Privacy

Facebook has extended its "Gross National Happiness" prototype app to 18 new countries. The app analyzes words in status updates like "awesome" or "tragic" to track changes in the collective emotional state of its users.

When Facebook applied the methods to its U.S. userbase last year, it found that happiness went way up on holidays and way down when celebrities like Michael Jackson or Heath Ledger passed away. While the results of the study weren't surprising, the idea of using status updates to measure national happiness was a novel one.

It has been a long week for Facebook.

Fifteen consumer privacy groups just filed a new complaint (PDF) with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) claiming the social networking site has dropped the ball in protecting user privacy. Meanwhile, other groups like the Progress and Freedom Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) cautioned that ongoing legislative efforts to protect privacy on the Internet may go too far.

Facebook was forced to take its chat system offline after users found a way to spy on friends' personal information.

The security flaw meant users could view other people's live chats and pending friend requests - processes which are normally meant to be private.

Social networkers aren't paying attention to their privacy settings and are broadcasting their personal information to opportunist criminals. In fact, Consumer Reports found that around a quarter (23%) of the 2,000 American households surveyed either didn't care, or didn't know, about protecting their privacy while on social networks.

The publication's "State of the Net" survey found 9% of social network users had been the victim of some form of online abuse in the past year such as malware infections, scams, identity theft or harassment.

Law Commission president Sir Geoffrey Palmer, SC, has flagged proposed changes to privacy rules which could mean more sharing of private information between government agencies.

In a speech to the Privacy Forum in Wellington today, Sir Geoffrey spoke about the commission's privacy project, a review of the Privacy Act 1993, and the pressures expanding technology can place on privacy. It was complex subject, and he offered a chocolate fish to anyone who could define privacy.

It’s annual Privacy Awareness Week time (2 to 8 May 2010) and AVG (AU/NZ) suggests you might like to take the easy online multiple choice quiz which looks at 11 situations in which you might be subject to ID theft. The test from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, Australia can be found at http://www.privacyawarenessweek.org/id_theft_tool/index.html.

Monitoring, not just on BitTorrent but on the Internet in general, is a very hot topic. If thousands of news articles are to be believed, we are lurching ever closer to an online world where routine surveillance is common place, where privacy is thrown aside and the interests of governments and corporations trump the rights of the individual.

Google has restored its "personalized" search suggestions after purging the tool of a critical vulnerability that allowed attackers to steal a user's web history.

Personalized search suggestions were disabled on March 1, and they didn't return until April 20. Ordinarily, Google adds these personalized keyword suggestions to its generic suggestion list if you've turned on Google Web History, a service that stores your searches and page visits. The personalized suggestions are based on data from Web History.

itTorrent is arguably the most efficient peer-to-peer protocol for content replication. However, BitTorrent has not been designed with privacy in mind and its popularity could threaten the privacy of millions of users. Surprisingly, privacy threats due to BitTorrent have been overlooked because BitTorrent popularity gives its users the illusion that finding them is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The goal of this project is to explore the severity of the privacy threats faced by BitTorrent users.

In the first significant challenge to the government’s ambitious programme to give more than one billion Indians a unique identification number, a group of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are planning to take the government to court over a range of issues, including concerns over privacy and the safety of information.