user privacy

German authorities again go off into hysterics with Google and impose a strict ban on any use of Google Analytics tool by businesses on the grounds it violates people’s privacy. Furthermore, a report in the Wall Street Journal says that Germany terminated any talks on the matter with the Mountain View without even deigning to inform the company about it.

"Google says it wasn't aware that discussions with German officials had ended, and that it was actively working to address their concerns," reports Christopher Lawton.

New data provided by a website called What the Internet knows about you shows that today browsing the Internet implicates exposure of your personal information starting from news articles you read and ending with the Zip Code.

The new report reveals that about 76% of users exposed their browser histories, with the proportion of those using Apple's Safari and Google Chrome browsers even higher. Surprisingly, the percentage was also higher among browsers that turned off JavaScript.

Facebook is facing serious indignation on the part of its users and Internet community on the whole as its features break all thinkable rules of respect for users’ privacy. This week Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a 38-page complaint against the company with the Federal Trade Commission, demanding that Facebook cancel new features introduced in mid-April that compel users to share more information than before. The filing was joined by other 14 privacy and consumer protection groups.

On Tuesday the search engine giant Google unveiled a new tool that shows the number of requests the governments make to receive private information about the users of the website. The tool showed that Brazil and the US were on the top of the list by the number of demands. Thus, Brazil sought information 3,663 times in the last six months of 2009 followed by the US with 3,580.

A new website was launched to allow users and experts to review online and mobile apps for privacy and security. WhatApp.org was introduced by the Stanford Center. M. Ryan Calo, a residential fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, has helped design WhatApp.org. The resource has been created to help reduce the risk of computer hacking, identity theft, spam and phishing.

The reviews on the website are written by lawyers, computer scientists, and privacy and security experts from Stanford and other institutions.

Kirk Skaugen, Intel vice president, said that the hardware maker will not follow the software developments anymore, instead it will lead the market.

"We learned our lesson in waiting for software. We did this 64-bit thing that was perceived to be a little bit late relative to the market. So we will get the hardware out there as soon as it's ready," Kirk Skaugen of Intel's Architecture Group told a group of analysts and reporters gathered in San Francisco Tuesday morning for the rollout of the Xeon 7500 and 6500 series (née Nehalem-EX) server processors.

In a move to protect privacy of the Internet subscribers in the United States fierce competitors Microsoft and Google have joined their forces and teamed with over 20 other technology providers and lobby groups from the right and left of US politics to update a US privacy law. The law was written in 1986, which was not even the start of the era of the web, email and mobile phones.

A survey commissioned by US advertising network trade body the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) showed that behavioral advertising is more efficient than non-targeted internet advertising while it is also more expensive. The study was performed by former US consumer protection official Howard Beales.

The survey revealed that targeting ads cost advertisers 2.68 times what normal 'run of network' ads do. Run of network (RON) ads are those placed across the entire inventory of websites that an ad network is contracted to provide ads for.

During this week Phorm was asked to exclude domains and websites and refrain from scanning the pages of several resources at once. The first one who took this view was Amazon. The Open Rights Group supporteded the bookseller's decision. The ORG has written to Microsoft, Google, Facebook, AOL/Bebo, Yahoo! and eBay asking them to take similar action and protect their users.