privacy

With one little update, Instagram is out to quiet critics of its continued growth following last month's privacy policy debacle.

The photo-sharing app has 90 million monthly active users, according to its just-updated press page, as first spotted by All Things D. This is the first time the Facebook-owned property has reported active users. Previously, Instagram said that it had 100 million registered users.

The number confirms what CNET has suspected for weeks: Instagram has fully recovered from its December privacy scandal. The photo app maker had changed its terms of service with language that suggested that it would … Read more

It's my birthday today and Jeff is still making me write the blog for today's episode, but I'm fine with that because today is an exceptional show. Not just because Richard "Gems" Peterson lived up to his nickname on two occasions, but also because the stories are exceptionally strange.

First we'll look at how cheaters in Japan are getting away with their infidelity with the help of an older Fujitsu phone, simply because of a layer of stealth security that gives users privacy that would make the Ethan Hunts and James Bonds of the world jealous.

Not that we're suggesting you take tomorrow off and cheat on your spouse, but at least the misstep that leads to you getting caught will be your fault, not technology's.… Read more

As details of Facebook's Graph Search unfolded this morning, users heaved a sigh of relief when they learned that Facebook would not be exposing our innermost privacies with its latest product -- the company would simply search the data we've already (willfully) shared and make it easily accessible to friends.

Your data. Easily accessible to friends.

In the new search bar, a Facebook user can search for something like, "Friends who like 'Star Wars' and cooking." Immediately, Facebook will dig through that user's friends' likes and interests to find relevant matches. Facebook doesn't magically … Read more

Sometimes, there is truth in advertising. Today's case-in-point: Abine's DeleteMe Mobile, which, as the name suggests, vigorously petitions Internet data brokers to remove personally identifying information from their databases.

Previously only available as a Web service, the app debuts on iOS with an Android version in the works. As CNET reported last year, DeleteMe is a partially human-powered service where Abine employees take on the onerous duty of contacting data brokers on your behalf. That's an important step because many of them have been known to add your data again, just months after removing it, according to … Read more

California's attorney general issued long-promised guidelines on mobile privacy today. The "Privacy on the Go (PDF)" report address the varied interests in smartphone and mobile app development, including app developers, carriers, ad networks, and operating system makers.

"We are now offering this set of privacy practice recommendations to assist app developers, and others, in considering privacy early in the development process," Attorney General Kamala Harris wrote in an introduction to the guidelines.

Sarah Downey, online privacy analyst at online privacy firm Abine, agreed that it's important to get the various mobile interests focused on … Read more

President Obama signed Netflix-backed legislation today that makes it easier for people to share their video-viewing habits online.

With his signature on H.R. 6671, Obama approved an amendment to the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act that allows video rental companies to obtain customer consent to share information about their viewing preferences on social networks such as Facebook. The law was enacted after a weekly newspaper printed the video rental history of Judge Robert H. Bork during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

The House bill is similar to a proposal approved last November by the Senate Judiciary Committee, minus language … Read more

Facebook, Gmail, and other ad-supported online services would need to start charging users if proposed changes to EU data protection laws go ahead, a legal expert has warned.

Substantial restrictions on how companies handle personal data have been put forward under the draft European Data Protection Regulation, which will shortly be put before the European Parliament.

The proposals would severely curtail the ability of services to claim they have legitimate grounds for collecting, analyzing, or selling the personal data of their users. They also make it far more difficult for services to claim they have a user's consent for … Read more

LAS VEGAS--A group of consumer panelists shared their candid thoughts on online privacy during a tell-all panel discussion on Generation Y and digital media at CES.

Six extremely articulate young adults ages 18 to 28 fielded questions from moderator Xavier Kochhar and the audience about their social media preferences and attitudes. On the topic of privacy, Darius, a 22-year-old fashion designer who uses Twitter "for therapy" summed up the group's attitude with this statement: "We live in public."

Darius was keenly aware that everything he shares on Twitter or other social media platforms is "… Read more

The latest versions of OS X integrate a number of personal data services that can be accessed by various applications. For example, if you have a Twitter account set up in OS X, you can then have various programs send tweets to this account or otherwise interact with it. Though convenient, this does need to be secured, so Apple invokes management of this service through a central privacy framework, which you can interact with both in the system preferences and in the command line.

When a program requests access to your personal data, the system will first present you with … Read more