privacy

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

LAS VEGAS--Private WiFi has been making a name for itself as a subscription VPN service on desktops. At CES 2013, the company has unveiled mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Private WiFi wraps your data in 128-bit encryption as it runs in the background of your phone or tablet. Based on the open-source OpenVPN, the service will block attacks on public, unsecure networks such as man-in-the-middle attacks, rogue networks, honeypots, ARP spoofing, sniffing, and session sidejacking.

Private WiFi CEO Kent Lawson said that his app stands a better chance than the competition because Private WiFi is low-cost but avoids privacy … Read more

LAS VEGAS -- The future of privacy and the cloud occupied a sidestage at CES 2013 this morning, with one panelist comparing privacy lost to something else that can't be replaced.

"Getting your privacy back is like getting your virginity back," said Jim Reavis, Executive Director of the non-profit Cloud Security Alliance, from a room on the second floor of Las Vegas Convention Center North building. The on-stage conversation between Reavis and other privacy experts focused mainly on desired changes to how to make the nebulous concept of online privacy more user-friendly.

Sid Stamm, lead privacy engineer … Read more

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is facing a 20,000 euro ($26,000) fine over the social-networking site's failure to offer German users anonymous accounts.

According to The Guardian, the data protection commissioner of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein has written to Zuckerberg and to Facebook Ireland threatening the fine if Facebook continues to ban anonymous accounts. According to the data protection authority, forcing users to provide their real identities is a breach of German law, under which the country's citizens have the right to use online media services anonymously.

"It is unacceptable that a US portal like … Read more

In mid-December, a good portion of our wired world had a collective cow after Instagram put out a confusing statement about how it planned to treat users' photos. (The company blamed the ensuing uproar on imprecise wording and retreated to its original terms of service.) Oh, we love our photos. Fine. Whatever.

Now compare that uproar with the (relative) sound of silence greeting the five-year extension of extraordinary spying powers handed to the National Security Agency. Even in an age when attention deficit disorder seems to be the default mode, this was something else. In the closing days of 2012, … Read more