A group of nine scientists and doctors recently sued the US government claiming that their personal Gmail accounts were under federal surveillance which led to harassment or dismissal for Food & Drug Administration (FDA) employees who were whistleblowers. The Washington Post reported that the FDA: …secretly monitored the personal e-mail of a group of its [...]
Since 92% of adults use search engines every day means that they share volumes of information with Google, who dominates searching, 66.4% in the US and 80% in the EU. No one was surprised when Pew Research reported that 92% of adults search daily, but what Google does with our personal information changed on March [...]
Privacy is a hot topic for users of Facebook, Google, and other Social Media sites, so the White House has proposed the following Bill of Rights for legislative consideration: 1. INDIVIDUAL CONTROL: Consumers have a right to exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it. 2. TRANSPARENCY: Consumers [...]
Although Google claims its new Privacy Policy helps simplify privacy, the EU claims otherwise and specifically that the new Privacy Policy “makes it impossible to understand which purposes, personal data, recipients or access rights are relevant to the use of a specific service.” The EU gave the lead to investigate Google’s new Privacy Policy [...]
Path confessed that it took users’ address book data without permission when the app loaded and admits it “made a mistake.” As part of its confession Path declared that it deleted all data it illicitedly collected. On Path’s About page it claims that its app accounts for “two million people sharing life with close friend [...]
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a Motion to enjoin Google from implementing new ToS and Privacy Policies on March 1, 2012. On February 8, 2012 EPIC filed a Motion for Temporary relief against the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce Google’s March 2011 Agreement Containing Consent Order which included the FTC’s oversight on Google’s [...]
Privacy continues to be hot news, just look at Facebook’s S-1 disclosures in its Initial Public Offering (IPO) which among a myriad of “Risk Factors” includes this statement about privacy laws: Our business is subject to complex and evolving U.S. and foreign laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, and other matters. Many of these [...]
EU officials announced that the new Google Privacy Policies may not insure compliance with EU laws and asked Google to halt these changes pending an investigation of the implications of personal data protection. Google’s new Privacy Policies are scheduled to go into effect on March 1, 2012 and the New York Times reported that EU authorities [...]
My video interview about business risks concerning Internet Privacy Policies is very timely since Google just announced a radical change in its Privacy Policies. You are welcome to view the video interview “Privacy Policies: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You” thanks to my friends at Financial Management Network (& parent SmartPros Ltd.). Of course [...]
A Judge in Boston sealed the court records after a brief hearing challenging the District Attorney’s subpoena to Twitter to get the identity of certain accounts. The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the subpoena and was very disappointed in the sealing of the records. The New York Times reported: The police in Boston and the [...]