privacy

A Federal Trade Commission official on Thursday issued a warning of sorts to Internet companies: stop collecting information about your users by default, and give them shorter, more conspicuous details about what's going on with their data.

The government doesn't need to force such practices "at this point," said Commissioner Jon Leibowitz, a Democrat. But in his view, online services need to start offering users more "meaningful choices," such as the ability to "opt in" to placement of Web cookies on their machines from the start, rather than the typical "opt … Read more

WASHINGTON--Despite demands from President Bush to shield telephone and Internet companies from surveillance-related lawsuits, key U.S. senators are reluctant to offer legal immunity. But they may force taxpayers to pick up the legal tab instead.

Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), the co-chairmen of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said at a hearing here Wednesday that they still don't have enough information to decide whether it's wise to immunize any past assistance by telecommunications providers to a wide swath of U.S. government agencies over the last six years.

That's precisely what would happen, however, … Read more

With the majority of the Democrats caving in to the Bush administration's demands for full immunity for the telecom companies for-profit collusion in the NSA's illegal wiretapping program, it seems to be clear that the Fourth Amendment and federal antiwiretapping laws are no longer enough to keep our communications secure. Laws stating that "thou shalt not listen to your customers phone calls" no longer seem to have any bite. Or at least, they don't as long as teleco lobbying coupled with massive political contributions can turn once critical senators into kindly old men willing to … Read more

Go figure.

All those smart and savvy managers and nobody at Verizon Wireless was able to prevent the brass from stepping into a very avoidable public relations mess.

The source of the kerfuffle: a letter informing customers that Verizon planned to "begin sharing information from their calling records with its affiliates, agents and parent companies."

The official explanation offered up is that the company only seeks to share the information between corporate divisions, the idea being to better sell new products to the install base.

No doubt Verizon is keen on upselling its existing customers. The telco types … Read more

NEW YORK--Facebook appears to be making peace with New York's aggressive attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo.

At a press conference on Tuesday afternoon at Cuomo's office in downtown Manhattan, the attorney general along with Facebook vice president and chief privacy officer Chris Kelly unveiled a joint plan to address concerns about sexual predators on the fast-growing social-networking site.

"This did start out as an investigation," Kelly explained to the room full of reporters and photographers, "but it has turned into a great cooperative effort that we hope the whole industry will follow."

Cuomo had … Read more

WASHINGTON--We already know that some aging politicians and bureaucrats are prone to less-than-coherent ramblings about the technological topics that fall within their job descriptions (See: Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, former chairman of the panel overseeing Internet regulation, "The Internet is a series of tubes," July 2006).

You can imagine what goes through their minds: I really need to show the public that I get it. The only problem is that it doesn't always work.

Take an event held Wednesday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a storied pro-business lobbying group. It was called "RFID Solutions: … Read more

Republicans are so eager to sink a wiretapping bill that includes some privacy safeguards that they're invoking what amounts to a do-this-or-Americans-will-die argument.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., said after an Intelligence Committee vote on the Restore Act on Wednesday that the bill "puts our nation and troops at risk." A few minutes earlier, responding to a Judiciary Committee vote, Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said the bill protects "terrorists, spies and other enemies."

Politicians of both major parties wield this as the ultimate political threat. Its invocation typically predicts that if a certain piece of legislation is … Read more

If you ever wondered why parents can come across as worried and cranky members of the digital world, check out Noam Cohen's Link by Link blog post, Use My Photo? Not Without Permission. Cohen tells the story of a 15-year old high school girl, Alison Chang, from Dallas who was goofing off at a local church-sponsored car wash. Her church youth counselor snapped a photo and uploaded it to the photo-sharing site Flickr, where it caught the eye of an Australian advertising agency. Next thing you know, Alison's likeness appeared on a billboard in Australia.… Read more

Here's something for you privacy advocates: a security camera that determines your age, gender and, possibly one day, your social class.

It's called FieldAnalyst and it's from NEC. The system homes in on faces of people who pass by the video camera. It then rapidly compares the image against samples in a database. It then spits out what it believes is your approximate age is and your gender.

NEC scientists may next try to add clothing as a characteristic and classify people by whether they wear a suit or a T-shirt.

FieldAnalyst isn't looking for criminals … Read more