Over the past few years, the world has witness BlackBerry stocks plummeting. Recently, Blackberry has decided to sign a provisional agreement to be purchased by Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited, a Toronto based company who is currently BlackBerry’s largest shareholder, owning 10% of the publicly traded stocks. As a result, Blackberry would no longer be a publicly traded stock, but rather a private company. This deal would also allow current BlackBerry’s current shareholders to walk away with nine US dollars for each share they own. The transaction valued to be at $4.7 billion, much less than the $83 billion the company was once worth.

The sale is contingent upon the approval of regulators, and shareholders. Up until November 4th, where a final transaction agreement would be in place, BlackBerry still has the right to “actively solicit, receive, evaluate” and “negotiate with other parties” and look around for alternative proposals. (CBC)

With the launching of the new Blackberry Z30 and competitor offerings from Samsung and Apple, there are speculations of whether or not the transaction will actually go through, but with benefits of keep stock prices from further declining. The stock remained unchanged from Friday September 20th to Monday the 23rd, and has since dropped to $8.80 on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Only time will tell what is in store for BlackBerry’s future.

It’s hard to argue against the fact that everyone enjoys using Google ‘Street View’ maps either to view houses, streets, and physical landmarks. Even with all the benefits of Google Street View and its growing popularity, now comes surprising allegations of a controversy linked with Google Street View and its involvement in acquiring peoples private data.

Recently Google has drawn negative attention towards itself due to the news of attaining private information from residents of over 30 countries; Google was able to access confidential information, such as emails, usernames, passwords, and medical records from residents who had unprotected wireless networks.  Not only is attaining private data from people all over the world unethical and unjustifiable, but to make matters worse although Google has apologized for snooping and promised to stop collecting data, the company still feels as though they have not done anything illegal.  

Although Google is a massive company that provides a very useful network, this by no means suggests that Google has the right to collect and save persona data. To have all of the data from 2008-2010 and not immediately dispose of this information is a completely unethical business decision, and is a basic violation of human privacy. Why Google considers itself to be above the law is a question the company will be addressing in court, and only time will tell whether consequences will be awarded.

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