Privacy
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Social Media Privacy: 3 Questions to Ask Before Authorizing Third-Party Apps
Jamie Beckland is a digital and social media strategist at Janrain, where he helps Fortune 1000 companies integrate social media technologies into their websites to improve user acquisition and engagement. He has built online communities since 2004. He tweets as @Beckland. Never completely off the radar, privacy concerns recently stepped back into the spotlight. In the past months alone, privacy issues have emerged from all corners. The California Attorney General is twisting arms for better app disclosures, and startup Path apologized for scraping address books.
Is that a spy in your smartphone? Carrier IQ , the mobile phone network analysis company at the heart of the smartphone spyware scandal , isn’t talking to me, but it is talking to AllThingsD . To them, Andrew Coward, Carrier IQ’s VP of marketing, explained that “The software receives a huge amount of information from the operating system . But just because it receives it doesn’t mean that it’s being used to gather intelligence about the user or passed along to the carrier.”
Carrier IQ tries to spin its way out of trouble | ZDNet
Carrier IQ
Updated with a more detailed response from Carrier IQ below. Update 2: Class action lawsuits have now been filed against Carrier IQ, HTC , and Samsung. A piece of keystroke-sniffing software called Carrier IQ has been embedded so deeply in millions of HTC and Samsung-built Android devices that it’s tough to spot and nearly impossible to remove, as 25-year old Connecticut systems administrator Trevor Eckhart revealed in a video Tuesday . That’s not just creepy, says Paul Ohm, a former Justice Department prosecutor and law professor at the University of Colorado Law School. He thinks it’s also likely grounds for a class action lawsuit based on a federal wiretapping law. “If CarrierIQ has gotten the handset manufactures to install secret software that records keystrokes intended for text messaging and the Internet and are sending some of that information back somewhere, this is very likely a federal wiretap.” he says.
Phone 'Rootkit' Maker Carrier IQ May Have Violated Wiretap Law In Millions Of Cases - Forbes
Where are the ethical boundaries defined between malware and parental control software? Recently one privacy violation resulted in litigation against a school and a complaint has been filed against a parental control software company for data mining their proxy service’s filtered content. Are we forgetting where security measures come from? Sheepdogs: Our Oldest Security Human civilization has raised herd animals for thousands of years.
Parental Control Software: Sheepdog or Wolf?
Here we go again. Once more, the chief of a major online social network has called into question the relevance of privacy in today’s connected world. This time it is Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn , who recently said that “privacy is an ‘old people’ issue.” Really?
LinkedIn founder dead wrong about privacy being just for ‘old people’ « IT Business Blogs Canada - Privacy and Security
IAPP : Privacy Links and Blogs
Privacy Links View our collection of privacy-related links below: Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) – A public interest research center that seeks to protect privacy, focus the public's attention on issues relating to civil liberties and the First Amendment. Privacy.org – A joint venture by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and Privacy International, this site features the latest news on privacy from a number of sources. Privacy Exchange – Acting as an online library of sorts, this site offers privacy law summaries, news and resources of interest.
One tweet takes a journalist on a voyage of discovery | Media | guardian.co.uk
Here's a fascinating post by Joanna Geary, the web development editor of The Times , How I tracked down an entire family from one tweet . During a presentation to the Young Journalists' Academy , she illustrated just how easy it is to trace supposedly private information about people online. Though she wishes to protect the privacy of the individuals involved in her search, she has explained the process, admitting: "It frightens me how simple it was to get all that I did." I chose a few keywords "gunfire, shot, attack, missile" and ran them through Twitter search . Most of what I get back is utter rubbish.
Facebook's Big Privacy Changes: An Overview [PICS]
Facebook unveiled a massive wave of privacy changes on Tuesday. It’s one of the biggest privacy overhauls in the company’s history, one that includes more than a dozen changes to profiles, status updates, locations and tags. In fact, there are so many changes that it’s easy to get confused about what changes Facebook is making and what impact they will have on your privacy. The updates are significant enough that Facebook will make every single one of its 750+ million users go through a tutorial about the updated privacy settings. That’s why we’ve written this short guide to all the changes Facebook has implemented. Refer to this page for a quick rundown of all the new privacy features now available on the world’s largest social network.
A woman uses her BlackBerry at a shopping mall in Dubai, UAE. In neighbouring Saudi Arabia, authorities have blocked the device's instant messaging services. Photograph: Reuters Law enforcers in the United Kingdom and elsewhere are coming to grips with a hard reality: modern communications technologies give activists of all kinds an easier way to organise and deploy. But even as governments move to crack down, as Jeff Jarvis notes , activists are also learning a lesson – not just those whom we may support, such as the Egyptian revolutionaries, but also those whose deeds leave us cold or angry, such as many of the rioters and looters who've trashed so many parts of London and other British communities in recent days.
