CISPA Is Dead, Long Live CISPA
After stirring up trouble for months, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) died a quiet death in the Senate on Thursday.
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Shazam, the song-identifying app whose logo keeps making its way onto TVs for second-screen expansion, has expanded its smart-listening deeper into your life with a new automatic tagging feature that basically turns your iPhone or iPad into a personal little wiretap.
After stirring up trouble for months, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) died a quiet death in the Senate on Thursday.
A fresh bit of Kafka from the Supreme Court today: Since you can never be sure if the government is secretly spying on you, you can never sue the government for spying on you.
A secret program from the defense contractor looks through Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla, and Foursquare to find out where a person lives and hangs out, to discover what he or she looks like, and even to predict what he or she will do in the future.
Nobody likes a lost dog. The owners lament her absence. The public fears her bite. And authorities have better things to do than chase down pets. So why not just put tracking chips under their skin?
Instead of the usual song and dance about how privacy is important to companies in the business of selling our data, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer gave a refreshingly honest take today at the World Economic Forum on how privacy actually works .
Jill and Scott Kelley on privacy and Petraeus, Mark Bittman on Coke's obesity awareness ads, Simon Jenkins on Prince Harry's Afghanistan story, Sarah Chayes on Benghazi and bureaucrats, and Aaron David Miller on Israel's election results.
From a new set of opt-out options to just how much of your preferences are now searchable — and sellable — here's everything you need to know about protecting yourself from the many advances of the new product Mark Zuckerberg claims is "privacy aware."
For Instagram, there's good news and there's bad news about the class action lawsuit just filed against them. Bad news first: Somebody just filed a lawsuit. Good news: Facebook's lawyers have plenty of practice getting rid of these.
Subtle tweaks will arrive on your screen, helping you block people and de-tag ugly photos — but you've got to have a keen eye to discover when they're really affecting your profile.
Mark Zuckerberg's been eager to find a way to get more kids on Facebook for years, and on Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission handed it to him on a platter.
How to remove ugly photos, block people instantly, and more — a (very) simple guide to help you better understand the latest round of changes.
Following a leaked report that set off not one but two rounds of speculation into the future of digital privacy, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill Thursday that requires a warrant to access e-mail and any other private communications stored over the cloud.
Without court orders of any sort, the NYPD has access to "a trove of telephone logs" — and in a somewhat frightening twist, it takes more paperwork to get a thief's cell records than it takes to get the victim's. Here's how it works.
People really want to believe that writing something on their wall will allow them to use the social network without having to play by the rules. It doesn't quite work like that, though.
The senate proposal set for next week that "now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail," as CNET and later Drudge exclaimed, doesn't actually do that, according to the Senator actually writing the bill.
Capitalizing on all the information we put into our cell phones, Verizon Wireless is selling all our app usage and location information to marketers, reports CNET's Declan McCullagh.
In its first foray with Datalogix, that company that uses rewards card data to make advertising more effective, the social network has found that fewer than 1 percent of in-store sales could be tied to brand advertising campaigns on Facebook, reports Reuters's Alexei Oreskovic.
Every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the video clips that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention.
In an attempt to give advertisers more information about the effectiveness of ads, Facebook has partnered with Datalogix, a company that "can track whether people who see ads on the social networking site end up buying those products in stores," as The Financial Times's Emily Steel and April Dembosky explain.
Finally, when we delete an embarrassing image from our Facebook lives, it will be wiped from Facebook's servers in a "reasonable amount of time," Facebook told Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng, who has been following the saga since 2009.
Google has admitted to having Street View data it said it had deleted in France, following its admission last Friday of having kept information from the United Kingdom, too.
Hide your kids, hide your wife, hide your grow op. Drones are flying across American skies and there's nothing we can do about it. The head of a drone company especially doesn't care about your privacy concerns because you don't have anything to hide, right?
Following an iPhone tracking privacy scandal earlier this year, Google will have to pay the biggest Federal Trade Commission fine ever given to a single company, which for a huge corporation like Google doesn't add up to all that much, showing how little impact even the largest fines have.
A Congressional report on the relationship between cellphone carriers and law enforcement agencies shows that the companies are responding to thousands of requests per day from criminal investigators asking for text messages, call records, location data, and other information on customers.
