue of nearly $38 billion works out to more than $30 per user of its services.

“Facebook needs to find more ways to get revenue from their users,” Loughran said.

Facebook listed its most promising expansion opportunities as Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea. The company, based in Menlo Park, Calif., eventually hopes to make its service available in China if it can navigate rules requiring online content to be censored if the Chinese government considers it to be objectionable or obscene.

The IPO filing gives some clue when Facebook is likely to surpass 1 billion users. If it can add users at roughly the same pace as last year, Facebook should surpass the 1 billion mark this summer.

As it is, Facebook already generates 44 percent of its revenue outside the U.S. The company is also developing other sources of revenue beyond online advertising faster than Google. Advertising accounted for 85 percent of Facebook’s revenue last year. It made up 96 percent of Google’s. Facebook’s other revenue sources include the 30 percent cut of sales it takes from game makers and other external applications companies that sell things on its website.

The big question is whether Facebook’s numbers are impressive enough to fetch the lofty IPO price. It’s still too early in the process for Facebook to reveal how much it intends to ask for its shares, but Wednesday’s filing provides some clues. Facebook valued its Class B common stock at $29.73 at the end of December, down slightly from appraisals of $30.07 in June and September. If this unfolds like most hot IPOs, Facebook will probably try to sell its shares at a premium. That could mean an IPO price in the $35 to $40 range. Investor demand, though, ultimately will dictate the pricing.

Facebook still hasn’t listed how many outstanding shares it has, but the documents make it possible to make a rough estimate of the company’s market value at the end of last year. Financial notes in the filing show Facebook calculated it had about 2.9 billion fully diluted shares at the end of December. That works out to a market value of about $86 billion, based on Facebook’s $29.73-per-share self-appraisal.

At that price, the nearly 534 million shares that the 27-year-old Zuckerberg owns are worth about $16 billion. The filing indicates Zuckerberg will sell an unspecified number of shares in the IPO to cover a tax bill for exercising a stock option to buy 120 million shares. Zuckerberg has been collecting a $500,000 salary but that will fall to one dollar next year at his own request, according to the filing.

Other big winners in the IPO include: Facebook co-founder and old Zuckerberg friend, Dustin Moskovitz, who owns nearly 134 million shares; venture capital firm Accel Partners, which owns 201 million shares; Russian investor DST Global Ltd., which owns 131 million shares; and former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, who owns nearly 45 million shares.

Hundreds of other Facebook employees could become millionaires because they receive stock as part of their compensation. Facebook has about 3,200 employees now, nearly 2,000 more than it did two years ago.

Facebook also shared some of its biggest worries in the filing. Among other things, it cited Google’s ability to use its dominance in Internet search to promote its Google Plus social network. Facebook also frets the possibility that regulators in Europe and the U.S. may impose tougher privacy rules that would make it more difficult for the company to stockpile information about its users.

DANA POINT, Calif. (AP) – Legendary rocker Neil Young took his campaign for higher-fidelity digital sound to the stage of a technology conference Tuesday, saying a giant of the industry was on his side: the late Steve Jobs.

Young said the Apple co-founder was such a fan of music that he didn’t use his iPod and its digitally compressed files at home. Instead, he used a physical format well-known to have better sound.

“Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music. His legacy is tremendous,” Young said. “But when he went home, he listened to vinyl (albums).”

Young told the “D: Dive Into Media” conference Tuesday that he spoke with Jobs about creating a format that has 20 times the fidelity of files in the most current digital formats, including MP3.

Such a format, he said, would contain 100 percent of the data of music as it is created in a studio, as opposed to 5 percent in compressed formats including Apple’s AAC. Each song would be huge, and a new storage and playback device might only hold 30 albums. Each song would take about 30 minutes to download, which is fine if you leave your device on overnight, he said.

“Sleep well. Wake up in the morning. Play some real music and listen to the joy of 100 percent of the sound of music,” he said.

Although Young didn’t have a practical plan for developing such a format – saying it’s for “rich people” to decide – he said Jobs was on board with the idea before he died from cancer at age 56 in October.

“I talked to Steve about it. We were working on it,” Young said. “You’ve got to believe if he lived long enough he would eventually try to do what I’m trying to do.”

