An animated explanation of how your personal data gets tracked and sold

Keeping up with our theme from yesterday’s post about how frictionless it has become for users to give unfamiliar apps broad and permanent access to their data, we stumbled on this interesting video about the personal information people unwittingly share with their mobile phone carriers.

The video comes from Michael Ringley, a graphic designer living in San Francisco. It tracks the life of an MMS message, 28,000 of which are sent every second, and shows … Continue Reading

It’s 10pm, do you know where your data is?

With the advent of OAuth, an open standard for authorization, you can easily sign up for new services and apps simply by relying on your Facebook and Google profiles. But that simplicity also makes it easy to give total strangers a window into our lives, as Wired’s Andy Baio explains in a recent post.

Instead of filling out a lot of forms and trying to remember a new password, you can just rely on the … Continue Reading

Path-ological: In 2010, founder Dave Morin said Path never stored user data

It’s the privacy snafu that will not die. A day after a developer discovered that mobile social network Path was storing users’ entire address books on its servers, the startup seemed to have defused the incident by apologizing and deleting all the personal data it had stored.

But now Gawker’s Ryan Tate has published an email he got from Path CEO Dave Morin back in 2010 in which the CEO acknowledges that his company looks … Continue Reading

Path is grabbing names, numbers, and emails from users’ phones

A brief post from Arun Thampi, an iOS developer based in Singapore, has sparked an outcry among Path users. Thampi was poking around the Path API for a hackathon when he stumbled on request which sent his entire contact list including names, emails and phone numbers to Path.

"Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path” and repeated the experiment and I got the same result – my address book was in Path’s hands," he wrote on his blog.

Deleting a photo on Facebook might not be what it seems

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but there seems to be one word Facebook doesn’t understand: “delete.”

When you delete a Facebook image from your profile you’re actually sending a request to Facebook to remove that photo file from its servers. You’d expect the request to be completed in a reasonable amount of time. Ars Technica is reporting, however, that “deleted” photos dating back as far as 2008 are still floating around on … Continue Reading

From Google to Facebook, online privacy concerns aren’t going away (infographic)

Ever since Google announced its new, controversial privacy policy two weeks ago, interest in online privacy has spiked as more people question how Google and other companies are managing their data.

Google announced last week that it would change its privacy policy by combining 60 existing policies into one, with the changes going into effect March 1. While simplification of hard-to-read policies is nice, Google attracted criticism because it will now combine user data across … Continue Reading

European regulators want Google to delay new privacy policy

European regulators have asked Google to delay a new, controversial privacy policy change because they want more time to investigate how well user data will be protected.

Google announced last week that it would change its privacy policy by combining 60 policies into one, with the changes going into effect March 1. While simplification of hard-to-read policies is nice, Google has attracted criticism because it will now combine user data across all of its services, … Continue Reading

As Google falters in public favor over privacy, Microsoft seeks to step in

Some would look at Google’s recent PR flub over privacy policies and settings as a bit of a fiasco.

Microsoft, of course, sees it as an opportunity.

This week, the company is placing a series of ads in newspapers across the U.S. to remind consumers that it still offers popular and secure web services for search, email, document management, and more.

In short, the company is making a bid for disgruntled Google users. For those … Continue Reading

The 3 Facebook IPO risk factors that matter

When Facebook’s S-1 filing comes out (which could be as soon as tomorrow, if you believe the Wall Street Journal), we’ll see a lot of risks in it.

The S-1 is the first and most significant document that a company fills out, and the Securities and Exchange Commission publishes, prior to an initial public offering. If it’s typical, we’ll see many boilerplate risks, such as an earthquake wiping out Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, … Continue Reading

Google defends its new privacy policy in letter to Congress

Google is defending its privacy policy changes yet again, this time to the United States Congress.

“Last week we heard from members of Congress about Google’s plans to update our privacy policies by consolidating them into a single document on March 1,” said Google director of public policy Pablo Chavez in a blog post. “Protecting people’s privacy is something we think about all day across the company, and we welcome discussions about our approach.”

In … Continue Reading

Congressman releases new mobile device privacy bill to stop Carrier IQ-like software

The United States Congress is readying a new piece of legislation aimed at preventing unauthorized use of your cellphone data.

