Earlier this week Carrier IQ representatives met with officials at the FTC, FCC, and with the staff of a number of Senators. For more details about Carrier IQ please read my eCommerce Times column “Carrier IQ and the US’ Escalating Privacy Risk Level.” The Washington Post reported that Carrier IQ Andrew Coward (senior vice president [...]
Google has a team of 60 engineers, & Microsoft has 40 people, fully devoted to avoiding violation of privacy laws in the US and around the world. At a recent legal seminar executives from Google and Microsoft described how many resources they devote to privacy law compliance. Google’s senior privacy attorney Keith Enright said that [...]
After the US government filed charges that Facebook violated US privacy law, Facebook finally confessed that it failed to protect the privacy of its 800 million active users. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) welcomes the public to submit comments on the settlement through December 30, 2011. Under the proposed consent order, which does not include [...]
US citizens expect the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to protect the country from potential threats, but the recent announcement that DHS will monitor Twitter & Facebook will surely cause privacy advocates great concern. Social Media has been used extensively in the government uprisings world-wide and DHS is now drawing up guidelines to monitor Social Media. [...]
My eCommerce Times column for October is entitled “Shore Up Your Privacy Policy Before Disaster Strikes” and I encourage you to read it. Actually it was published the same day as my blog that more than 7.5 million children under 13 are on Facebook. Since the Federal Trade Commission regulates Internet privacy in the US and [...]
A report in the Financial Times that Alibaba might take over Yahoo! has raised privacy fears. Jack Ma’s (Alibaba founder & former Google employee) recent comment about the prospect that Alibaba was interested in Yahoo! set off privacy group alarms as reported by the Financial Times: "Lawmakers should oppose a deal where the data of [...]
Effective in December 2011 OnStar GPS navigation-and-emergency-services company will collect vehicle data for those customers who terminate their agreements. The 10 page OnStar Privacy Statement states that: Unless the Data Connection to your Vehicle is deactivated, data about your Vehicle will continue to be collected even if you do not have a Plan. It is [...]
A new lawsuit against Google for Internet location tracking highlights my recent eCommerce Times column that Internet privacy may not be possible. The new class action lawsuit brought by Jon Pessano and others asserts that Google uses its location marketing database to generate billions of dollars in location based ad revenue. The lawsuit is based [...]
Two recent Pennsylvania State Court rulings only make things more confusing as Social Media privacy disputes become more prevalent. Bucks County Common Pleas Court Judge Albert J. Cepparulo ruled in Piccolo v. Paterson denied a motion to require the Piccolo to accept Patterson as a Facebook friend. In this case Piccolo was injured in an [...]
Not only was Google’s roll out of Buzz in 2010 badly received by the user community, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a Complaint for Google’s violation of its own Privacy Policies: …Google launched its Buzz social network through its Gmail web-based email product. Although Google led Gmail users to believe that they could choose [...]