Young’s opinion of Jobs was confirmed by interviewer Walt Mossberg, a journalist with News Corp.’s All Things D website, which hosted Jobs at its conferences.

Mossberg said Jobs expressed surprise that “people traded quality, to the extent they had, for convenience or price.”

An Apple Inc. spokesman declined to comment.

Young, a 66-year-old singer and songwriter, was full of other surprising opinions, including his defense of recording labels such as his own Reprise Records, a unit of Warner Music Group Corp., as being a nurturer of artists, even as he said recording companies had botched the transition to digital music.

Young also said that “piracy is the new radio,” suggesting that illegally copying low-quality songs was an acceptable way for fans to sample music before buying higher-quality versions.

Only yesterday it was the exotic stuff of spy shows: flip on a computer and track the enemy’s speeding car.

But today, anyone with $300 can compete with Jack Bauer. Online, and soon in big-box stores, you can buy a device no bigger than a cigarette pack, attach it to a car without the driver’s knowledge and watch the vehicle’s travels — and stops — at home on your laptop.

Tens of thousands of Americans are already doing just that, with little oversight, for purposes as seemingly benign as tracking an elderly parent with dementia or a risky teenage driver, or as legally and ethically charged as spying on a spouse or an employee — or for outright criminal stalking.

The advent of Global Positioning System tracking devices has been a boon to law enforcement, making it easier and safer, for example, for agents to link drug dealers to kingpins.

Last Monday, in a decision seen as a first step toward setting boundaries for law enforcement, the Supreme Court held that under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, placing a GPS tracker on a vehicle is a search. Police departments around the country say they will be more likely to seek judicial approval before using the devices, if they were not already doing so.

Still, sales of GPS trackers to employers and individuals, for a multitude of largely unregulated uses, are growing fast, raising new questions about privacy and a legal system that has not kept pace with technology. This easy tool for recording a person’s every move is a powerful one that, when misused, amounts to “electronic stalking,” in the words of one private investigator.

“That, to the victim, is just as terrifying as seeing your face in the window at night before they go to bed,” said the investigator, John J. Nazarian, who heads an investigation agency based in Los Angeles.

So many suspicious spouses are now doing their own spying, a private investigator in New Jersey said, that his infidelity business is declining.

In the absence of legislation in most states, putting a GPS device on a spouse’s car, or hiring an investigator to do so, is widely considered to be legal if the person placing it shares ownership of the car. But some privacy experts question this standard, and there is little to stop a jealous suitor, or an abusive man trying to prevent a battered woman from escaping, from doing the same.

GPS trackers are increasingly being cited in cases of criminal stalking and civil violations of privacy.

One increasing use of GPS tracking — by as many as 30,000 parents, one seller estimates — is to monitor the driving habits of teenagers; some devices even send a text message when the car goes over a certain speed.

Jimmie Mesis, a private investigator in New Jersey who, with his wife, Rosemarie, publishes PI Magazine and also sells devices through a company called PIgear, recalled a couple whose 17-year-old daughter had a drug problem and would disappear for hours at a time. Worried that she might overdose, they placed a tracker on her car. When they saw that she was visiting the same house repeatedly, they informed the police, who raided the drug den.

Also rising is the placement of devices in the cars or pockets of elderly parents with dementia. Mr. Mesis said one client with an erratic 86-year-old father discovered that he had driven to the southern end of the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey, and they were able to retrieve him.

Even if done legally and out of concern for family members, the covert use of GPS devices poses ethical questions. “To have this as a routine tool strikes me as pretty chilling,” said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of law and computer science at Harvard University. “We are talking about partners and spouses, not pets.”

“It cuts into someone’s autonomy to know where they are all the time and not give them the opportunity to opt out,” he said.

Rick Johnson, a private investigator in Denver, recalled two recent cases in which women who were going through divorces hired him because they believed that their husbands were following them. He found GPS trackers on their cars and removed them.

“It scared the hell out of these women,” Mr. Johnson said.

Sales of GPS trackers to private individuals may have already surpassed more than 100,000 per year, some experts believe. The marketing is just getting started.

—

Reporting was contributed by Jess Bidgood from Boston, Robbie Brown from Atlanta, Dan Frosch from Denver, Ian Lovett from Los Angeles and Steven Yaccino from Chicago.

FORGET the Union — what’s the state of the BlackBerry?

