Privacy

It’s easy to forget sometimes how much time we spend plugged into various social networks. It’s also easy to forget how easily we can share too much information on networks like Facebook and Twitter, and how that information can come back to hurt us in the future.

Some of the dangers associated with sharing too much information include identity theft and the chance of damaging your professional reputation. While first looking at these dangers in a little more depth, it’s possible to think through some of the ways in which you can protect yourself online.

On the second-to-last Monday of 2010, Brian Byrd was playing video poker on his Dell Inspiron laptop when someone knocked on the door of his home in Casper, Wyoming. The visitor, who drove a truck from the local Aaron's rent-to-own store that furnished the PC five months earlier, said the 25-year-old Byrd was behind in his payments and demanded he pay up at once. He then brandished a picture that was about to cause a national privacy uproar.

Instagram said today that it has the perpetual right to sell users' photographs without payment or notification, a dramatic policy shift that quickly sparked a public outcry.

The new intellectual property policy, which takes effect on January 16, comes three months after Facebook completed its acquisition of the popular photo-sharing site. Unless Instagram users delete their accounts before the January deadline, they cannot opt out.

In February, 2012 the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a report titled Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures are Disappointing (PDF) that pointed out that there was "little or no" privacy information available to parents in the Android Google Play and Apple iOS app stores prior to download and scarce data in the apps themselves or on the app vendors websites.

Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations, according to documents obtained by a news outlet.

The systems are being installed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and other cities with funding from the Department of Homeland Security in some cases, according to the Daily, which obtained copies of contracts, procurement requests, specs and other documents.

 Weeks of international intrigue about the whereabouts of tech millionaire John McAfee ended Tuesday after the internet pioneer made an elementary digital mistake that highlighted the fraught relationship Americans have with what they once quaintly called "the telephone".

 Hackers broke into insurance company Nationwide's network in October, stealing the personal information of more than a million customers across the country, the insurance company recently revealed.

The company said the compromised information included people's names and a combination of Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, their date of birth, and possibly marital status, gender, and occupation, as well as the names and addresses of employers. Nationwide said it had no evidence that any medical information or credit card account data was stolen.

You gotta hand it to the marketers who come up with robot acronyms. Can it get any better than Extreme Access System for Entry (EASE)?

Sounds innocuous enough, right? Until this little critter tries to float into your room to spy on you. It's one of two bots unveiled by CyPhy Works, headed by iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner.

EASE and PARC (that's Persistent Aerial Reconnaissance & Communication), a communications relay, are compact flying machines that can fly between 3 feet and 1,000 feet while remaining tethered to their human controllers via microfilaments.

WikiMartyr in waiting Julian Assange has emitted another screed in which he shares his belief that democracy is being dangerously undermined by government monitoring of the internet, and that Facebook and Google are helping those efforts.

Chatting with RT, Assange has outlined his belief that nations now conduct surveillance on a massive scale, because “it is cheaper to intercept every individual rather that it is to pick particular people to spy upon.”

Despite calls for Facebook to stop planned changes to the way it makes privacy policy, analysts are divided over whether the changes would be bad for users.

Last week, Facebook announced that it's making an adjustment to the way it pushes through changes to its privacy policy. Facebook will no longer allow users to vote on proposed policy changes, citing the lack of quality comments it has been getting.