Privacy

The New York Times is reporting a rising number of law suits against some major players because of their use of persistent web tracking: — Fox Entertainment Group — NBC Universal — Specific Media — Quantcast The Times said the suits are claiming that the companies used Flash cookies to collect data on browsing activities in spite of the fact that users had privacy settings on to block them. Those Local Shared Objects (LSOs) are persistent cookies that are stored in several ways and in some cases will restore themselves when deleted. One is available, with a detailed description here. ...

The All Facebook blog (not an official Facebook site) is reporting that Facebook’s Public Policy Director, Tim Sparapani has said the company will install privacy settings that are easier to understand and control in the next few weeks. (“Facebook Preparing To Release Simple Privacy Settings” ) The 800-pound gorilla of the social media world has been taking increasing heat recently about its sloppy attitude toward securing users personal information and privacy policy that seems to permit it to do nearly anything with users personal info.. ...

It seems like anyone who wants to be anybody is whacking Facebook over its loose — or rather loosening — privacy policies. Earlier this month, with disregard to the grammer momma taught me, Even I whacked CEO Mark Zuckerberg aside the head about Facebook privacy. As bad as pundits make out Facebook privacy to be, people can, and do, reveal plenty of information on the Web, too. Which place do they reveal more? I set out to find out in a non-scientific experiment, looking for publicly available information about one of my sisters. ...

Macro Monday Theme: Life is Hard Credit cards and debt make life hard. It seems so easy at the time, but after time, you realize what a mistake it is. Strobist: Canon 430ex II at 1/4 power through a softbox camera left. Triggered with a Cactus V4.” Macro Monday Theme: Life is HardCredit cards and debt make life hard. It seems so easy at the time, but after time, you realize what a mistake it is.Strobist: Canon 430ex II at 1/4 power through a softbox camera left. Triggered with a Cactus V4.” ...

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. ...