Social networking surveillance: trust no one | Dan Gillmor | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
OLD SAYBROOK — When Old Saybrook High School freshmen attended a recent assembly on Internet safety, they didn’t just hear about privacy settings, cyberbullying and “digital footprints.” Some took to Twitter to express their frustration, writing on the social media site that the school is “corrupt.” Others wrote on Twitter, “I hope old saybrook high school is reading this,” and “put me on ur slide show I want you to read my tweets.”
Old Saybrook High School makes privacy point; Some perturbed when real students shown in social-media slide show- The New Haven Register - Serving New Haven, Connecticut
Facebook
Conversational Commerce Update: End-user Advocates Set FTC Straight on Personal Data Ecosystem | The Social Customer
In a tour de force of clear writing and exposition (albeit in 33 typed pages), Kaliya Hamlin and Mary Hodder, executive director and chairman, respectively, of the Personal Data Ecosystem Collaborative Consortium (PDECC) have provided the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) with this response to its proposal for "Do Not Track" regulations (similar to the "Do Not Call" List for phone-based telemarketers). Hamlin and Hodder start by pointing out that the "Do Not Track" mandate does a double disservice to the quality of commerce. Advertisers, on the one hand, already "target" product development, customer acquisition, promotional and advertising strategies based on old and often inaccurate information from credit bureaus, data aggregators or even Facebook archives. Denying them their diet of fresh cookies with tracking data on recent searches or site visits will mean that they will be even more clueless than under "business as usual."ACLU Settles Privacy Lawsuit Regarding Amazon Customer Data With NC Department Of Revenue | digtriad.com | Triad, NC | Local News
Raleigh, NC -- A federal court fight between North Carolina tax collectors and Amazon.com is over, with the online retailer's customers satisfied that details of their purchases won't be disclosed. The American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday the seven North Carolina residents it represents have dropped their fight over keeping private the names of the books and other items. A federal judge in Amazon's hometown of Seattle closed the case last month, ruling in October tax collectors aren't entitled to know specifically what individual customers bought. North Carolina's Revenue Department was auditing taxes collected by Amazon and wanted names of North Carolina customers.Regulating Google’s Results? Law Prof Calls ‘Search Neutrality’ Incoherent | Epicenter | Wired.com
“Neutrality” — if it’s good enough for the core of the internet, isn’t it good enough for the edge? The biggest internet providers say it is, and they would love to have the government slap a few neutrality rules on Google, just to see how the advertising giant likes the taste of the regulatory bridle. In 2010, while the FCC was debating net neutrality rules, ISPs like Time Warner Cable settled on a “they’re gatekeepers, too!” strategy. “Google has led the charge to adopt regulation to ensure internet openness, yet it has the ability and incentive to engage in a range of decidedly non-neutral conduct due to its control over so many aspects of the internet experience,” said one representative filing. “Google’s core search application relies on a pay-for-priority scheme that is squarely at odds with its proposed neutrality requirements for broadband-internet-access service providers.”Google is not alone among Internet and telecommunications companies in feeling inundated with requests for information. told Congress in 2007 that it received some 90,000 such requests each year. And told in 2009 that subpoenas and other orders were arriving at the company at a rate of 10 to 20 a day. As Internet services — allowing people to store e-mails, photographs, spreadsheets and an untold number of private documents — have surged in popularity, they have become tempting targets for law enforcement.
Privacy Law Is Outrun by Speed of Web’s Progress - NYTimes.com
Over the weekend, we reported that the government had ordered Twitter to turn over private information about users associated with WikiLeaks . The order was fairly routine, and Twitter and other Internet companies have so far refused to talk more about it. But, as we wrote in Monday’s paper , the high-profile nature of the court order brought to light an issue that cyberlaw experts have been discussing for years: the ways in which the law lags fast-changing technology. The question boils down to this: Should personal information that people store online, like e-mail messages, photos and location updates, be treated the same as telephone calls or paper documents stored in a person’s home? Right now, they often aren’t, in part because the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which governs surveillance of what people do online, was written in 1986 — well before Twitter direct messages, Facebook status updates or Foursquare check-ins.
Should E-Mail and Letters Have Equal Legal Protection? - NYTimes.com
Health Care
WikiLeaks
Do Not Track
Digital Fingerprinting
FTC