Research in Motion, maker of BlackBerry smartphones and tablets, sent its co-chief executives packing last week and replaced them with Thorsten Heins, who had been RIM’s chief operating officer. How would he characterize his employer?

“We make the best communications devices in the world,” said Mr. Heins, who met with editors and reporters from The New York Times on Friday.

Not everyone feels the same way. Over the last year, RIM’s share price has plunged 75 percent. The company once commanded more than half of the American smartphone market. Today it has 10 percent.

RIM has two, maybe three ways forward.

The first — the one that Mr. Heins is clearly aiming for — is a triumphant comeback after a near-death experience. Think Apple and its iMac. RIM is on the verge of upgrading its PlayBook operating system — now with, among other things, e-mail, a feature that the original PlayBook bafflingly lacked — and will release the BlackBerry 10 OS this year.

Behind Door No. 2 is a gradual decline and diminution as rivals like Apple, Google and Microsoft devour most of the market; to some degree, they already have. BlackBerry would keep the scraps — a small but dedicated following of corporate and government customers who want its proprietary messaging and security features.

Then there is the third option: oblivion. The road of progress is littered with the corpses of fallen titans. Objects that once seemed as indispensable as the companies that made them have been mercilessly superseded — as seen below. And RIM ought to know: with mobile devices like the BlackBerry 957, it helped to extinguish the pager era.

SONY WALKMAN (1979-2010) Before the Walkman, “personal audio” meant holding a transistor radio to your ear. Sony’s invention created an entire category of devices and helped make the company the technology leader of the 1980s. New models (Thinner! Auto-reverse!) were eagerly anticipated, the LP was relegated to the attic and tender moments spent listening to mix tapes from that certain someone proliferated across teenage bedrooms. Sony seemed incapable of putting a foot wrong. It successfully moved the brand into compact discs with the Discman, then bought record labels and movie studios to bring about that illusory marriage of technology and content. When the digital revolution hit, Sony was too beholden to its proprietary formats, as well as to the inertia inside its media companies. Enter Apple and the iPod.

PAGERS (BORN 1951) At first, pagers were attached to people who worked in fields where lives were on the line. That usually meant doctors, though the group expanded in the late 1980s to include drug dealers. Early beepers displayed only numbers, giving rise to a numerical lexicon that included codes like 911 (call me back immediately) and 07734, which resembles “hello” when read upside down. Pagers briefly gained fame in early 1990s hip-hop, showing up in songs like “Skypager,” by a Tribe Called Quest. The pager’s fall was attributable to the disruptive and destructive powers of another technology: the mobile phone. Why beep when you can talk? And a pager message is so tiny that it makes a tweet look like “The Iliad.” The beeper does live on, in limited circles: its network remains more reliable than cell networks, making it useful to E.M.S. and other rescue workers.

PALM PILOT (1997-2007) Filofax brought personal organizers to their analog apogee in the early ’90s, but Palm brought them into the digital age. Palm Pilots were dazzling when they first appeared: all of your contacts, calendars and notes in one slim, pocket-size device. A touch screen, which required a stylus, made navigation easy. And you could add software, bought through an online store. Want a Zagat guide to go along with your personal data? No problem. In later years, Palm even added telephone features, creating a compelling, all-in-one gadget. Despite boardroom dramas that affected the company’s name and its ownership, Palm’s reputation as a source of innovative hardware and software endured until Jan. 9, 2007. Why that date? That’s when Apple introduced the iPhone.

POLAROID INSTANT CAMERAS (1948-2008) Edwin Land’s invention of instant-developing film in 1948 put a darkroom inside a handheld camera. That achievement gave his Polaroid Corporation a distinct advantage over traditional film cameras. By 1980, Polaroid was selling 7.8 million cameras a year in the United States — more than half of all the 15 million cameras, instant and traditional, sold that year. In 1985, it won a major patent-infringement suit, forcing Kodak to abandon its own instant-camera efforts. The victory was short-lived. The late ’80s brought the rise of the digital camera. By 2000, digital cameras began appearing on cellphones, placing cameras in millions of pockets. Polaroid declared bankruptcy for the first time in 2001 and stopped making instant film in 2008. Kodak declared bankruptcy on Jan. 19.

