Big Data Troves Stay Forbidden to Social Scientists - NYTimes.com. Video: The Truth About Online Reputation. In Ad Network Nightmare, Microsoft Making 'Do Not Track' Default for IE 10 | Threat Level. Microsoft announced Thursday that the next version of its browser, IE 10, will ship with the controversial “Do Not Track” feature turned on by default, a first among major browsers, creating a potential threat to online advertising giants. That includes one of Microsoft’s chief rivals — Google. The change could also threaten the still-nascent privacy standard, and prompt an ad industry revolt against it. Do Not Track doesn’t attempt to block cookies — instead it sends a message to every website you visit saying you prefer not to be tracked.
That flag is currently optional for sites and web advertising firms to obey, but it’s gaining momentum with Twitter embracing it last week. The proposal also has the backing of the FTC, which has grown deeply skeptical of the online ad industry’s willingness to play fairly with users and has threatened to call for online privacy legislation. “I hope this doesn’t throw a wrench into works on getting agreement on Do Not Track,” Brookman said.
Location Apps: 4 Privacy Settings You Need to Know. Kate Brodock is executive director of digital and social media at Syracuse University, where she leads efforts in the space. Connect with her on Twitter at @just_kate and @othersidegroup. There are roughly 792 mobile apps downloaded each second. As a result, more and more services are taking to mobile in an effort to capitalize on this trend. That also means location-based capabilities and features are being integrated into many apps, whether users know it or not. You may be someone who takes personal and digital privacy matters very seriously, or you might be more relaxed about your digital information. Either way, there are four types of settings users can check to determine how much information they make available to the world. 1.
Most apps require you to fill out a minimal amount of personal data to sign up for an account. Setting: Usually found under “sharing” or “privacy,” these settings determine what personal information you make public, partially public, or private. 2. 3. 4. Dr. Cranor on "Do Not Track" & the Improbability of Complete Privacy. If there truly is no privacy on the Web, then how can we be shocked by reports of a privacy breach? If that's not the case, and we truly do expect privacy on the Web, then when 15 years go by before major browser makers pledge to implement Do Not Track buttons, and then only at the urging of the President of the United States, whom do we hold at fault for those buttons having been absent all this time? And if those buttons probably won't work anyway, which is what some experts believe, then just who is it being fooled by whom?
"People are holding out the same hopes for Do Not Track that they held out for P3P 15 years ago. It's definitely a whole déjà vu thing here," says Dr. Lorrie Faith Cranor, in the second part of her interview with ReadWriteWeb. Dr. Cranor, now an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, was an early contributor to P3P and the former chair of the W3C working group that developed it. Self-Regulation: The Sequel Multiple Choice As Dr. Microsoft Won't Back Down On Offering 'Do Not Track' By Default In Internet Explorer. Should Companies Be Able To Monitor Our Use Of Their Products For Our Own Good? Reading the Privacy Policies You Encounter in a Year Would Take 76 Work Days - Alexis Madrigal - Technology.
One simple answer to our privacy problems would be if everyone became maximally informed about how much data was being kept and sold about them. Logically, to do so, you'd have to read all the privacy policies on the websites you visit. A few years ago, two researchers, both then at Carnegie Mellon, decided to calculate how much time it would take to actually read every privacy policy you should. First, Lorrie Faith Cranor and Aleecia McDonald needed a solid estimate for the average length of a privacy policy. The median length of a privacy policy from the top 75 websites turned out to be 2,514 words.
A standard reading rate in the academic literature is about 250 words a minute, so each and every privacy policy costs each person 10 minutes to read. Next, they had to figure out how many websites, each of which has a different privacy policy, the average American visits. That's greater than the GDP of Florida, which has the fourth largest state economy in the US. Some Really Good Points About Ad Cookies & Privacy. Last week's online privacy fracas-of-the-week was about the revelation that Google (and other advertisers) had learned to circumvent Safari's settings to let third-party cookies track users more easily. Apple's browser's default setting messes with the way advertisers track users.
