private data

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)

Sony PlayStation Network has not been hacked, according to a new statement made by the company in a blog post. Sony spokesperson Patrick Seybold says that the PlayStation Network wasn’t hacked so much as threatened yesterday when a password exploit accessible through its PSN web page login page came to light.

“We temporarily took down the PSN and Qriocity password reset page,” wrote Seybold, quickly adding “Contrary to some reports, there was no hack involved.”

A new research found that cellphones based on Android platform fail to encrypt users’ data sent to Facebook and Google Calendar. Rice University professor Dan Wallach conducted a simple exercise for his undergraduate students where he connected a packet sniffer to his network and observed the traffic sent to and from his Android handset when he used various apps available for Google's mobile platform.

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.

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.

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.

According to a new research four major browsers fail to remove users’ personal information even when they browse in a private mode. While privacy settings provided by the browsers should supposedly allow users to visit a website without leaving any trace on their computers, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari frequently leave tracks, according to the research, which is scheduled to be presented at next week's Usenix Security Symposium in Washington DC.

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.

In light of ubiquitous privacy violations practiced by social media websites like Facebook many venture capitalists are seeking to invest into start-ups that deal with the privacy protection and certification of the web resources that meet high standards in this area. Thus, tech companies are starting to capitalize on a potentially profitable market – privacy protection. According to the Wall Street Journal many investors are financing new companies that want to work with preventing the personal information from unauthorized access and improper use.