ATARI 2600 (1977-c.1984) It wasn’t the first game console, but the Atari 2600 brought video games into the home and popular culture. Over its life span, more than 30 million were sold. Pong, Combat, Pitfall and Frogger soaked up children’s afternoons. Then came the PC, which could play games and do much more. Atari rushed out games, assuming that its customers would play whatever it released. They didn’t. Millions of unsold games and consoles were buried in a New Mexico landfill in 1983. Warner Communications, which bought Atari in 1976 for $28 million, sold it in 1984 for no cash.

LOS ANGELES (AP) – When Facebook makes its long-expected debut as a public company this spring, the social-networking company will likely vault into the ranks of the largest public companies in the world, alongside McDonald’s, Amazon.com and Bank of America.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Facebook is preparing to file initial paperwork for an offering that could raise as much as $10 billion and value the company at $75 billion to $100 billion. The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission could come as early as Wednesday, with an initial public offering of stock in three or four months.

The targeted amount would slot it among the world’s 25 largest IPOs, although as recently as November 2010, General Motors raised $15.8 billion when it shed majority control by the U.S. government.

The IPOs of 14 companies would rank higher than Facebook’s, according to investment adviser Renaissance Capital. Among them were Visa Inc.’s $17.9 billion IPO in March 2008, the largest for a U.S. company, and world-topper Agricultural Bank of China Ltd., which raised $19.3 billion in July 2010, not including extra shares issued to meet demand.

Facebook spokesman Larry Wu said the company will not comment on IPO-related speculation. The Journal had cited unnamed people familiar with the matter.

The Journal also said that Facebook was close to picking Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriter, which would be a setback for rival Goldman Sachs. Both declined comment to The Associated Press.

The buzz surrounding an outsized haul for Facebook’s founders, employees and early investors remains a hopeful sign for capital markets following a deep recession. At the reported price, Facebook’s IPO would be the biggest for a U.S. Internet company ever – topping the debut of one of its main rivals, Google Inc.

“We are expecting 2012 to be a year of recovery for the IPO market led by the Facebook IPO,” said Kathy Smith, Renaissance Capital’s principal.

The event will follow a string of tepid debuts by technology startups including social game maker Zynga and discount advertiser Groupon. The stocks of both companies are just pennies above their offering prices in December and November respectively. Zynga’s stock fell 5 percent below the IPO price on its first day of trading.

Facebook’s will be the most anticipated tech IPO since Google went public in August 2004. Not including shares sold by early investors, the Internet search giant raised $1.2 billion and grabbed a market value of $23 billion, the biggest so far for a U.S. Internet company. The IPO raised $1.9 billion, including shares sold by early investors and extra stock issued to meet the heavy demand. It’s not known whether Facebook’s $10 billion target includes shares owned by early investors.

Facebook’s reported valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion compares with about $100 billion for McDonald’s Corp., $90 billion for Citigroup Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. and $75 billion for Bank of America Corp. It would exceed the market cap of $55 billion for Hewlett-Packard Co., one of the world’s largest technology companies by revenue.

Both Facebook and Google earn most of their money from advertising and are now competing to gain as much information as possible about their users to help advertisers target niche audiences.

According to eMarketer, Facebook is expected to grow its share of the U.S. display ad market to about 20 percent this year from 16 percent in 2011, above second-ranked Yahoo’s expected share of about 13 percent. For overall online ad revenue, Facebook is seen grabbing just 8 percent of the market this year, compared with 45 percent for Google.

EMarketer estimates that Facebook’s ad revenue will grow 52 percent to $5.78 billion this year and will reach $7 billion in 2013.

Despite presumably topping Google’s public launch, Facebook spent more time growing behind the veil of private ownership than its rival.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates in 2004 and is debuting on stock markets in its eighth year. Google’s IPO came six years after being founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. When Google turned eight in August 2006, its market cap was roughly $116 billion. Today, the company is worth nearly $190 billion – down from a peak of about $235 billion in November 2007.

Investors may be asked to bet heavily on the belief that Facebook will continue to revolutionize the way people communicate around the globe. Even with Facebook’s heady growth rate, Google had ad revenue last year of more than five times what Facebook is expected to get in 2013. Yet it is Google that is mimicking Facebook in building a rival social network called Plus.

“There’s the general feeling that Facebook might be the future of the way the Internet works,” said eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson.

