Privacy

Rep. Tom Price, chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, said yesterday that this week's elections will provide "an opportunity for our Republican principles to shine through our policies."

But what that means for privacy, Net neutrality, and other regulatory areas that affect Internet companies isn't entirely clear.

The Contract from America, a set of grassroots-derived governing principles signed by some incoming Republicans and backed by dozens of Tea Party groups, stresses evaluating the constitutionality of government programs but doesn't specifically address technology. Neither does the Republican Party's 2010 Pledge to America.

This should … Read more

It's obvious that Facebook sees serious potential in mobile check-in service Foursquare: it tried to buy it for $125 million.

That didn't work. So Facebook started to get into the location game, too. It launched Facebook Places, its own geolocation service. And today, Facebook went ahead and launched a big new suite of mobile features that includes, notably, enhancements to Facebook Places that let businesses easily automate "deals" for when users check in. On the surface, given Facebook's scale, this looks like it could spell difficult times ahead for Foursquare.

Like Foursquare, Facebook's new … Read more

Facebook offered a pointed defense of its data protection practices in a letter to two members of Congress released today, saying recent reports of a privacy breach are "false" and misunderstood.

Marne Levine, the company's vice president for global public policy, said a widely circulated Wall Street Journal article last month was largely mistaken because it incorrectly claimed that the sharing of Facebook user IDs was a "privacy breach," when it did not "involve the sharing of any private user data."

In fact, Levine wrote (PDF), a Facebook UID "at most enables … Read more

The United Kingdom's Information Commissioner has found that Google violated the country's Data Protection Act when it collected data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks with its Street View vehicles.

"There was a significant breach of the Data Protection Act when Google Street View cars collected payload data as part of their Wi-Fi mapping exercise in the U.K.," the Information Commissioner's Office said in a statement today.

The country's Data Protection Act, which was enacted in 1998, determines policies related to the safekeeping of personal information in the U.K. The Information Commissioner's office … Read more

Art can sometimes gush from the strangest of springs.

So when I cast my eyes on the first images from the launch of Google Street View in Germany, I find myself more entranced than by anything that, say, Dale Chihuly might have mustered.

You see, recently Google deigned to allow Germans to remove their homes from Street View. And when the service launched today in the land of always beautiful bratwurst and suddenly attractive soccer some of the images were powerful indeed.

Almost 3 percent of German homeowners decreed that their homes should not be on Street View. Which has … Read more

Facebook has revealed that a data broker has been buying identifying Facebook user information from app developers, and as a result the social-networking powerhouse has placed some developers on a six-month suspension.

The announcement, which Facebook made Friday afternoon on its developer blog, comes on the heels of the revelation that many popular Facebook apps were transmitting user IDs--which can be used to look up a users' names and, in some cases, the names of the app user's friends--to at least 25 advertising and data firms.

According to Facebook's developer blog:

As we examined the circumstances of … Read more

A Texas court has ruled that a husband accused of monitoring his wife's computer through a keystroke logger did not violate federal wiretapping laws.

Larry Bagley was sued in June by his wife Rhea Bagley, who accused him of surreptitiously placing audio recording devices in their house as well as a software keystroke logger. The Bagleys are in the process of divorcing.

The complaint in this civil case says that during the divorce proceedings, the husband revealed the existence of the surveillance tech and acknowledged that the "software recorded screenshots of activity on this computer." The husband … Read more

Alma Whitten is taking on one of Google's most important and perhaps impossible jobs as the face of its commitment to privacy.

Whitten, a seven-year Google engineer with a background in privacy and security, was named director of privacy for the company Friday in a blog post in which Google acknowledged that its Wi-Fi spying debacle had snared e-mail addresses and passwords. Already leading a team focused on privacy issues, she's now getting more resources and a lot more responsibility in hopes of preventing incidents like the Wi-Fi issue from happening again and convincing the public that Google … Read more

When WikiLeaks launched with little fanfare in early 2007, its founders touted it as a unique collaboration that would rely on the same anyone-can-edit software and sense of community that made Wikipedia such a success.

Instead of having a small group of experts examine documents, WikiLeaks promised, the forthcoming Web site would allow "the entire global community" to "interpret documents and explain their relevance to the public." News coverage at the time quoted spokesman Julian Assange emphasizing the lack of hierarchy, saying WikiLeaks is "an international collaboration, primarily of mathematicians."

That was then. In … Read more