Friday, February 17, 2012

They seem to have noticed that the “operators of online services” are not doing what they are required by law to do, so think of this as a sort of heads up that the FTC is thinking about considering a timetable to start planning future research into possibly doing their job!
FTC Report Raises Privacy Questions About Mobile Applications for Children
February 17, 2012 by Dissent
From the FTC:
The Federal Trade Commission today issued a staff report showing the results of a survey of mobile apps for children. The survey shows that neither the app stores nor the app developers provide the information parents need to determine what data is being collected from their children, how it is being shared, or who will have access to it.
… According to the FTC report, Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures Are Disappointing, in 2008, smartphone users could choose from about 600 available apps. Today there are more than 500,000 apps in the Apple App Store and 380,000 in the Android Market. “Consumers have downloaded these apps more than 28 billion times, and young children and teens are increasingly embracing smartphone technology for entertainment and educational purposes.”
… The report notes that mobile apps can capture a broad range of user information from a mobile device automatically, including the user’s precise geolocation, phone number, list of contacts, call logs, unique identifiers, and other information stored on the device.
… “In most instances, staff was unable to determine from the information on the app store page or the developer’s landing page whether an app collected any data, let alone the type of data collected, the purpose for such collection, and who . . . obtained access to such data.”
… The report notes that more should be done to identify the best way to convey data practices in plain language and in easily accessible ways on the small screens of mobile devices.
… The FTC enforces the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule. The Rule requires operators of online services, including interactive mobile apps, to provide notice and get parental consent prior to collecting information from children under 13. The report says in the next 6 months, FTC staff will conduct an additional review to determine whether some mobile apps were violating COPPA.

(Related) Think of the information gathered as e-Gold and ask yourself if you would throw it back into the stream...
Google Circumvents Safari Privacy Protections – This is Why We Need Do Not Track
February 17, 2012 by Dissent
Peter Eckersley, Rainey Reitman, and Lee Tien and write:
Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal published evidence that Google has been circumventing the privacy settings of Safari and iPhone users, tracking them on non-Google sites despite Apple’s default settings, which were intended to prevent such tracking.
This tracking, discovered by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, was a technical side-effect—probably an unintended side-effect—of a system that Google built to pass social personalization information (like, “your friend Suzy +1′ed this ad about candy”) from the google.com domain to the doubleclick.net domain. Further technical explanation can be found below.
Coming on the heels of Google’s controversial decision to tear down the privacy-protective walls between some of its other services, this is bad news for the company. It’s time for Google to acknowledge that it can do a better job of respecting the privacy of Web users.
Read more on EFF.


Apparently an Industry Best (most profitable?) Practice
Twitter stores full iPhone contact list for 18 months, after scan
February 17, 2012 by Dissent
David Sarno reports:
Twitter Inc. has acknowledged that after mobile users tap the “Find friends” feature on its smartphone app, the company downloads users’ entire address book, including email addresses and phone numbers, and keeps the data on its servers for 18 months. The company also said it plans to update its apps to clarify that user contacts are being transmitted and stored.
The company’s current privacy policy does not explicitly disclose that Twitter downloads and stores user address books.
Read more in the Los Angeles Times. Note that Twitter clarified that names are not stored and that they intend to update their privacy policy to make the collection more transparent. If you are having second thoughts and want to remove your contacts from Twitter’s logs, use the remove link on this page.
Of course, I have been advocating for a long time that Twitter (and other companies) should not retain PII for so long. They are setting themselves up as a more desirable resource for law enforcement and putting our privacy at greater risk of government intrusion or hacking.

(Related)


I suspect the Police are getting software tools, training and even manpower from the Copyright Corps. (Or they have been training the cops to make up facts to support their assertions.)
"Following its takedown earlier this week of the music blog RnBXclusive, the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has claimed that "a number of site users have deleted their download histories" in response. Given that the site didn't host copyright-infringing files itself, how do they know? We've asked, but SOCA refuses to discuss its methods. A security expert has pointed out that, if they were hacking using Trojans, the police would themselves have been breaking the law. Added fun fact: SOCA readily admits that the scare message it showed visitors to the taken-down site was written 'with input from industry.'"


I was impressed, until I realized...
Lawmaker Demands DHS Cease Monitoring of Blogs, Social Media
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-California) said Thursday she wants the Department of Homeland Security to cease its social-media and news-monitoring operation.
Speaking at a Homeland Security subcommittee hearing, the California lawmaker said she was “outraged” that the agency has hired a contractor to review a variety of social networking sites, including Facebook and Twitter, and that General Dynamics is being tasked with reviewing news sources, blogs and their bylines for all types of articles, including those containing anti-American sentiment and reaction to policy proposals.
“This should not be a political operation,” she said.

