personal information

A new research has been recently published by Netpop that reveals 8 in 10 social media users feel “uneasy” or “ambivalent” about sharing personal information on social media sites.

In total the study found this proportion:

42% of social media users are “Uneasies” (concerned about privacy)
38% … are “Ambivalents” (uncertain about privacy)
20% … are “Laissez-Faires” (not concerned about privacy)

According to Symantec Corp report users’ personal information at Facebook may have been accidentally leaked to third parties, in particular advertisers, over the past few years.

The security firm wrote in a blog post that third-parties would have had access to personal information such as profiles, photographs and chat, and could have had the ability to post messages.

"We estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage," the blog post said.

Lawsuits against Apple have been filed by two separate groups of the iPhone and iPad users who allege that certain software applications were passing personal user information to third-party advertisers without consent.

The lawsuits filed with a federal court in California are seeking a class action status. The complainants seek an injunction on passing the user information without their consent as well as financial compensation.

A report from the security vendor Check Point reveals that 79% of users admit that they type personal information and phrases in passwords. Besides, 26% of web users reuse the same passwords for e-mail, online banking, or social networking accounts while 8 percent claim they copy passwords from online lists of "good" passwords.

Furthermore, more than 22 percent have had their social networking accounts hacked, and the same amount have experienced email hacking.

Hackers accessed a database of McDonald’s Corp that contained the email addresses and birth dates of people who voluntarily signed up for its websites and promotions.

The company immediately tried to calm media by saying the security breach did not include any Social Security numbers, credit card accounts or sensitive financial information.

Facebook is sued by a group of customers over Friend Finder service which allegedly uses user names and photos without permission and makes false claims about it usefulness.

With the new feature users are encouraged to upload their email contacts entirely so they can be reunited on the social networking site. Facebook often promotes the service by showing users the names and photos of their friends along with the claim that the friends found many of their Facebook contacts using the Friend Finder service.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a founder of the Web, criticized social networks and other Internet services claiming they are "a threat to the web." He thinks that Facebook-like websites encourage users to enter their information, which is captured and then reused, but not shared with other websites.

"Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the web," he said in the Scientific American journal.

A new Trojan marked as "a serious enemy" is threatening corporate networks as it can be used as a corporate spying tool, warned the Internet security specialist BitDefender. The security vendor stated that Trojan.Spy.YEK sniffs for critical data and archives that may hold private information and sends them back to the attacker. It is a serious threat because the Trojan features both spying and backdoor capabilities, say BitDefender Malware Researchers Doina Cosovan and Octavian Minea.

Hi-tech industry representatives claimed this week that the Internet companies must be more accountable for the mass of personal data collected from users to guard against cybercrime.

"Information is the currency of growth, but it's also increasingly become the currency of crime," Peter Cullen, chief privacy strategist for Microsoft Corp, said at the Family Online Safety Institute's annual conference.

The story of Emily Steel in the Wall Street Journal points to an ever sore subject – online privacy protection with Rapleaf being presented as one of the largest offenders who use sensitive users’ information for its mercenary purposes. The main idea of the story is that Internet data mining firms know more than you think: your political affiliations, religious activities, income level, various likes and interests, and your activity on online dating sites, to name but a few.

Google made its apologies last week for weak privacy measures and security practices that resulted in mistakenly collecting unencrypted Wi-Fi data using Street View cars.

While collected information was mostly fragmentary in some cases it included entire e-mail messages, URLs, and passwords, according to a blog post by Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research.

"We work hard at Google to earn your trust, and we're acutely aware that we failed badly here," he says in his post.

According to the reports by the Wall Street Journal Facebook users are unwittingly exposed to advertising and Internet tracking companies, through some popular applications. An independent investigation performed by the Journal revealed that tens of millions of Facebook app users including those who set their profiles to Facebook's strictest privacy settings are inadvertently providing access to their names and in some cases even their friend's names to third parties.

New generation of malware called Stealing Reality is expected to bring more harm to users with long lasting implications. The problem is in that the malware steals "behavioral pattern" and a user cannot change his/her behavior and habits absolutely even if they change their login credentials and other personal information.

‘In the best interest’ of its users Facebook launched a new product to enable members to download their information stored on the social network and create a local copy of it.

Dubbed as Download Your Information the new service is built on top of Facebook’s Graph application programming interface and includes wall posts, photos and status updates among other types of content. It creates a compressed ZIP file.

Ecommerce trade group NetChoice included online privacy legislation from Representative Bobby Rush and a similar draft bill from Representatives Rick Boucher and Cliff Stearns into its fourth Internet Advocates' Watchlist for Ugly Laws (iAwful), calling these bills as the worst current legislative proposals for the Internet.