The gist is this: Cookies are set by the site you're on, but some allow third-party sites to set a tracking cookie through them. That's how advertisers (like Google) personalize ads for you all around the Web. By default, Safari allows cookies from the site you're on, but it blocks third-party cookies. Google and others found a way around that. That sucks... For the most part, I'm with my colleague, Dan Rowinski: track me all you want, just don't think we won't catch you if you do something wrong. I don't have a problem with the idea of ad tracking. "No account, login, or user preference was required for circumvention. Users who have a Google account can change their Google privacy settings. There is no such thing as anonymous online tracking. A 1993 New Yorker cartoon famously proclaimed, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. " The Web is a very different place today; you now leave countless footprints online.
You log into websites. You share stuff on social networks. You search for information about yourself and your friends, family, and colleagues. In the language of computer science, clickstreams — browsing histories that companies collect — are not anonymous at all; rather, they are pseudonymous. Will tracking companies actually take steps to identify or deanonymize users? Regardless, what I will show you is that if they’re not doing it, it’s not because there are any technical barriers. Here are five concrete ways in which your identity can be attached to data that was initially collected without identifying information. 1. Most of the companies with the biggest reach in terms of third-party tracking, such as Google and Facebook, are also companies that users have a first-party relationship with. 2. 3. 4. 5. Peacemaker: Lauderdale police put trouble spots under surveillance - South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com.
January 27, 2012|By Ihosvani Rodriguez, Sun Sentinel FORT LAUDERDALE — Tania Ouaknine is convinced the police are watching her. She's not paranoid — it says as much on the red sign painted along the side on the hulking armored truck that's been parked in front of her eight-room Parisian Motel for several days. "Warning: You are under video surveillance," reads the bold message on the side of the truck. From the front bumper of the menacing vehicle, another sign taunts: "Whatcha gonna do when we come for you?
" The truck is a new weapon for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department in the fight against drugs and neighborhood nuisances, and it looks like a Winnebago on steroids. Mixing high tech with simplicity, the in-your-face strategy is straightforward: load an out-of-service armored truck with some of the latest surveillance equipment available and decorate it with police emblems. "Make no mistakes about it," said Detective Travis Mandell. She says she's doing nothing illegal. “Right to be forgotten”: How Facebook, Google, and other companies can protect Internet user privacy. Ron The great paradox of today's Internet is that the Web feels less and less orderly, even as technology companies preach the virtues of control.
Take Facebook: It has recently been caught hosting photos that its users had asked it to delete three years ago. Last year, a bug in its security system made the private photos of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, publicly accessible. Or take Anonymous, which keeps releasing personal information of private citizens and public officials, with the goal of making broad political statements or just having fun. Or take Path, a popular social network, which was recently caught uploading members' mobile phone contacts to its servers.
We are lucky that Path has taken at least some security precautions; without them, the address books of its 2 million users might have already been available to Anonymous. What's to be done? However, “the right to be forgotten” won't do much to mitigate debacles like Google Buzz and Path, let alone regulate Anonymous. Stealth Search Engine Offers Private Internet Browsing. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Stealth Quick Pitch: Search the web anonymously Genius Idea: Stealth is a search engine that does not store cookies, track IP addresses or save search terms. Your internet footprint can be minimized with a new stealthy search.
The Stealth search engine allows users to search the Internet without being trailed by cookies and other tracking devices. Jon Cook, the founder of the startup, was inspired by the intermingling of Google's social media and search engine. Stealth doesn't store cookies, track IP addresses or save browsing history like many of the top search engines such as Google and Yahoo do. "One of the scary things about Google is they track everything you do even when you aren't on Google," Cook said. Stealth works differently from other search engines. Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures are Disappointing. Your Online Privacy Is Worth Less Than A Six Pack Of Marshmallow Fluff. Identity & Trust: The Keys to the Game in Winning the Hearts (and Wallets) of the Consumer. It seems like only yesterday RWW's own Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote the foreword to a book discussing the new ecosystem, business models and value chains in a hyper-connected world.
