Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Mark Stanley and Harley Geiger from the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), a non-profit public interest organization based in Washington, DC. CDT’s mission is to keep the Internet open, innovative, and free. For more on ECPA reform visit CDT’s Wiretap/ECPA page.

“One who does not wish to disclose his movements to the government need not use a cellular telephone.” – DoJ reply brief, page 12

Last week, both the Senate and House held hearings on reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Passed in 1986, ECPA specifies rules for government access to email, text messages, and other digital communications. At the time ECPA was written, Congress wanted to protect then-emerging Internet services from inappropriate government access so people would trust the services enough to make them commercially successful.

Of course, a lot has changed in 24 years, and the law is in serious need of reform. ECPA, for example, provides no clear standard for the government’s ability to track our movements. Cell phones, increasingly indispensible to modern life, broadcast the location of their owners every few seconds. This location information is recorded and is more easily available to law enforcement than one might think.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.