Google CEO's Eric Schmidt's off-the-cuff answer that people who don't want their homes photographed for Google Street View should "just move" raises the question: Move where? Just where on this planet are you safe from Google's prying eyes?
Virtually everything you do online is scrutinized by search engines and advertising networks that evaluate you as a potential customer based on what you search for, the sites you visit and the ads you see - whether you click on those ads or not.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt is getting a lot of attention lately, not so much for the company's ubiquitous search engine or any of the company's other products. It's more for what Schmidt has been saying about privacy.
To be clear, privacy is a heady and heated issue these days. Social networking site Facebook has found itself repeatedly in privacy hot water this year. And Google isn't fairing much better with its Street View service's drawing negative attention for posting images of people's homes for the world to see.
Google has admitted its StreetView cars collected entire emails and passwords which it now intended to delete, according to a statement made Friday.
Google's earlier claim that it did not collect anything that wasn't already in the public domain was made before it actually checked the detail of the data it mistakenly collected, the company said.
My buddy Robert X. Cringely wonders if Facebook is evil or merely incompetent. That's an easy one: both -- not to mention arrogant and greedy. But how surprising is that? Facebook is in business to make money, whether it's from advertising or the increasingly attractive treasure trove of third-party apps. Never mind that "don't be evil" stuff. Mrs. Zuckerberg's boy Mark wants to be a billionaire for real -- not just on paper.
A feature first made popular on the iPhone 4, Apple's FaceTime, is running into problems on new Macs. News reports suggest a dangerous security flaw could cause headaches for consumers.
Apple on Wednesday announced the public beta of FaceTime for Mac. The application lets Mac users video -call iPhone 4 and iPod touch users as well as other Macs. FaceTime for Mac automatically uses the consumer's address-book contacts and works through the built-in camera and microphone on Mac notebooks, iMacs and Apple LED Cinema Displays. But few may want to use it after Thursday's revelations.
An NHS IT manager was given a six-month suspended jail sentence for illegally accessing medical records in Hull between October 2008 and June last year.
Dale Trever, 22, was employed by Hull Primary Care Trust as a data quality manager and saw no harm in accessing the medical details of 413 patients. Of these, 336 were his family, friends and colleagues. Trever was caught after a general practitioner’s practice manager became suspicious and reported him.
The Wall Street Journal has been running an interesting series on online privacy, called “What They Know,” about the information advertisers (surreptitiously) collect about us based on our Internet activity. The latest in the series is titled, “Facebook in Privacy Breach,” and details how some popular applications on Facebook are leaking users’ “personal IDs” to advertisers. Here’s the alarming lead on the article:
Twitter may be suffering from yet another embarrassing software security vulnerability, according to SearchEngineWatch.com. Apparently, if you use you Twitter credentials to log in to a third-party website, that site could gain access to your private direct messages. Gary-Adam Shannon, in a technical demonstration using WordPress and the Twitter API, shows how a small code change in the API code can send direct messages of logged in users directly to your email inbox of choice. Twitter has yet to comment on the vulnerability.
The user data collected by some iOS apps can be correlated to real-world identities, posing a privacy risk to iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users. According to research from Bucknell University, a majority of iOS apps transmit user data back to their own servers. But because some store more info than others—and in some cases, in plaintext—it can be easily pieced together to reveal more about individual users than they bargained for.