(Related) ...they were just changing agencies. DHS attracts bad publicity, NSA is better at keeping covert.
McCain: Cybersecurity Bill Ineffective Without NSA Monitoring the Net
After three years of haggling to produce bipartisan cybersecurity legislation that addresses the security of the nation’s critical infrastructure systems, the Senate finally got a bill this week that seemed destined to actually pass.
That is, until a hearing on Thursday to discuss the bill in which Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) sideswiped lawmakers behind the proposed legislation and announced that he, and seven other Senate ranking members, were opposed to the bill and would be introducing a competing bill in two weeks to address failings they see in the legislation.
McCain and his colleagues oppose the current bill on the grounds that it would give the Department of Homeland Security regulatory authority over private businesses that own and operate critical infrastructure systems and that it doesn’t grant the National Security Agency, a branch of the Defense Department, any authority to monitor networks in real-time to thwart cyberattacks


This can't be true, can it? Can the Teacher Gestapo search your child's Roy Rogers lunch box and force her to eat something your dietician didn't prescribe? Could they force the child to skip a meal?
Parents are ignorant serfs. Only the government knows what is best. “Ja, ve have rules und they must be enforced!”
"A North Carolina mom is irate after her four-year-old daughter returned home late last month with an uneaten lunch the mother had packed for the girl earlier that day. But she wasn't mad because the daughter decided to go on a hunger strike. Instead, the reason the daughter didn't eat her lunch is because someone at the school determined the lunch wasn't healthy enough and sent it back home. What was wrong with the lunch? That's still a head-scratcher because it didn't contain anything egregious: a turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice. But for the inspector on hand that day, it didn't meet the healthy requirements."
[From the article:
See, in North Carolina, all pre-Kindergarten programs are required to evaluate the lunches being provided and determine if they meet USDA nutrition guidelines. If not, they must provide an alternative.
But that’s not the worst of it. Instead of being given a salad or something really healthy, the girl was given chicken nuggets instead. On top of it, her mother was then sent a bill for the cafeteria food.
… But what was so wrong with the lunch the mother provided? Nothing apparently. A spokesowman for the Division of Child Development explained that the mother’s meal should have been okay.
… The school denied knowledge of the incident and said it’s looking into it.


Interesting question for debate with absolutely no help from the comments... How do you value digital assets? (Are they worth the paper they're not printed on?)
"I am a long time Slashdotter and currently find myself in the beginning of a divorce process. How have you dealt with dispersing of shared data, accounts and things online in such a situation? Domains, hosting, email, sensitive data backups and social media are just a few examples."


Perspective
Chart: In Four Years, Apple Sold More iPhones Than All Macs Ever


Play in the Cloud!
http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2012/02/trystack/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29
Free OpenStack Time: What Gives?
How does free cloud compute time on a virtual machine with an available 156 cores, 1040GB memory and 59.1 TB of disk storage running the latest OpenStack release, Del PowerEdge C6100 and C6105 servers and libvirt/KVM sound?
You guessed it: There’s a catch. With the new OpenStack promo service TryStack, free time is limited like on-demand movie from the cloud — that’s 24 hours to watch this feature film before a script wipes out your TryStack existence.
So who and what is this for?
Rule No. 1: Remember that TryStack is designed exclusively as a testing sandbox. We wanted a fast, easy way for developers to test code against a real OpenStack environment, without having to stand up hardware themselves. It probably goes without saying that this is not the place for production code – you should host only test code and test servers here. In fact, your account on TryStack will be periodically wiped to help make sure no one account tries to rule tyrannically over our democracy. Play nice in the sandbox!


More eBook publishing options surface...
Online blogging platforms do a wonderful job of letting you write an online diary. But what if you are an aspiring author looking for a way to write an entire book online? What you will need is a web service that organizes the chapters in your books and lets visitors comfortably go through them. This is precisely what Pandamian offers.
… Your book is published under a unique URL that you can share with others. Visitors to your book’s pages and chapters can leave their comments. The stats about your books, chapters, and comments appear under your Dashboard.
Similar tools: Webook, Moglue and ePubBud.
Also read related articles:


Try a search for your favorite topic...
Aspdf.com is a website where you can find every kind of PDF files to download or view online. The site contains mainly user guides, owner manuals, tutorials and other "how tos". If you need instructions on how to perform some technical activity, whether it is building a desk for your garden or installing some computer software, you will probably find a related instruction booklet to help you out.


What technology should I teach?
BuiltWith Reveals The Tech Used By The 130 Million Web Sites That Matter Most
Search engines like Google scour the web to figure out how to rank content. Measurement firms like comScore sample users to estimate traffic to web sites. But what if you want to know which of some 2000 technologies a web site is using? And, what if you want to know what the tech trends are across the 130 million largest sites on the web today?
You could just dig through the source code for each site you’re interested in to answer these questions piecemeal, or you could repurpose other web site profilers designed for search engine optimization or other jobs.
Or, you could use BuiltWith.
The five year-old bootstrapped startup, built by one-man team Gary Brewer in Australia, looks at the publicly available code for each site, and figures out each piece of technology that it’s using.


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