An old saying states that “security is inversely proportional to convenience.” This explains the slow adoption of many important security technologies. HTTPS, the secure version of the HTTP protocol used to browse the world wide web, has been around for more than two decades, but it’s only been in the last couple of years that it has been enabled by default on many major websites.
Back when we… → Read More
With “Don’t Get Scroogled,” Microsoft went for shock and awe in its fight against Google by arguing that the search giant can’t be trusted with your personal information. Today, Microsoft is launching a far more restrained campaign: an online safety and security resource center, a privacy quiz and a new TV ad that proclaims that “your privacy is [Microsoft's]… → Read More
Apple’s Siri voice assistant on iOS devices retains information to help the company generate better and more accurate results in the analysis process that takes place at its remote servers. The company has never previously revealed exactly how long it keeps that data or how exactly it works, but now Wired has learned from an Apple spokesperson exactly how Siri IDs and store data, as well as for… → Read More
With the Era of Over-sharing and the Social Fire Hose upon us, the heft and value of privacy is changing — and, for better or worse, many argue that it’s diminishing. Perturbed by the access many companies (inconspicuously) have to our browsing history, former Googler Brian Kennish developed a Chrome Extension to address the browser privacy issue. Facebook Connect, as it was called then, disabled… → Read More
Facebook is taking a step today in its bid to position itself as the privacy-respecting social network: it is announcing an alliance with the U.S.’s National Association of Attorneys General to provide teens and their parents more information and tools to manage their profiles on Facebook and beyond to counter its less flattering image as a “ever-expanding data collection octopus.” → Read More
Today, Microsoft has leveled more accusations about Google’s practices by way of its “Scroogled” campaigns. This time, the complaints are about how Google handles users’ data when they purchase an application from Google Play. Previous “Scroogled” campaigns have targeted both Gmail and search over ads and privacy. In the two videos below, Microsoft uses… → Read More
Firefox 20 is now available for download. The emphasis of today’s release is on Firefox’s private browsing mode, which now allows Firefox desktop users to open a private browsing window without the need to shut down the whole browser, while Firefox for Android users can now use per-tab private browsing. Also new in this version is a download manager for the desktop, the ability to… → Read More
Google is facing enforcement action — and possibly fines — in six European Union member states after it failed to make changes to its privacy policy following requests by European data protection regulators. The six countries that have today launched data protection investigations into Google’s unified privacy policy are France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the U.K. → Read More
As Forbes first reported this afternoon, Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy for product and engineering, has decided to step down from her current position. Google has now confirmed this. Whitten joined Google 10 years ago and oversaw the company’s privacy policies during a tumultuous time when its Street View cars were accused of spying on people’s Wi-Fi networks and… → Read More
Famil.io, a new service for privately sharing photos and videos with your family across web and mobile, is today officially launching to the public. The sharing platform can serve as a complement to Facebook, where most families network today, though in a more restrained fashion. Or for those family members who aren’t even active on Facebook, Famil.io can, to some extent, serve as a… → Read More
Your phone knows you completely. It knows where you’ve been, and who you’ve been talking to. It knows which websites you visit in your idle time, and your many passwords. Hell, it probably knows what you look like without pants on. It knows you.