Zuckerberg, 27, is already worth $17.5 billion, based on the latest estimates from Forbes magazine. Most of that wealth is drawn from the value of Facebook shares that have traded among a small universe of well-heeled investors that buy stakes in companies before they go public.

As the company gauges public demand for its stock, the number of shares offered and the price asked could change significantly. Groupon had to refile its securities paperwork repeatedly as regulators questioned some of its accounting methods. Even Google took in less than it hoped as people shunned an unorthodox auction-based offering.

John Fitzgibbon Jr., publisher of IPOScoop.com, said it’s too early to get excited.

“Until they actually put the ink on the paper and push it across the desk of the SEC, it’s all speculation,” he said.

The possible filing next week isn’t all that surprising.

Federal rules require companies with at least $10 million in assets and more than 500 shareholders to disclose its quarterly financial results and other details. The reporting requirement kicks in 120 days after the fiscal year in which a company exceeds the shareholder threshold for the first time.

Facebook’s fiscal year ends Dec. 31, so it has until late April 2012 to comply with this requirement, having hit the 500-shareholder threshold last year. Because it typically takes three or four months after filing paperwork to issue the IPO, a Wednesday filing would allow it to meet the deadline. If it happens in May, it could become a lucrative birthday gift for Zuckerberg, who will turn 28 that month.

The explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws.

When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.

Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.

“Are you Lai Xiaodong’s father?” a caller asked when the phone rang at Mr. Lai’s childhood home. Six months earlier, the 22-year-old had moved to Chengdu, in southwest China, to become one of the millions of human cogs powering the largest, fastest and most sophisticated manufacturing system on earth. That system has made it possible for Apple and hundreds of other companies to build devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up.

“He’s in trouble,” the caller told Mr. Lai’s father. “Get to the hospital as soon as possible.”

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”

Apple is not the only electronics company doing business within a troubling supply system. Bleak working conditions have been documented at factories manufacturing products for Dell, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.

Current and former Apple executives, moreover, say the company has made significant strides in improving factories in recent years. Apple has a supplier code of conduct that details standards on labor issues, safety protections and other topics. The company has mounted a vigorous auditing campaign, and when abuses are discovered, Apple says, corrections are demanded.

And Apple’s annual supplier responsibility reports, in many cases, are the first to report abuses. This month, for the first time, the company released a list identifying many of its suppliers.

But significant problems remain. More than half of the suppliers audited by Apple have violated at least one aspect of the code of conduct every year since 2007, according to Apple’s reports, and in some instances have violated the law. While many violations involve working conditions, rather than safety hazards, troubling patterns persist.

“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.

“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.

Some former Apple executives say there is an unresolved tension within the company: executives want to improve conditions within factories, but that dedication falters when it conflicts with crucial supplier relationships or the fast delivery of new products. Tuesday, Apple reported one of the most lucrative quarters of any corporation in history, with $13.06 billion in profits on $46.3 billion in sales. Its sales would have been even higher, executives said, if overseas factories had been able to produce more.

Executives at other corporations report similar internal pressures. This system may not be pretty, they argue, but a radical overhaul would slow innovation. Customers want amazing new electronics delivered every year.

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

“If half of iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?” the executive asked.

—

Gu Huini contributed research.

Also Wednesday, a New Zealand judge denied Kim Dotcom, the Megaupload founder, bail following his arrest last week on American accusations of copyright infringement.

The prosecutor’s office spokeswoman, Marieke van der Molen, declined to release the name of the latest man arrested in line with Dutch privacy rules, but a United States Justice Department official identified him as software programmer Andrus Nomm, 32, a citizen of Estonia and a resident of both Turkey and Estonia.

Ms. Van der Molen said the suspect was arrested last Friday and appeared on Monday before a judge, who ordered him detained for 60 days pending an American extradition request.

Judge David McNaughton in Auckland denied Mr. Dotcom bail pending a hearing Feb. 22 on his possible extradition to face trial in the United States, saying Mr. Dotcom poses a flight risk. Mr. Dotcom, 38, insisted he was innocent and posed no flight risk.

New Zealand police arrested three other Megaupload employees last week on American accusations that they facilitated millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content, costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue. Judge McNaughton was expected to make bail rulings on the three later this week or early next week.