SOPA was a black eye for the US government. Nothing in the last few decades can compare to the complete turnaround Washington DC had to make once the people of the internet and websites across the web made their opposition to the bill known back in January, 2012. Now, the politicians and other entities have learned from their mistakes. This time, they have been able to pull off the unthinkable.
The IRS refuses to deny whether its Criminal Tax Division rummages through suspected tax dodgers’ emails without a warrant. In response to the American Civil Liberties Union request for its privacy policy, the IRS dumped 247 records, revealing that the agency definitely believed it could access emails without a warrant before a court deemed the practice illegal. The agency is conspicuously silent on whether it still applies those old spying rules.
Our phones have become an integral part of our lives, and have fundamentally changed the way we work, the way we navigate the world, and the way we communicate with friends and family.
But do smartphones with all their interactive, location, and connectivity features and apps compromise our privacy and information security?
Reddit, Craigslist and more than 30,000 other websites are flying the flag of opposition to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, a controversial cybersecurity bill that was recently reintroduced in Congress.
The thousands of websites which oppose CISPA will, starting Tuesday, be displaying an interactive banner ad (seen below) from the Internet Defense League that allows voters to send the following message to their members of Congress: "CISPA is back. This bill sacrifices privacy without improving security. We deserve both."
There are two sad realities about online tracking. One reality is that the majority of people have their online activities tracked on nearly every website that they visit and these tracking protocols have very little oversight, nearly no rules associated with them, and can be stored indefinitely by anyone, even sites or companies that you’ve never visited. The other sad reality is that everyone has the ability to stop the tracking, but it would mean doing things that few are willing to do.
This coming week, we’re likely to get a peek at Samsung’s next generation Galaxy flagship smartphone, and by most accounts, it’ll have an auto-scrolling feature that can use head movement cues to detect when you’re paying attention to what’s on the small screen, and when you look away. There’s no word on just how specific it will be, but others are prepping tech that detects eye movement with a high level of accuracy to determine not just when someone’s facing a screen, but also where exactly their attention is focused.
Phones that pay at least as much attention to a user as a user pays to them are coming, whether in the form of the Galaxy S IV or not. And when they do, they’ll bring a tremendous amount of innovation potential to the application market, lucrative opportunities for mobile advertisers, and privacy concerns that make those around the rise of mobile location services over the past five years look like a minor concern.
The FBI used National Security Letters -- a form of surveillance that privacy watchdogs call “frightening and invasive” -- to surreptitiously seek information on Google users, the web giant has just revealed.
Google’s disclosure is “an unprecedented win for transparency,” privacy experts said Wednesday. But it’s just one small step forward.
“Serious concerns and questions remain about the use of NSLs,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Dan Auerbach and Eva Galperin wrote. For one thing, the agency issued 16,511 National Security Letters in 2011, the last year for which data was available. But Google was gagged from saying just how many letters it received -- leaving key questions unanswered.
“The terrorists apparently would win if Google told you the exact number of times the Federal Bureau of Investigation invoked a secret process to extract data about the media giant’s customers,” Wired’s David Kravets wrote. He described the FBI's use of NSLs as a way of "secretly spying" on Google's customers.
Private browsing mode doesn’t offer complete privacy, but it does prevent your browser from saving your history, searches, cookies, and other private data between browsing sessions. You can have your browser always start in private-browsing mode if you prefer it.
Most people won’t want to use private-browsing mode permanently. You will have to log into the websites you use each time you open your browser, as your browser won’t save the cookies that keep your login state.
Choosing not to password protect your devices is the digital equivalent of leaving your home or car unlocked. If you're lucky, no one will take advantage of the access. Or maybe the contents will be ravaged and your favorite speakers and/or secrets stolen.
Facebook may already know a lot about our daily habits - where we check in, what we buy, who we hang out with - but it might be on the cusp on knowing exactly where we are in real-time. A new report out of Bloomberg claims that Facebook is working on its own equivalent of Apple's Find My Friends app - or Google's Latitude, for the more Android-inclined among us.
Bloomberg's report suggests that new Facebook app would "track the location of users" and is set to launch in mid-March - but it's otherwise extremely light on detail. The story neglects to mention that the company rolled the very same thing last June in the form of "Find Friends Nearby" - a hackathon-born mobile feature which the company released and rescinded within hours. And it cites Highlight rather than Facebook-owned Glancee as one of this new(ish) class of constant location tracking apps.
As the web infiltrates commerce and social life more each day, more consumers are becoming aware that their personal information is becoming less and less personal.
While some websites and applications have transparent sharing policies, stating exactly what information they will be using for advertising and other purposes, others aren’t so clear.
So what if one day you’re fed up?
Tired of the eerie advertisements that seem to cater perfectly to your personal history, hobbies and wants?
What if you want to erase your online identity with no strings attached, which brings us to the question...
It's more important than ever to make smart decisions about your privacy online.
You don't have to get carried away with it, but you could probably stand to use some of the same tools that security-obsessed folks use every day.
Here are some utilities to help keep your identity to yourself.
It's more important than ever to make smart decisions about your privacy online.
You don't have to get carried away with it, but you could probably stand to use some of the same tools that security-obsessed folks use every day.
Here are some utilities to help keep your identity to yourself.
Around 11 a.m. on New Year’s Eve day, a Facebook friend in India sent an urgent message: My website had been hacked. Sure enough, when I went to my site and right-clicked my mouse to view the “source code” (the gibberish that shows what’s going on behind the scenes), I discovered that in addition to being a journalist and social media teacher, I was now also a purveyor of erectile dysfunction products.
As his night ticked down toward midnight, a man I know through techie forums and whose expertise I respect spent half an hour guiding me through the many steps of a website cleanse.
The Wall Street Journal has analyzed the top 50 sites in the United States plus 20 other top sites in sensitive categories like dating or health. They found that 25 of these sites—including OKCupid, Pinterest, YouTube, Yahoo—send personal data to other sites in the open, with no security encoding, using your own browser session.
On the surface, 2012 saw some major shifts in how privacy is treated online. The Federal Trade Commission's Do-Not-Track Online Act and the White House's Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights prompted Facebook and Google to change allegedly deceptive practices for tracking users. And most Web browsers and even Twitter adopted the do-not-track functions in one form or another.
These were steps in the right direction, but in reality, they didn't solve the data insecurity problem. Facebook can still track users through its "Like" function. And Web surfers' online data can still be used by law enforcement and "market research" for the employment, credit, healthcare and insurance industries. And let's not even get into denial of service attacks and cybersecurity...
Welcome to this morning's edition of 'First To Know,' a series in which we keep you in the know on what's happening in the digital world. Today, we're looking at three particularly interesting stories.
Facebook changed its privacy settings on Wednesday and it's important to know what the new changes mean for users, especially your digitally-connected children.
You might notice that now all your privacy settings are housed under one area called Privacy Shortcuts. But you may not see the changes on your profile yet -- Facebook said it will be rolling this out through the end of this year.
Many businesses have a privacy policy of some kind or another. These policies are very important, because they explain to customers or employees how their personal information will be disclosed and to what parties are disclosed.
Google's released its twice-yearly transparency report, and there's one message within it that rings loud and clear: the US government is spying on us harder than ever.
Seems the search giant is increasingly being asked to hand over user data and remove content by governments and courts from around the world. As Google explains:
[G]overnment demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report. In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world. Those requests were for information about 34,614 accounts...
The number of government requests to remove content from our services was largely flat from 2009 to 2011. But it's spiked in this reporting period. In the first half of 2012, there were 1,791 requests from government officials around the world to remove 17,746 pieces of content