To search someone’s phone is to breach not just their property, but their very being. Today, the ACLU has filed suit against the county of San… → Read More
It looks like GitHub Enterprise, the on-premises version of the GitHub code-sharing platform, has today leaked out over 3,000 emails of individuals that use it. Those emails were then posted online on a Pastebin page (which we’re not linking to; please don’t post the link in the comments below). → Read More
It’s often been said that we, as users, are “the product” of networks like Google or Facebook. But there is now a new wave of privacy centric start-ups seeking to give us back control of our personal data. One of these is Abine which boasts a suite of products that protect our online privacy. Data protection is the “new frontier”, Abine’s CEO Bill Kerrigan, who describes his startup as “the online… → Read More
After a week of rumors, this doesn’t come as a huge surprise anymore: Google today settled the privacy case brought against it by 37 states and the District of Columbia. In total, Google will pay $7 million dollars, a number that isn’t going to cause a lot of sleepless nights at company headquarters. Every state will get a share of the $7 million, so even the eight lead states that… → Read More
Twitter is sending out emails to 250,000 users it says may have had their accounts compromised in the last week as the site experienced “unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data.” Twitter tells TechCrunch that this is “not related” to the widespread, but intermittent, outage the site saw yesterday. → Read More
Path’s 2012 included a major hiccup when it was discovered in February last year that the app uploaded user address books in their entirety to its servers. The company quickly responded by deleting the data and apologizing for the transgression, but the damage was done: The FTC levied charges against the startup, and today the government body has announced the results of those proceedings in the… → Read More
Dave Morin, CEO and founder of Path, today likened Facebook to a Chevy, and Path to a BMW or Audi, as he attempted to draw out the differences between his privacy-focused social network and the one that is now publicly-traded and recently passed 1 billion users (and is his former stomping ground). Speaking at the DLD conference currently underway in Munich, Morin admitted that while people have… → Read More
The U.S. government is continuing to lobby Brussels to water down plans to reform privacy legislation. The European Union’s executive and legislative bodies are in the process of reforming the region’s data protection rules — a long overdue wrangle since current legislation dates back to 1995, when Facebook was not even a gleam in 11-year-old Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. → Read More
Facebook has been cooperating with law-enforcement officials for some time when it comes to handing over user data as evidence in court cases. But the situation is less clear when those legal requests are made by others — a predicament being highlighted right now in a murder case in Oregon, where the social network has (so far) refused to comply with requests from the defense team of a murder… → Read More
Foursquare — which this year passed its three-billionth check-in, added 15 million more users to its network, and in October kicked off a new chapter as a stronger competitor to Yelp with more local information and reviews — is now updating its privacy policy to keep up. It has been sending out an email to its users informing them that as of January 28, it will add in two new items that will… → Read More
Employers and schools in Michigan, the greatest state in the Nation, are now prohibited from asking employees and students for passwords to their personal email and social media accounts. In a win for reasonable privacy and common sense, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder just signed House Bill 5523 into law introduced by state Rep. Aric Nesbitt, R-Lawton. “Cyber security is important to the… → Read More
While most of us were enjoying the holidays with our families all over the world, someone who is related to the CEO of Facebook posted a photo of her family to friends, and then some journalist person downloaded it and tweeted it. There’s a real difference between something being private and something being personal. And that, as the aforementioned incident highlights, is a notion that a lot of… → Read More
Sure, it’s not unlike the New York Post to be sensationalist. But in this case it misinterpreted data to suggest Instagram was hit harder by backlash to its terms of service changes than it actually was. Combined with it being a quiet-ish holiday news week, I am taking a story it published today on a 25 percent drop in Instagram users with a little more than a grain of salt. → Read More
In a very carefully worded blog post penned by Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, he laid out what Facebook and Instagram will do to answer any and all questions that users might have over the recent privacy and terms of service changes. This was the “Beacon-Like” response we were anticipating: I’m writing this today to let you know we’re listening and to commit to you that we… → Read More
Facebook’s thorny relationship with Europe and European lawmakers took another barb in the side yesterday as a German Data Protection Commissioner issued a ruling that Facebook’s real-name policy violates German Law. The privacy regulator is demanding Facebook “immediately” stops enforcing that its users use their real names but Facebook says it will “vigorously” fight the order. → Read More
Instagram has just announced an update to its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy which will go into effect starting January 16.
According to the popular photo-sharing service, Instagram has introduced this Privacy Policy update to better collaborate with Facebook, which purchased the app earlier this year. → Read More
Google released an update to its Transparency Report today, detailing how government requests both for information about users and also for content removal from Google services. The numbers indicate a startling trend: in both cases, requests are on the rise, according to the latest data added to the report, which covers January to June 2012. Content takedown requests especially saw a significant… → Read More
Interesting development today in the browser wars, with the latest battlefield being who is best positioned to guard users’ privacy. Mozilla today announced that it has started to test new social functionality inside its Firefox internet browser — a foray into sharing and social activity, it says, with user privacy in mind. The first service to join the Social API platform for testing is Facebook… → Read More
Authorities in Europe today kicked off a fresh wave of scrutiny over Google’s privacy policy and called for changes to be made in how Google manages user data, describing Google’s scope as “too large”. But they also stopped short of saying Google is acting illegally in how it manages privacy or demanding a change in its wider policy. France’s data protection authority, the Commission Nationale de… → Read More
Wayne Plimmer, a retiree living in Sechelt, British Columbia, filed a class action lawsuit against Google last week. In it, he and his attorney allege that Google’s Gmail service “intercepts, obtains and uses personal information it collections from emails sent to Gmail users.” → Read More
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