Privacy

The University of California, Berkeley, has found that more than half young adults have become more aware of Internet privacy issues than they were five years ago. That number is similar to Internet users their parents’ age or older. “In its telephone survey of 1,000 people, the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California found that 88 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds it surveyed last July said there should be a law that requires Web sites to delete stored information. And 62 percent said they wanted a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knows about them.” ...

Facebook is, by its nature, a social experience. But as the undisputed king of social networking expands ways for its users to interact, it’s raising more questions about how much of their information is made available to people they don’t know. In some cases, users may not even realize it’s happening. One example is the hundreds of thousands of developers approved by Facebook to create games, quizzes and other applications. Some of those developers are able to access basic information about users after a Facebook friend has started using their application. ...

Facebook started rolling out a new home page and navigation menus earlier today. And whenever Facebook adds new features, in this case the Applications and Games dashboards, there’s usually a new privacy setting as well. This is what part of the new Applications dashboard looks like. All Facebook has raised some privacy concerns regarding the dashboard’s output. Do you really want all of your “friends” to know what applications you’ve been running? ...

Information leakage is a real problem. It’s especially bad for high-security organizations, like military agencies. And it’s now harder than ever, thanks to services such as Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. So, we worked together with Lewis Communications to submit a Freedom Of Information Act request to Ministry of Defence in UK, asking if they’ve had problems with this. After waiting some weeks, we got a reply back, detailing that UK military personnel and Ministry of Defence staff have leaked secret information 16 times on social networking websites and Internet forums. ...

There were two news stories recently that seemed to coincide. In the first, Cisco issued an annual security report which said the two current targets of the Internet criminal underground are banks and social networks. Banks because, well, we all know what they keep there. Social networks are targets because that’s where weakly protected password databases are kept and the passwords they contain probably are used on a lot of other sites as well. ...