Occupy Wall Street protester Malcolm Harris is not alone in having his tweets subpoenaed: according to Twitter's semi-annual first semi-annual report, the company said it has produced information in 75 percent of the 679 requests it has received so far in 2012 from U.S. government agencies.
As a reaction to SOPA and other complex legislative efforts to regulate the Internet, online activists have created a Declaration of Internet Freedom, which consists of five very broad principles to keep the Internet free and open. And yet, at fewer than 100 words, the declaration remains frustratingly unclear.
Facebook's @facebook.com e-mail address takeover is worse than just an unwanted default change for some, who have had their entire phone address book populated with @Facebook.com e-mail addresses, replacing previous contact information.
After 27 hours up and running this stalker website with the appropriately creepy name We Know What You're Doing ... has gotten over 100,000 unique visitors, according to a tweet from 18-year-old founder Callum Haywood, which says something disturbing about our society.
In a pushy move, Facebook just made the Facebook email address you probably didn't even know you had the default email address on your timeline, hoping to push users to its messaging service.
Google's just-announced 3D maps sound awesome, but they also include a serious downside for the privacy crowd: Anybody who got creeped out by Street View cars shooting their block will now have to worry about Google's camera-toting fleet of airplanes.
It's that time of year again, boys and girls: Time for Facebook to test the boundaries of how much of your data it can collect and sell to advertisers.
As Facebook has become more hegemonic, about a quarter of its users have started crafting fake personae, fudging some personal details on the social network in order to, they say, protect their privacy and data, according to a new Consumer Reports survey.
Faced a host of privacy investigations around the globe and an initial public offering in the next few works, Facebook is trying extra hard to increase transparency and make users happy.
It's become a common practice for police look into the online activities of people they are investigation, but authorities come calling to people who have that info, what exactly do they find out?
Remember when everybody hated Facebook because it invaded their privacy, kept them from getting their dream job and embarrassed them in front of their friends and family?
One of Google's own, Chief Internet Evangalist (and Internet inventor) Vint Cerf, has joined the growing chorus of voices warning of the possible end to Google's dominance.
We deleted our Google history when the new privacy policies came into being, and it's a fair bet you did too, and based on a great long read Thursday from Gizmodo's Mat Honan, it sounds like we were right to be suspicious of Google.
As is typical in the case of widespread outrage, the people are fighting the man in a pair of new class action lawsuits over Google's new privacy policy.
With warrantless cell phone searches increasingly allowed by law enforcement, the privacy aficcionado prone to losing phones or getting arrested will want to be able to lock the cops out manually, and it looks like Android's the best operating system for that.
You can tweak the settings; you can educate yourself about the settings; but you cannot opt out of Google's data collection. That is, unless you stop using Google altogether. Let us show you how.
Depending on the time of month, developers and tech bloggers tend to be either upset about the supposedly overly strict rules in Apple's App Store or concerned that the company doesn't better police its own standards.
Google's new privacy policy has proved pretty unpopular with state attorneys general at home, and now a French regulator says it might just violate privacy rules in the European Union, and it's also running afoul of Korean guidelines.
Dying to remember what you tweeted about how much you hated vuvuzelas at the World Cup and what happened at the ending of Inception? Lucky for you, Twitter and Datasift will enable companies to look at tweets from two years ago.
On Thursday, the White House pulled back the curtain on its "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights," a presidential attempt to clamp down on the misuse of online user data.
At noon today, the White House will unveil a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights announcing the cooperation of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL on a plan to install "Do Not Track" technology in Web browsers.
Following last week's iPhone app data collection scandals, California will now mandate that all mobile applications have privacy policies.
On the gut level, reactions to Google's recently leaked top secret augmented reality eyeglasses can be split into two broad camps: the WTF!?! crew (concerned with privacy) and the WHOA!!! crew (excited about the future).
Currently Google and Microsoft are battling it out via passive aggressive statements over who is in the wrong in this whole user privacy tracking ordeal, when of course, both of them, along with the rest of the tech giants, are doing the same wrong things.
Not limiting its tracking to iDevices, Google has also bypassed Internet Explorer's privacy settings, getting around the search engine's cookie restrictions, according to Microsoft.
Google may be catching all flack this morning for tracking iPhones, but Apple doesn't care about users' privacy either. In fact, the company already tracks users' every move.
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