When Google started raising money in 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t have a revenue model — or at least that’s how the story goes. The company’s highly successful text ad program didn’t start until 2000, but Brin and Page may have had at least some idea of how to monetize the service by the time Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim gave them their check. → Read More
According to The Next Web, sending someone a link to something on a third-party site using Facebook’s social system in a private message increases the “Like” numbers on public counters by two. → Read More
Editor’s note: Sarah Downey is a senior privacy strategist at Albine, provider of online privacy solutions. Keep track of her on her blog and on Twitter.
The ad industry says that Do Not Track will destroy the free Internet. We love the Internet and would be pretty upset if it died, so we looked deeper into this claim. → Read More
Earlier today European regulators collectively scored a victory for privacy when the Irish Data Protection Commissioner revealed it had managed to get Facebook to drop all facial recognition activity on its platform, as part of a wider investigation and process to get Facebook more in line with EU regulations on data protection and consumer transparency — most of which Facebook appears to have… → Read More
The ongoing investigation into Facebook’s transparency on user data and privacy by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner has come to a positive conclusion for the social network. The DPC, whose decisions had wider-ranging implications for all of Facebook’s business in Europe, had made several recommendations earlier in the year to bring Facebook’s policies in line with that of data protection… → Read More
Wait, I’ve seen this one before, back when it was called Please Rob Me and based on Foursquare. The folks (folk?) behind the latest “social networking privacy experiment” called We Know Your House have just brought their website back online, following a swift takedown of their Twitter account after media reports disclosed what they were up to. In case you missed it: We Know Your House is an… → Read More
It’s long been said that “I agree to the terms of service” is the biggest lie on the internet. And even if you do read them, many TOS are so ridden with legalese that you practically need to be a lawyer to understand them. Also, as I wrote in a gloomy post last weekend, users have no choice but either agree to the terms offered by a web app or simply not use the service at all.
But a new… → Read More
Facebook and the FTC today finalized their earlier announced settlement over charges that Facebook had “deceived” its customers by “telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public.” Unlike this week’s earlier $22.5 million FTC settlement with Google, Facebook does not face any financial penalties. Instead, the company… → Read More
Looks like Google Play is growing up, combing its hair and trying to move away from its Wild West image: Android’s app store team has sent out a letter to its tens of thousands of developers informing them that it is making several changes to tighten its developer app policies. Areas that are covered include naming apps, app icons, payments, privacy, spam and advertising — effectively, a set of… → Read More
As if the rules at the 2012 London Olympics didn’t sound draconian enough, the organization has banned personal Wi-Fi hotspots from the games, thereby ensuring that people will just tether their phones in secret and surf the web like the champions they are.
This follows hot on the heels of prohibitions from sharing Olympic news via social media. Can we all just agree that this isn’t about… → Read More
Brewster, the hot, new personalized address book app for iPhone, launched to much fanfare this week. But it also launched with a concerning bug. Some users reported they had the ability to see the personal contact information for people they shouldn’t have had access to, including the likes of one Mr. Ashton Kutcher, for example.
His wasn’t the only private contact information exposed, from… → Read More
A new Chrome plug-in that lets users bypass the installation of Facebook apps, but still consume the content your friends are sharing via those Facebook-enabled apps, has been picking up users at a solid clip since going live only a week ago. Facebook Open Graph Redirect, which works with Facebook apps for sites like SocialCam, Yahoo, the Washington Post and others, now has 3,200 users, and… → Read More
A while back we wrote about a flaw in Groupon’s email link encryption, which revealed the emails of some Groupon users when “addx” was added into a Google search of Groupon’s site. We’ve been alerted that is still happening, with about 170 emails coming up when we searched (last time around it was less than 80).
When this last happened, Groupon director of engineering Shinji Kuwayama told us… → Read More
It’s not clear if this is a one-off glitch, a signal of a bigger issue — or a way of pumping up/sabotaging Klout scores for those who care. But it’s not great news any way you spin it, if it’s true: a Klout user has gotten in touch to say that when he accesses the social influence ratings service, he is getting signed in to Klout not as himself but as someone else.
