Senator Al Franken writes: In January, Facebook made a troubling announcement that it plans to allow third-party developers to request access to the home addresses and phone numbers of users. Despite Facebook’s insistence that it will protect its users, I believe this policy will place users at great risk. That’s why I wrote a letter…
Category: Business
FTC Accepts Final Settlement with Twitter for Failure to Safeguard Personal Information
From the FTC: The Federal Trade Commission has finalized a proposed settlement that it announced in June 2010 with social networking site Twitter, which resolved charges that Twitter deceived consumers and put their privacy at risk by failing to safeguard their personal information. The FTC alleged that serious lapses in the company’s data security allowed hackers…
EU: Disagreement over who must apply privacy icon could hit self- regulation
There’s growing debate over how the online ad industry’s forthcoming privacy icon – the industry’s response to imminent EU privacy legislation – will be delivered. The icon, which is being piloted across a small number of sites, has been developed to alleviate consumer concerns, and is designed to appear on all ads served through retargeting…
Data Mining: How Companies Now Know Everything About You
Joel Stein has a lengthy piece on data mining on Time, in which he describes a lot of the data mining that goes on these days and interviews a number of people in the privacy community. Discussing the “creep factor,” Stein writes: “We have this feeling of being dogged that’s uncomfortable,” Calo says, “but the…