Published August 09, 2010
Research In Motion (RIM) Corp., the Ontario-based maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, has reached an agreement with the Saudi government, preventing the banning of core BlackBerry features.
The Saudi government claimed core BlackBerry features present sufficient risk to national security that it would have been forced to disable the key features for all users in the country, including for all foreigners traveling to the Kingdom.
The features in question include both BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) and BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), including BlackBerry Messenger, email, and browsing.
The Saudi’s claimed (including many more nations like India, and the United Arab Emirates, among others) that the platform is far too secure where government officials are not able to monitor BlackBerry data.
Read the full story
Published January 19, 2010
Microsoft today announced the company would alter its privacy settings for its Bing search engine. Specifically, Microsoft will purge all (including Internet Protocol (IP) addresses) identifiable information to users search queries after 6-months.
Microsoft’s existing privacy policy already automatically unlinks search queries from Microsoft accounts (such as Hotmail), therefore removing any link between a users search query and an associated Microsoft account.
Yahoo currently most quickly purges identifiable information related to its users and their search queries to only 90-days. Google removes its data in about 10 months.
Published December 02, 2009
The world’s most popular online search engine, Google, today announced new changes for news content providers to limit the amount of news they provide free of charge.
The company introduced “First Click Free”, a new algorithm that can optionally limit each user to only 5 clicks per day for content from premium providers. On the 6th click, you will be taken to a subscription registration page.
Read the full story
Published November 23, 2009
New iPhone worm can identify specific handsets to compromise sensitive data, no fix right now
A new iPhone worm has been created, this time posing a very serious threat as it has the capability to compromise sensitive information stored on the phone.
The worm currently can only infect iPod Touch and iPhone devices that are jailbroken.
The worm essentially works by launching the scripts immediately when the phone is started up, it then simply executes the worm at boot-up. Once the worm has been loaded, it sends sensitive data to the hackers by uploading it to a Lithuanian control server. The worm also has the capability to look for passwords in SMS messages via mTAN systems that are primarily used by financial institutions who use the technology to authenticate mobile users for online banking.
Read the full story
Published October 19, 2009
Privacy concerns are being raised over the search giant accidentally making private voicemails available publically from its popular Google Voice service
A technical error in the Google algorithm is indexing private voicemail recordings from Google Voice and making them available to the public.
If you currently search “site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/*” in Google, it will return various voicemails, some dated as far back as many months ago, to even only hours ago.
As of right now, if you perform the search string noted above, the voicemails are still available publically with transcription.
Read the full story
Published October 07, 2009
This is a guest post by Harley Lorenz Geiger from the Center for Democracy & Technology
The digital signage industry is rapidly becoming aware of the privacy issues raised by interactivity and audience measurement techniques. There is, however, no industry-wide consensus about how to address those concerns. Some industry figures agree that privacy guidelines need to be adopted if audience measurement and other digital signage applications are to progress. Others, though, have referred to calls for the industry to be sensitive to privacy as “attacks” and have condemned privacy concerns as a lot of hype over nothing. The privacy issue is real, particularly if one considers the big picture of where digital out-of-home (DOOH) media is headed.
Read the full story
Published July 28, 2009
This is a guest post by Harley Lorenz Geiger from the Center for Democracy & Technology
Marketers are creating digital signs that can display targeted ads based on information they extract from examining the contours of individual human faces.
These smart signs are proliferating in commercial establishments and public places from New York’s Times Square to St. Louis area shopping malls. They are a powerful innovation in advertising, but one that raises compelling privacy issues – issues that should be addressed now, before digital signs that monitor our behavior become the new normal.
Read the full story
Published February 26, 2009
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today at 11am PST hosted a telephone conference about the new changes to the Facebook terms of service, and the new program to allow Facebook users to actually create privacy policies.
CNET has the live coverage of the phone conference here.
You may remember recently there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the new Facebook terms of service agreements that essentially allowed Facebook to keep your user generated content indefinitely and use it however it wanted. Facebook has since reverted back to its previous terms.
PALO ALTO, Calif. – February 26, 2009 – Facebook today announced a new approach to site governance that offers its users around the world an unprecedented role in determining the future policies governing the service. Facebook released the first proposals subject to these new procedures–The Facebook Principles, a set of values that will guide the development of the service, and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that make clear Facebook’s and users’ commitments related to the service.
Over the coming weeks, users will have the opportunity to review, comment, and vote on these documents. An update to the Privacy Policy is also planned, and this change will be subject to similar input.
Published February 01, 2009
24-year old founder and CEO Mark Zukerberg of Facebook showed everyone at the World Economic Forum in Davos something very kool. He polled more than 100,000 Americans asking them if they thought President Obama’s new fiscal stimulus package would be enough to get out of recession. Two out of Five thought it would not be enough.
What is interesting is how he was able to get more than 100,000 responses from very targeted groups of people in a matter of minutes. Facebook has amassed a wealth of information from its 150 million strong user base (check out Facebook Planatir to see a geographical representation of users communicating) and it now plans to capitalize on the wealth of information by giving more access to corporations for market research purposes. Marketers will be able to use information you put on your Facebook profile, including your current mood, your location, content you upload, to poll and analyze you.
Read the full story
Published January 28, 2009
If you want to know if your ISP blocks or throttles applications you are running, you can now use a new open source Google tool called Measurement Labs that is designed to tell you if your connection is throttled by your ISP via various diagnostic measurements. ISPs have been accused of blocking connections to various applications including BitTorrent and giving very slow connection speeds in hopes users will back off from the increased download usage, bringing ethical questions concerning net neutrality. ISPs maintain they are in no way capping or restricting any part of the internet or any application. See other Google Internet Tools here.
Facebook
