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.
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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