I was recently complaining to a teller at my bank that the another bank down the street had given my three-year-old daughter a stuffed horse for nothing more than walking past the front door. I jokingly asked her what gifts my own bank would be willing to offer to compete for the affections of my daughter. Then I said, “Oh, you probably don’t like it when I mention the competition when I’m in here, eh?” More »
Seems like everyone is lining up to take shots at the search giant. Besides lawmakers investigating how it will use the unified data and regulators investigating whether the company prioritises its own services in search results, a public interest group is now suing to prevent Google from implementing its privacy policy changes. More »
Path faced a privacy flap when it was revealed that the company was uploading users’ address book data to its servers without permission. While it stopped doing that and deleted all the data it had stored, a larger issue remains. More »
Facebook is a privacy disaster. Nobody with an iota of sense really trusts it to respect their privacy. Which is precisely one of Path’s big selling points: It’s got better privacy. Or so it seemed. But then it surprised everyone. Updated. More »
Normally, focus groups only require a few hours of your time, with a free lunch and a little bit of money for your troubles. Google now has plans to start focus grouping as well, except that they’ll only give you a $US5 Amazon gift card in exchange for letting them spend three months observing your browsing habits. More »
To most people that know him, Max Schrems is a typical law student from Austria. To Facebook, he is a massive pain in the arse. Outsmarting their attorneys, bombarding them with legal complaints and forming activist groups, he plans to transform Facebook’s privacy policy in Europe. More »
While searching for a way to create an OS X app for Path’s social network, hacker Arun Thampi stumbled on to something that could raise privacy issues with the app. More »
Three years ago, Ars Technica discovered that when you “deleted” your photos, they were still kept on Facebook’s servers, and anyone with a static URL could still access it. Three years later, Ars Technica revisited the matter and found little has changed. But Facebook says that things will be different… eventually. More »
Well this is mildly terrifying: according to a new Pew study, the Facebook privacy mode a lot of us rely on for photos and status updates is, on average, anything but private. Time to reconsider your settings, everyone. More »
According to Apple, the iMessage bug we posted yesterday isn’t really a bug. It’s a rare incident caused by an employee’s overeagerness to help a customer. More »