Using an HTC Sensation… → Read More
Remember address book-gate? Locationgate? I-don’t-know-what-my-apps-are-doing-on-my-phone-gate? (Oh, that last one might not be a real thing.) Regardless, we’re living in age where companies are pushing us to rethink the boundaries between what we consider private, personal information and what should be public. The resulting backlash is an overreaction(-gate) when we discover that some of the… → Read More
The European activists “europe-v-facebook.org”, led by a group of Austrian students, say that they have reached the 7,000-comment threshold on a Facebook privacy proposal, first raised last week, which would force the company to take the revisions to a worldwide vote. Perhaps not the best timing for Facebook, but great timing for those looking for more profile on the whole issue of privacy… → Read More
Well, that didn’t take long. A proposed Facebook user protection amendment introduced yesterday in the U.S. House of Representatives has already been shot down. The legislation, offered by Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter, would have added new restrictions to FCC rules that would have prohibited employers from demanding workers’ social networking usernames and passwords.
The final vote was… → Read More
Facebook is on its way to having a billion members, but it’s not always making friends everywhere it goes. Two young men, both aged 19 and in the most recent crop of Y Combinator startups, think they’ve found a gap in the market that has yet to be served that well by the social network: families.
FamilyLeaf was created by childhood friends Wesley Zhao and Ajay Mehta (last seen here spinning out… → Read More
Pinterest is growing up fast: just days ago the image-based social network rolled out redesigned profile pages, and now it’s following that up with an updated Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy and Privacy Policy that sharpen how the company interfaces on a number of commercial points as it rides its wave of growth as it rapidly reaches and passes 12 million users.
“We think that the… → Read More
With the number of apps growing by the day, companies offering analytics on how they are performing have taken on a new focus, and the recent acquisition of Chomp by Apple has put the area positively on the map. Now a company is emerging, Placed, that is zoning in on one area of app analytics in particular: location. Formerly known as Sewichi, today Placed is coming out of stealth mode with a… → Read More
It was bound to happen sooner or later, but it looks like all the heated conversation we’ve seen over user privacy in mobile apps has now finally boiled over into a class action lawsuit, filed this week in the Western Division of the U.S. District Court, Austin Division.
A list of 13 plaintiffs, acting “on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated,” have filed a suit against… → Read More
The issue of information privacy around free services like some mobile apps and social networks has often been met with a rebuttal from the other side of the argument: if the service is free, you the user are the product, and so you shouldn’t be surprised when your information is “sold” as part of that business model, the so-called “hidden cost” of free.
That can seem like an uncomfortable… → Read More
This morning I was ready to bust some heads. I got a text message at about 8:39 from Highlight, the hot new social network thing that will disappear once everyone digests the last of their brisket on the plane ride home from SXSW. The SMS was pretty innocuous (“Download the app!”) but it included a list of 141 phone numbers. Had iOS been able to handle sending messages to 141 people at the same… → Read More
Privacy and security issues have been at the forefront of tech news this week, with recently exposed loopholes in Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android indicating that apps can access much more content on our smartphones than most users realize. Superstar security researcherAshkan Soltani came by the TCTV studio to dig a bit deeper into how safe smartphones are today and whether things are getting… → Read More
Mozilla took a moment this morning to remind everyone that it invented Do Not Track in February 2011, was the first to implement it with Firefox, and that 18 percent of mobile and 7 percent of desktop Firefox users currently have it activated. Now the President and competitor Google Chrome are joining the bandwagon, but Firefox offered Do Not Track since before it was… → Read More
The Obama administration has announced that it will work with Congress on a new series of consumer protections dubbed a “Privacy Bill of Rights” that will detail how Internet companies can handle and use consumers’ personal data. According to the statement from The White House, consumers should have a right to control how their personal information is handled so that businesses can maintain their… → Read More
It’s a tense time for Google: controversial policy and user-experience changes are combining with a growing distrust of tracking and advertising to produce something of a toxic atmosphere. Not the moment, then, you would want a minor scandal to erupt in the form of Google circumventing, intentionally or unintentionally, the privacy settings of millions of Safari users.
The allegations have… → Read More
I believe the children are the future. (What, too soon?) But in the case of the new FTC report on mobile applications for kids, which references the current data handling practices employed by mobile developers, the children are the future. They’re the future indicators of how our personal information needs to be handled in today’s mobile app ecosystem.
Although the new report… → Read More
The controversy that began last week with mobile startup Path being exposed for downloading users address books from their mobile device exploded over the weekend.
Nick Bilton at the New York Times opined on the matter and declared Path to have been let off way too lightly due to the Silicon Valley echo chamber and its lack of concern for privacy. Path investors, and my good friends, Mike… → Read More
Like millions of other people, I got an email from Google this morning. It was entitled “Changes to Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service”. The first sentence describes the intent of the changes as shortening 60 policies into one, and improving their readability. → Read More
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