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privacy
Are You Ready for Facebook Timeline?
In the next couple of weeks, Facebook will unleash its most drastic redesign ever. We take a look at how you can help protect your privacy.
Men More Likely to Befriend Sexy Strangers in Facebook Scams
Men are more likely than women to be the victims of identity theft on Facebook, but nobody is safe from scammers, especially with the rise of social media on mobile devices.
Our Friends Electric: Facebook Info Open to ‘Socialbot’ Snooping
Perhaps it’s time to start paying more attention to whom you’re friending on Facebook. A recent study designed to evaluate how safe social networks are from being invaded by programs pretending to be real people resulted in more than 250GB of personal information being collected from thousands of Facebook users by the researchers’ …
TechnologizerApps & Software
OnStar’s Privacy Dust-Up: It’s Over, and Didn’t Apply to OnStar FMV
My latest Technologizer column on TIME.com is about OnStar FMV, the first version of the car safety-and-information service available as an aftermarket add-in for most cars, cleverly built into a rear-view mirror. When I shared the story on Twitter, Facebook and Google+, I heard from some folks who said FMV sounded neat. But a few said …
Will Amazon’s Kindle Fire Web Browser Spy On You? The EFF Gets Answers
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has found that the new Silk browser in Amazon’s forthcoming Kindle Fire tablet, which speeds browsing by routing users’ traffic through Amazon’s cloud servers, does not pose a privacy threat to users.
“We are generally satisfied with the privacy design of Silk, and happy that the end user has …
Smartphones Can Use Vibrations to Steal Passwords
Be careful where you type. Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a way for smartphones to pick up and interpret the vibrations made by typing on a keyboard. In theory, that means a thief could set an iPhone down next to your computer and steal your passwords or blackmail you with copies of embarrassing emails.
How does it work? …
Verizon Wireless Users’ Web Habits for Sale
Bad news for privacy paranoids: Verizon Wireless is monitoring the web browsing habits of its customers, and plans to sell the data in aggregate.
Under Verizon’s new privacy policy, as noticed by Computerworld, the carrier will collect data on the websites customers are visiting, the apps they’re using and the location of their …
TechnologizerSocial Networking
Facebook’s ‘Open Graph’ Needs New Approaches to Privacy
I touched on the privacy implications of Facebook’s new Open Graph share-everything-forever platform in my latest Technologizer column over at TIME.com—but I didn’t dwell on them. For one thing, neither feature is fully available yet, making it hard to judge them. For another, use of Facebook in general and the Open Graph in particular …
OnStar Reverses Position, Won’t Track You if You Cancel Service
OnStar’s crying uncle after the media (and presumably customer) hoopla over its plans to track former subscribers. That’s terrific news—I called the plan creepy, because it was.
OnStar just announced that it was changing course, stating it was “reversing its proposed Terms and Conditions policy changes,” and that it would “not keep …
Facebook Damage Control: Pledges Privacy Breach Fix
No, it’s not some creepy OnStar-like secret monitoring scheme, where Facebook plans to track you even after you’ve logged out of the social networking site, but that’s essentially what Facebook’s capable of, thanks to a cookie “bug.” The bug allows Facebook to collect browsing-related information even after a user’s signed out of the …
Facebook Cookies Work Even If You’re Logged Out (for Your Own Good)
Facebook may not be planning to shut down your account or charge you, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t doing some things that you might want to be concerned about. Say, for example, tracking users even after they log out of the site.
That’s the accusation from developer Nik Cubrilovic, who discovered that Facebook “alters” …