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Valleywag
your privacy is an illusion
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Your Privacy Is An Illusion
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your privacy is an illusion
EU warns Google to respect privacy laws with Street View
After reports of Google Street View vehicle sightings on the continent, an EU spokesperson reminded Google to respect local privacy laws. "Taking pictures on a street isn't in itself a problem but taking pictures anywhere can be." Maybe Google's advanced horse-recognition technology will mollify concerns? [CIO]
your privacy is an illusion
Google blurs Street View faces, including a horse's
Google published updated Street View photographs for Manhattan this week. The changes include sharper images, an ability to look upward at the island's skyscrapers and, in an effort to satisfy nervous -nelly privacy advocates, blurred faces. Including one belonging to a publicity-shy relative of Mr. Ed, starring in his latest off-Broadway role.
lawsuits
Judge forces Facebook to out fake profile creators
The person who created a fake Facebook profile for Dean Tim Puntarelli of Roncalli High School in Indianapolis likely felt comfortably shrouded in Facebook's seeming anonymity as he sent "inappropriate" pictures from the account to students. No longer. A local judge ordered Facebook to reveal the prankster's IP address to Puntarelli; the Archdiocese of Indianapolis which runs the school calls it "identity theft." (Photo of a priest with a cane by Paweł Kabański)
your privacy is an illusion
Facebook making sure there's nowhere on the Web to hide
Facebook's formal announcement of Facebook Connect is at once a transparently timed response to MySpace's announcement of partnerships with eBay and Twitter yesterday and the culmination of things the social network has been working on for ages. Facebook Connect, at its simplest, lets websites like Digg and Twitter integrate their users' activity into Facebook users' News Feeds. Those two companies, as well as Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa, have been using Facebook Connect well before it was unveiled under that name. It cements Facebook's role as a central place to keep up with one's friends. Yet I'm not sure how I feel about it. More »
your privacy is an illusion
Internet Archive refuses to secretly hand over user info to FBI
With the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle successfully challenged an FBI request to secretly hand over information about the site's users. The FBI had sent Kahle a "national security letter" which requested personal information about a particular user and put Kahle under a gag order. Approximately 200,000 of the secret requests, which need no judicial approval, were issued between 2003 and 2006 after the NSL program was expanded by the Patriot Act. Kahle's case is one of only three the ACLU is aware of where NSL requests were successfully overturned in court. (Photo by David Silver)
your privacy is an illusion
Facebook posts more driver's licenses from advertisers
The employee at Ping Pong Music who had his drivers' license inadvertently published by Facebook for all the world to see tells us he's discovered at least two more licenses exposed by the site. He found one on the Facebook page for music group Switchfoot and the other on the page for Ben Kweller. Facebook allows musicians and their labels to promote music through official Musician Pages, but before allowing them to upload music, Facebook requires the page administrators to submit identification in case of copyright .The Ping Pong Music employee tells us he's tried to contact Facebook about the problem — sending four emails and calling four times — but all he's gotten in response so far is the following brushoff via email: More »
discrimination
Lily-white couture aficionado Marissa Mayer is a champion of her gender at Google, struggling to ensure that 25 percent of its engineers are women. How is she doing on other measures of diversity? Google has come under fire from Congress for offering H-1B visas to foreign workers rather than increasing its numbers of African-American hires. Perhaps the problem lies in its executives' social circles. A collage of Mayer's Facebook friends in the Google network reveals very few faces that are not white or Asian.
How many black friends does Marissa Mayer have? Let's count!
Lily-white couture aficionado Marissa Mayer is a champion of her gender at Google, struggling to ensure that 25 percent of its engineers are women. How is she doing on other measures of diversity? Google has come under fire from Congress for offering H-1B visas to foreign workers rather than increasing its numbers of African-American hires. Perhaps the problem lies in its executives' social circles. A collage of Mayer's Facebook friends in the Google network reveals very few faces that are not white or Asian.
your privacy is an illusion
Facebook posts advertiser's driver's license for all the world to see
Musicians can promote their work through Facebook's Musician Pages. But before allowing them to upload music files, Facebook requires administrators to submit scans of their driver's licenses, to keep on file in case claims of copyright infringement come up. Last night, one of these administrators, an employee at Ping Pong Music, discovered Facebook had posted his license publicly on EMI artist This World Fair's page. He took a screenshot, which we've included below. More »
your privacy is an illusion
The BBC creates a Facebook app to steal identities
In order to demonstrate how easy it would be for an malicious developer to create an application that steals private information from Facebook users, BBC television series Click created such an application themselves. Then they set up some spooky lighting and filmed a dude using two computers. "ID theft is a serious matter," the narrator intones. Check it out in the clip.
social networks
Egyptian girl disappears for 16 days after creating Facebook group
Eygptian woman Esraa Abdel-Fattah created the Facebook group "6 April: A Nationwide Strike." On April 7, she disappeared for 16 days. After her mother bought an ad in the newspaper Al-Masry Al-Yom pleading for her daughter's release, the government finally obliged. But Abdel-Fattah learned her lesson. "I have not heard about any coming strike nor do I want to hear about it," she told Al-Ahram, a weekly paper. Her uncle, the weekly also reports, said Abdel-Fattah agreed to get rid of her computer. The Egyptian government is now said to be deciding between blocking Facebook entirely or continuing to use it to spy on its citizens.
crumbled cookies
Google so serious about privacy promises, it's patented a way to get around them
Google has published a patent for a method of tracking user behavior through its downloadable toolbar software and serving ads against this information in addition to the content of a Web site. In the filing, Google's Krishna Bharat happily explains how one method Google could use to accomplish this task is through "a cookie which is a persistent means of storage on the client computer." The problem with this: Before regulators approved its DoubleClick acquisition, Google executives promised privacy activists that it would carefully restrict how it uses browser "cookies" to keep track of user behavior. More »
caption contest
While now able to afford real women engineers, Google engineers are still embarrassed by their inflatable booth
Laughing Squid photographer Scott Beale, shooting pictures at this week's Web 2.0 Expo, was rebuffed by marketers staffing the Google booth. Company policy, they said, forbade photography of the booth. Beale complained on Twitter, and word rapidly issued from the Googleplex: It was actually okay, they said, to publicize Google's attempt at gathering publicity. Can you suggest a better headline? Leave it in the comments. (Yesterday's drew no deserving suggestions.) (Photo by viss)
your privacy is an illusion
FBI to Internet: Yeah, we'd tap that
Head honcho of the federales, Robert Mueller, let his fantasies run wild in hearings held by the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee on Wednesday:[G]ive us the ability to preempt that illegal activity where it comes through a choke point as opposed to the point where it is diffuse on the Internet.With Comcast admitting to throttling file sharing traffic, AT&T promising to filter for copyright infringement, Google under fire for all sort of privacy concerns and the NSA already jumping our backbones, who isn't tapping that? (Photo by AP/Lawrence Jackson)
your privacy is an illusion
Israeli military imprisons soldier who posted photos to Facebook
A soldier from an elite unit of the Israel Defense Force will be spending 19 days behind bars after posting photos of his base to Facebook, reports Ha'aretz. Those photos have presumably been taken down. But I turned up dozens of photos posted by soldiers in the IDF goofing off with their units, brandishing weapons and, in the case of the photo above, standing next to a multimillion-dollar American jet fighter — even though the Israel Air Force specifically ordered its members to remove any photos posted to the site. It looks like Facebook's problems with privacy aren't limited to accidentally letting your boss see you taking hits off a bong, but could potentially lead to military intelligence leaks as well.
orkut