The Mobile Device Privacy Act (PDF), released today by Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), is in direct response to the recent controversy caused by data tracking software Carrier IQ. That software is designed to help cellphone companies track the performance of their devices, but many critics believe it’s far too intrusive because it records users’ web … Continue Reading

Google responds to privacy policy criticisms

Google is defending its new privacy policy, stressing that the company isn’t collecting more data, just collecting it in a new way.

“We’re making things simpler and we’re trying to be upfront about it. Period,” said Google’s policy manager Betsy Masiello in a blog post Thursday evening.

The company recently announced big changes to its privacy policy, posting notifications throughout its products that read, “We’re changing our privacy policy and terms. Not the usual yada … Continue Reading

Google+ gives teens some privacy, unless they don’t want it

It’s two in the afternoon, do you know where your kids are? Evidently, they’re on Google+ but don’t worry, Google has put in some privacy policies to police their raucous Internet partying.

“We think the best strategy is to equip teens and parents with the right information to promote safe online behavior, rather than limiting functionality completely,” a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat in an e-mail.

Bradley Horowitz, Google’s vice president of product for Google+, explained … Continue Reading

Privacy’s state of the union: Google follows Facebook down the path of no return

Google made some sweeping changes to its privacy policies yesterday. It let users know it will be combining data from all of its services, from search to email to photos. This will give Google a much more detailed picture of its users, allowing it to deliver more relevant services, and of course, more targeted advertisements.

People have a right to be angry about this. Faye Kakia, a fashion designer who creates virtual clothing to sell … Continue Reading

Author Andrew Keen cries out against Facebook and lost privacy

“I’m here as a crier, raising my voice in defense of lost privacy,” entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen said, directly attacking Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s expressed views on identity and privacy.

Keen, the author of the soon-to-be-released book “Digital Vertigo,” delved into the actual and ideological dangers associated with the social web at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich.

Keen ultimately called for web denizens to push back against the powers that be and … Continue Reading

Public interest group urges FTC to investigate Facebook for Timeline privacy violations

A prominent public interest group is once again targeting Facebook for questionable privacy practices.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Facebook for its implementation of Timeline, the social networking company’s radical new profile feature.

The group believes that Timelne exposes user information to the public without explicit consent from the user, and as such violates the conditions set forth in a recent, highly-publicized settlement between Facebook … Continue Reading

Facebook on government audit: “We could have been more transparent.”

After a thorough audit from the Irish government, Facebook has stepped forward with a statement on how it could have handled some privacy issues a little bit better.

While the company said the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) commended its security measures, its lack of user-tracking software and its real-names-only policy, the DPC also noted a few areas where improvement was needed — and Facebook agreed.

For facial recognition features in Tag … Continue Reading

Here’s how AT&T and Sprint are using Carrier IQ’s data

Moblie carriers Sprint and AT&T have revealed how much they each use data from Carrier IQ, the mobile data monitoring service that’s been raising eyebrows across the globe.

In the ongoing saga of Carrier IQ, we’ve focused a lot of attention on the company but relatively little on how carriers are using the information it gathers. The company collects information on around 150 million cell phones around the world — information about battery performance, app … Continue Reading

It’s not an investigation: Carrier IQ asked FCC & FTC for meetings to clear its name

Carrier IQ, the beleaguered firm that monitors cell phone data, has sought out meetings with both the FTC and FCC in an attempt to clear its name of wiretapping and privacy-violating allegations.

While other outlets are reporting that Carrier IQ is undergoing a federal investigation, the company tells us it contacted these agencies first, not the other way around.

“Investigation is the wrong word here,” a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email today. “We … Continue Reading

Carrier IQ: Actually, we don’t give your data to the FBI — or any other law enforcement

Carrier IQ has responded to speculation that it’s turning over your mobile data to law enforcement with an interesting rebuttal.

In an email to VentureBeat, a company spokesperson wrote, “Just to clarify all of the media frenzy around the FBI, Carrier IQ has never provided any data to the FBI.”

Carrier IQ is a company that monitors mobile data on more than 100 million phones around the world. It sends reports related to app performance, … Continue Reading