privacy

The Federal Communications Commission is about to conduct a “public education forum” where it will discuss the issues of consumers’ location data tracking. As a part of this discussion the FCC invited Apple, Google and consumer advocates to a forum scheduled for late June.

On June 28 the FCC will be talking about the risks and benefits of location-based services with wireless carriers, other technology companies and consumer advocacy groups, the FCC said on Tuesday.

An investigation has been launched by the US authorities into how customer data is used by some popular applications created to run on mobile platforms of Apple Inc and Google Inc.

In a regulatory filing this week online radio service Pandora reported that US Federal grand jury subpoenaed the service to provide information. According to the company it is not a target of investigation and similar subpoenas were sent to the publishers of numerous other smartphone applications.

Google has been fined 100,000 euros by the French data protection regulator for collecting private information from wireless networks when Google’s camera-equipped cars were gathering footage for online map service Street View.

In May 2010 Google was told by the Commission nationale de l'information et des libertes to cease tracking users’ data and turn over a copy of the information it had collected. This resulted in the fine announced this week.

In the course of a recent research it was found that a bug in the Apple iTunes service allows third parties to access private information about users such as what music, videos and apps they have purchased from the store.

Microsoft this week launched a release candidate of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) which is now complete. The final build is expected to come in a short time.

IE9 RC sports better and faster performance while requiring less memory. It also supports additional Web standards and the opt-in Tracking Protection that Microsoft has touted as its answer to calls for a Do Not Track feature in all browsers.

Facebook has posted a new message on its developer blog placing an entry titled "Platform Updates: New User Object fields, Edge.remove Event and more." In the passage the social networking giant explains that it gives access to mobile phones and home addresses of the users to the third parties.

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.

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.

Cellphone data captured from towers is protected under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution and accessing such information without proper sanction is deemed as illegal. Such a ruling was brought by a federal judge who broke the long line of similar cases when police wasn’t required to obtain search warrants based on probable cause before accessing the subscriber information.

Google received a preliminary approval of its $8.5 million settlement of a class action brought against Google Buzz. The preliminary approval was granted by federal district court Judge James Ware on October 7, and Google revealed the news with a press release on Tuesday. Google also took the unusual step of contacting all Gmail users via email.

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.

A group of customers filed a lawsuit against Ringleader Digital on the allegations that the company is abusing HTML5's local storage feature, using it to store a tracking "cookie" that can't be deleted when you delete your browser's cookies.

Websites use the HTML5 local storage feature to store certain data on user’s hard drive so as to allow them quicker access later on. Thus, a Webmail service could use this feature to store some of your inbox data on your hard drive, so that when you visit your Webmail inbox, it'll load more quickly.

According to a new poll from Consumer Watchdog a major part of Americans are very concerned about the privacy issues arousing from Google’s Street View data collection. Much covered reports about Google’s gathering private information from users’ WiFi networks make US consumers doubt in the efficiency of privacy protection measures implemented today, they want better privacy protections put in place.

Personal information of 100 million Facebook users is now available for download as a 2.8GB pack from torrents. The data of 1/5 of all Facebook users which includes e-mail addresses and phone numbers was uploaded by Ron Bowes of Skull Security who created the torrent using a Web crawler program, harvesting data from public profiles of users who have chosen not to change their privacy settings.