privacy

Facebook is reportedly on the verge of agreeing to a settlement with the federal government over claims it misled users regarding its privacy policies. The settlement wouldn't involve a formal admission of guilt, but would have lengthy consequences ... for the social networking company. The case, brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), is based on allegations that Facebook does not always obtain a user's permission before changing the way it handles that user's personal data. Instead, Facebook simply applies the changes it wants on an opt-out basis, in effect asserting that it can apply ... (view more)

The complaint that Facebook prioritizes its own revenue targets above user security is hardly new. However, there is something fresh about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's recent attempt to distract users by pointing a finger at other tech companies ... -- most notably Microsoft, Google and Yahoo -- accusing them of being far less privacy conscious than Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, the 27-year-old billionaire founder and CEO of Facebook, recently appeared on the Charlie Rose TV show to discuss his company's growth and, as usual, ongoing concerns with the way the site handles the personal information ... (view more)

The next edition of Internet Explorer is said to include a new tool for users to restrict how their information is shared with websites. But it will likely mean that some web features and content will be unavailable to users if the special privacy ... feature is enabled. FTC Calls for "Do Not Track" Feature in Web Browsers Recently, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) called on web browser producers and website owners to make it easier for users to avoid having their online activity shared with other web sites. For example, a site might share what a user reads with an advertising agency ... (view more)

Data mining is the process of extracting patterns from data. Data mining is becoming an increasingly important tool to transform otherwise abstract data into useable information. It is commonly used in a wide range of profiling practices, such as ... marketing, surveillance, fraud detection and scientific discovery. Data mining can be used to uncover patterns in data but is often carried out only on samples of data. The mining process will be ineffective if the samples are not a good representation of the larger body of data. Data mining cannot discover patterns that may be present in the larger ... (view more)

A new site aims to demonstrate Facebook's lax security and privacy by exposing some of the more embarrassing messages which users have posted. However, Facebook users appear to have undermined the site by posting intentionally bogus messages. The ... new site is known as Openbook and is intended to highlight changes made last month which made the search facility on Facebook much more public, even to non-users. It's even possible for status updates and other user info to appear on public search engines. This was particularly problematic as there have been several changes to Facebook's privacy ... (view more)

Facebook users are generally trusting when it comes to their privacy, but some issues push them right over the edge. Take a recent glitch that allowed outsiders to view private user information, including friend names and the content of their chat ... conversations. The glitch emerged late last week, and has once again brought scrutiny and anger down upon the heads of Facebook brass. Users of the social networking site discovered that they were able to find out more about their friends than had been the case in the past, and some could even uncover chat conversations between other people. (Source ... (view more)

Google has announced it will ask all users to reconfirm their preferred privacy settings on its social networking site 'Buzz'. It follows a controversial launch in which many believed, correctly or otherwise, that their privacy had been compromised. ... Buzz is Google's rival to Facebook and Twitter. It's integrated into Gmail and allows users to follow and reply to posts made by people they decide to follow on the service. The service also allows users to share information from other Google-owned services such as Google Reader (an RSS newsreader) and picture-sharing site Picasa. It was clearly ... (view more)

A recently filed 17-page lawsuit (PDF) alleges that laptops issued to high-school students in a Pennsylvania suburb feature webcams used by school administrators to invade the privacy of almost 1,800 students and their families. (Source: zdnet.com ) ... According to the parents in Blake J Robbins v. Lower Merion School District (LMSD), the issue was discovered last November when the Robbins' child was disciplined for 'improper behavior at his home' and a photo taken by the webcam was used by the Assistant Principal as evidence. The activity the student was engaged in is not specified in the ... (view more)

The CEO of Facebook has sparked a new debate by claiming the site's users no longer see privacy as a priority. Mark Zuckerberg says recent changes that make more user data public by default represent the site reflecting a "social norm." Speaking at ... an awards ceremony in San Francisco organized by the TechCrunch blog, Zuckerberg said, "In the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way. People have really gotten comfortable sharing more information and different kinds but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that's evolved over time ... (view more)

Microsoft has assured users that it will strive to give cloud computing customers the same privacy commitments given to those using desktop software. But it warns that this could be limited by government regulations, particularly where data is ... transferred across international borders. Cloud computing is a broad term, but generally refers to set-ups where data, an application, or even an operating system is stored on, and operative from, a remote server rather than a user's computer. As Microsoft notes, it's not a new idea: Hotmail is an example of a cloud-based service, with the emails and ... (view more)