privacy

Do Not Track browser standard: Back on the rails

It looks like development of Do Not Track, an effort to create a standard that'll let people tell Web sites not to track their online behavior, has resumed after a months-long logjam.

Peter Swire, the newly appointed leader of the World Wide Web Consortium's work on Do Not Track, has been attempting to find common ground among very different constituencies including privacy advocates and advertisers. But there's been progress, he said in a blog post.

"Over the past two days, the group has successfully managed to identify a path toward fulfilling our W3C charter: we now … Read more

Canada nixes online spying bill designed to stop child predators

It looks like Canadian privacy advocates won a battle over an Internet bill that was intended to stop online predators. The Canadian government announced today that it was not passing the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, or Bill-C30, according to the Register.

The purpose of the bill was supposedly to make sure children weren't stalked on the Internet by criminals or sex offenders. However, it also enabled warrantless wiretapping. The law said that carriers and ISP providers would be required to give police information about their customers.

The bill (PDF) says that if passed it would "require … Read more

Here's how governments might stalk you via social media

You might want to watch the video below before you check in, update your status, or snap and share that photo of you at lunch with your smartphone.

The Guardian got hold of this 2010 video demonstration from Raytheon, a big-time contractor that also develops things like missile systems for the Department of Defense, which shows an online tracking tool called Rapid Information Overlay Technology, or RIOT.

As Raytheon's Brian Urch explains in the video, the system takes in data about an individual from social networks including Facebook, FourSquare and GoWalla (remember, it's late 2010 in the video), … Read more

Microsoft goes after Google with attack on Gmail privacy

Microsoft is ratcheting up its attacks on Google with a campaign urging users of the Web giant's e-mail service to dump Gmail for its own Outlook.com over privacy concerns.

In its national campaign titled "Don't get scroogled by Gmail," Microsoft dredges up an old issue with Google's free e-mail service: Google scans users' e-mails to determine relevant advertisements to place alongside the messages.

Microsoft says a study it commissioned found that 70 percent of consumers polled were unaware that major e-mail providers "routinely" scan e-mail to sell ads and that nearly 90 … Read more

Apple wins California credit card privacy case

The California Supreme Court today ruled that Apple did not break state law by requiring customers to provide personal identification information such as mailing addresses and phone numbers to complete online credit card transactions.

The decision was a split one, as first reported by Reuters, with four of the seven justices finding in favor of Apple. A copy of the decision is embedded below.

The proposed class action suit was initially brought against Apple by plaintiff David Krescent in June 2011. Krescent alleged that Apple required his telephone number and address to purchase media downloads.

The majority of the justices … Read more

Privacy groups tell U.S. to stop lobbying EU on data law changes

A coalition of privacy groups has written to leading U.S. politicians to seek assurances that policymakers "advance the aim of privacy" in Europe, rather than hinder the development of new European data protection and privacy laws.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and more than a dozen other groups are seeking to meet with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and U.S. Acting Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank, to ensure that new European data law proposals are bolstered … Read more

Privacy at risk as Path app lets location data slip

While on assignment for business recently, Jeffrey Paul posted a photo to the social network Path.

For business reasons, he didn't want to tell his contacts where he was at the time. He had already disabled Path's access to his location in iOS settings. After he took his photo, he had carefully cropped it to obscure anything that might have identified his location.

But when he hit publish, there it was: the name of the city he was in. He deleted the post immediately, but the disclosure shook him. In a subsequent post on his company's blog, … Read more

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz resigns

Jon Leibowitz announced today that he is resigning from his post as the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. His announcement comes after presiding over both the investigation and settlement of Google's antitrust probe.

Leibowitz plans to leave his position by mid-February, according to The New York Times.

"I felt like this was a good time to leave because we got through a number of things that I wanted the commission to address," he told the newspaper.

President Obama appointed Leibowitz, who was formerly an FTC commissioner, to lead the agency in 2009. Leibowitz was said to … Read more

Google sued by iPhone users in U.K. over Safari tracking

Riding on the heels of the recent U.S. lawsuit against Google for Safari tracking, Apple users in the U.K. have now launched their own similar case against the Web giant.

Peeved that their online privacy was violated, roughly a dozen people are suing Google in a class action suit, according to The Guardian. The case alleges that Google secretly tracked their Internet habits via cookies in the Safari Web browser. The lawsuit revolves around the way Google may have sidestepped Apple's security settings on the iPhone, iPad, and desktop versions of Safari.

"This is the first … Read more