In actuality, it was a little over a year ago when the book, The Shift, was released. It documented an 18-month primary research study commissioned by Alcatel-Lucent to assess the market potential of various network APIs - including presence, profiling and location, among others - across an ecosystem of developers, advertisers, consumers and enterprises. Culling the inputs of over 10,000 respondents from the research, my co-author and I boldly predicted a $100 billion incremental market opportunity when telecom networks are leveraged as development platforms. The impressive figure is derived, in part, through the creation of new business models between developers, advertisers and service providers. Among some of the more interesting APIs across most audiences? The 3Ps First, there's presentation. Who's the Boss? IT Business - Business Advantage through Technology - Channel Recent News. The companies offered a glimpse at the work required to try to stay on top of data privacy issues Executives from Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT)and Google on Thursday gave a glimpse into the size of their privacy organizations, which are required for the companies to try to avoid running foul of complicated U.S. privacy regulations and prepare for changes coming to privacy laws around the globe.
Microsoft has 40 people fully dedicated to working on privacy issues and another 400 who might spend some time on privacy, said Michael Hintze, associate general counsel at Microsoft. He spoke Thursday during a Law Seminars conference in Seattle. Google has a team of about 60 engineers fully devoted to privacy, said Keith Enright, senior privacy counsel.
They work across all of Google’s products. In addition to its privacy engineers and legal pros, Google also now employs Anne Toth, formerly Yahoo’s chief trust officer, who oversees privacy in Google+, Enright said. Good to Know – Google. If you’re the tablet owner, touch Settings → Users → Add user or profile. Touch Restricted profile → New profile, then name the profile. Use the ON/OFF switches and settings to manage access to features, settings, and apps. Press the Power button to return to the lock screen, then touch the new profile icon. Once it's all set up, the Home screen is empty. Touch the All Apps icon to get started with the new profile. A New Year for Privacy: The PRC Launches Online Complaint Center. Copyright © 2012-2014Privacy Rights Clearinghouse Posted January 3, 2012 The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) is proud to announce the launch of an interactive online complaint center designed to serve as a clearinghouse for consumer privacy complaints.
This builds upon our 19-year history of troubleshooting consumers’ complaints and questions regarding a wide variety of information privacy issues, including background checks, debt collection, data breaches, financial information, and online data brokers. The PRC's staff will review and respond to every complaint, providing individuals with information and strategies to address their problem.
The impetus for the development of the online complaint center was the 2009 KnowPrivacy study, conducted by graduate students in the Masters program at the UC-Berkeley School of Information as well as the Law School at UC-Berkeley. Empower Consumers. Who are you? The online complaint center also offers a registration feature. Harsher data protection sanctions are coming. When Apollo wanted to stop Laokoon from warning the Trojans that there were Greek soldiers in the famous Trojan Horse, he sent two giant snakes to kill Laokoon and his sons.
Talk about sanctions! Have we considered using killer snakes to punish data protection violations and to discourage future bad practices? Since 2012 has now begun, here's a prediction about the future: there's going to be a lot more privacy enforcement actions. By a lot of different government authorities, not just DPAs. And the sanctions/damages are going to go through the roof. Indeed, it's not easy to keep track of which government officials are in charge of data protection enforcement actions. There are a lot of them. We all think of Data Protection Authorities, and similar bodies, like the Federal Trade Commission, as responsible for enforcing privacy laws. Moreover, in many countries, privacy laws have been inscribed into the penal codes. Do Privacy Rights in Electronic Communications Exist? The Challenge of Creating Web-Based Identity Standards.
John Fontana is the identity evangelist for Ping Identity and editor of the PingTalk Blog. Prior to joining Ping, he spent 11 years as a senior editor at Network World. Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others all want to be your identity platform on the web. But while it’s certainly convenient to have one credential for multiple websites, many would argue these services are only secure enough to access your grandmother’s online recipe book. Growing numbers of technologists, IT executives, organizations and governments believe an identity authentication model must establish set standards. But can any set of standards answer the tough security challenges, and to what degree? Is it safe to check your social security account on a credential issued by Google? Not today.
SEE ALSO: Who Owns Your Identity on the Social Web? However, OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 (open authentication) are pointing to some of the best and most promising standards of today. Image courtesy of Flickr, Darwin Bell. The PII Problem: Privacy and a New Concept of Personally Identifiable Information. How Private Is Your Email? It Depends. Protecting a Cellphone Against Hackers. Don't Want Your Private Data to Leak? Jailbreak Your iPhone.