IBM worries iPhone's Siri has loose lips. IBM bans Siri on its network, according to Technology ReviewThe technology company worries Apple may store voice requestsMessages are "sent to Apple in order to convert what you say into text" (WIRED) -- If you work for IBM, you can bring your iPhone to work, but forget about using the phone's voice-activated digital assistant. Siri isn't welcome on Big Blue's networks. The reason? Siri ships everything you say to her to a big data center in Maiden, North Carolina. And the story of what really happens to all of your Siri-launched searches, e-mail messages and inappropriate jokes is a bit of a black box. IBM CIO Jeanette Horan told MIT's Technology Review this week that her company has banned Siri outright because, according to the magazine, "The company worries that the spoken queries might be stored somewhere.
" Apple's new 'spaceship' campus: What will the neighbors say? It turns out that Horan is right to worry. Tips for using Siri Siri: Apple's new voice recognition. Instapaper’s (anti-)social network. Ben Brooks noticed and blogged about how Instapaper’s social features, introduced earlier this year, are minimal: There’s just a list of articles that people you chose to follow decided that they liked. All without knowing who, or if, anybody will ever see that they liked that article. It’s a fascinatingly private social system. That was exactly the idea, and I’m very happy to see it perceived that way. Social features are tricky. Social dynamics in real life are complex, so every social mechanic we construct or word choice we make will carry unintended baggage, connotations, and ambiguities. (“Like”. Social networks also need to address difficult issues with identity, privacy, harassment, spam, and information overload.
These systems require a lot of time and money to develop, maintain, and support. There are no public usernames, avatars, or profile pages. To label each story in the interface with the person it came from, Instapaper just uses the label from however you found them. Flickr Boosts Location Privacy With Geofences. Overview. Overview The Tor network is a group of volunteer-operated servers that allows people to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Tor's users employ this network by connecting through a series of virtual tunnels rather than making a direct connection, thus allowing both organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.
Along the same line, Tor is an effective censorship circumvention tool, allowing its users to reach otherwise blocked destinations or content. Tor can also be used as a building block for software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Journalists use Tor to communicate more safely with whistleblowers and dissidents. A branch of the U.S. Why we need Tor. A Case for Pseudonyms. Pseu·do·nym [sood-n-im] –noun a fictitious name used by an author to conceal his or her identity; pen name. There are myriad reasons why individuals may wish to use a name other than the one they were born with.
They may be concerned about threats to their lives or livelihoods, or they may risk political or economic retribution. They may wish to prevent discrimination or they may use a name that’s easier to pronounce or spell in a given culture. Online, the reasons multiply. Internet culture has long encouraged the use of "handles" or "user names," pseudonyms that may or may not be tied to a person’s offline identity. Pseudonymous speech has played a critical role throughout history as well.
A new debate around pseudonymity on online platforms has arisen as a result of the identification policy of Google+, which requires users to identify by "the name your friends, family, or co-workers usually call you". While these arguments are not entirely without merit, they misframe the problem. Sexual Activity Tracked By Fitbit Shows Up In Google Search Results. Yikes. Users of fitness and calorie tracker Fitbit may need to be more careful when creating a profile on the site. The sexual activity of many of the users of the company’s tracker and online platform can be found in Google Search results, meaning that these users’ profiles are public and searchable.
You can click here to access these results. The Next Web reported this earlier this morning. As you may know, the Fitbit Tracker is an compact wearable device that clips onto clothing or slips into a pocket and captures, through accelerometer technology, information about daily health activities, such as steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned, exercise intensity levels and sleep quality. So why are Fitbit users’ profiles able to be searchable in Google? So these users may be unwittingly sharing their most intimate details (i.e. kissing, hugging and more) when recording their sexual activity to calculate how many calories they have burned in a given period of time.
The first Google+ privacy flaw | FT Tech Hub | FTtechhub. Policy Announcement: Strengthen... by Marc Bodnick - Quora. We are publishing today a revised and simplified policy on individuals that strengthens the policy's protections. The new policy reaffirms the two core protections that Quora has offered individuals since we published the original policy in June 2010: Questions about people that are clearly hurtful or mean-spirited, or are likely to make the person uncomfortable, aren't allowed.For all Quora users, if there is a question about you on the site, then you have control over that question.
This means that with regard to that question, you can privately ask Quora moderation to delete the question or individual answers or comments that you don't like. And you can have final say over the contents of the answer summary wiki.Our revised policy makes it clear that these protections apply to all Quora users, regardless of whether or not they are public figures. We believe that this approach is fair and consistent and provides equal protection to people regardless of who they are. Feds Okay Start-up That Monitors Employees’ Internet and Social Media Footprints - Kashmir Hill - The Not-So Private Parts.
TigerText Disposes Of ‘Sender’s Remorse’ With New Privacy And Control Features For SMS. TigerText, a company that adds a bevy of privacy settings and controls to SMS, is today launching a new app for iOS that aims to preserve the social nature of group messaging while giving the sender complete control over their messages both in group and one-to-one conversations. A prized feature of TigerText’s service has been the fact that it allows a sender to recall a message they’ve sent at any time.
Bad for TextsFromLastNight. Now, with its new iOS app, users can create and manage group messaging easily, recall messages, and control the lifespan of a message. Other features of its new app include allowing the user to determine who receives the message, augmented privacy by using a TigerText specific user name (not based on a phone number), as well as confirmation of message delivery. TigerText’s core belief is that social sharing should be possible without sacrificing privacy, and that individual control should be key to the text messaging experience.
Facebook changes privacy settings for millions of users – facial recognition is enabled. Why you can't really anonymize your data. One of the joys of the last few years has been the flood of real-world datasets being released by all sorts of organizations. These usually involve some record of individuals’ activities, so to assuage privacy fears, the distributors will claim that any personally-identifying information (PII) has been stripped. The idea is that this makes it impossible to match any record with the person it’s recording. Something that my friend Arvind Narayanan has taught me, both with theoretical papers and repeated practical demonstrations, is that this anonymization process is an illusion. Precisely because there are now so many different public datasets to cross-reference, any set of records with a non-trivial amount of information on someone’s actions has a good chance of matching identifiable public records. So, what should we do?
Accepting that anonymization is not a complete solution doesn’t mean giving up, it just means we have to be smarter about our data releases. Keep the anonymization. Anonymous Web Tools - Real Online Anonymity.