privacy

Charter drops controversial customer tracking plan

Internet service provider Charter Communications announced Tuesday that it was indefinitely suspending the use of a controversial tool to track its customers' movement on the Web.

Charter, the fourth-largest cable operator in the U.S., announced in May that it would use technology from a company called NebuAd to monitor some of its broadband customers' Internet habits to provide advertisers with information to target online ads to individual customers. Privacy advocates had likened the service to Internet wiretapping.

"Our customers are always our first priority," Charter said a statement. "As such, we are not moving forward with … Read more

The 404 124: Where Fox News is giving us something good to talk about

In a follow-up to our newest "It came from Fox News" segment, actual Fox news anchor Clayton Morris drops by the studio today and dishes out his views on digital privacy in the workplace, making the switch, the perpetual woes of iPhone ineptitude, and the ancient practice of group shaving. If that isn't enough, we also conclusively prove that living well is the best revenge. EPISODE 124 Download today's podcast

Ask.com caves to Google's privacy pressures

Ever the publicity hound nipping at Google's heels, Ask.com has issued an open letter to the public about adding a privacy policy link to its home page.

The letter highlights the fact that, weeks ago, several privacy groups asked Google to play up the privacy policy on its start page. The search giant didn't immediately add the link.

So Ask, the No. 4 search company, said Wednesday that it will take the step first.

"As of today, Ask.com has added a direct link to our privacy policy via a 'Privacy' link prominently placed right on … Read more

Let go of my texts--all 75,000 of them! The 9th Circuit speaks

Being an attorney with an iPhone, I've wondered about the privacy of my SMS-text messages and whether they can be withheld from prying eyes. I don't mean that dinner date across from you, but in a larger sense. Think about what we've all begun to say via text messages: Carrie Underwood got dumped this way and Detroit's mayor was brought down by his text messages, for example. Like it or not, texting has become a communication medium that is here to stay, meaning that the contents of those messages are also susceptible to legal discovery, i.… Read more

Leaked AOL search logs take stage in new play

Imagine every question you've typed into an Internet search engine suddenly appearing online for the world to scrutinize. What would the queries say about you? Would the world view you as totally mundane? Totally bizarre?

Would your search log be intriguing enough to draw thousands upon thousands of viewers?

Brat Productions, a theater company in Philadelphia, found one such search string more than compelling enough to form the basis of its new play, User 927.

The show--which opened Wednesday and runs through June 22--is based on a now infamous real-life search log that included queries ranging from "purple … Read more

Google grab bag: Blurry faces and more

It's tough to stay on top of Google, but I thought I'd draw some attention to some developments involving the search powerhouse.

• More Street View with more privacy: One year into Google's launch of the Google Maps feature to show a driver's-eye view of the world, Google added 37 new cities, including Atlanta, Buffalo, N.Y., Ann Arbor, Mich., Fresno, Calif., and Cincinnati. It effectively doubles the coverage of Street View, engineer Jiajun Zhu said in a Google LatLong blog posting.

In addition, Street View face-blurring technology that first was tried with Manhattan imagery now … Read more

What ever happened to our privacy?

Am I living in a world where privacy doesn't matter? One where my right to do what I want within legal boundaries is stymied by the incorrigible desire to spy on me and know exactly what I'm doing at all times? One where the world is a big fish bowl and I'm swimming around trying desperately to find a private place?

It certainly looks that way.

A new study from Northeastern University secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States by monitoring their cell phone use and found that most people rarely travel more than a few miles from their home.

I'm not too sure why anyone really cares how far people travel from their homes, but this study does raise one important issue: Northeastern University researches tracked individuals without their knowledge with total disregard for privacy concerns. Obviously heeding the advice of legal counsel, the researchers conducted the study in "an industrialized nation" so they wouldn't be tracking US citizens while in the same country.

According to the Associated Press, "Researchers used cell phone towers to track individuals' locations whenever they made or received phone calls and text messages over six months. In a second set of records, researchers took another 206 cell phones that had tracking devices in them and got records for their locations every two hours over a week's time period."

Unbelievable.… Read more

Study tracking people via cell phone raises privacy issues

Updated 12:34 p.m. PDT to correct the attribution of the cellular phone tracking story. The story that focused on the privacy issues was written by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press.

Cell phone usage tracked in an undisclosed industrial nation revealed a majority of users tend to remain close to home for months at a time, according to a study conducted by Northeastern University and cited Wednesday in the journal Nature.

While the study of 100,000 cell phone users in a country outside the U.S. demonstrated that 75 percent remained within a 20-mile radius of their … Read more

MySpace, Yahoo blame bad APIs for celebrity photos breach

Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan's private MySpace photos are all over the Internet now, thanks to a glitch in the bad APIs.

While the not-so-publicity-shy stars probably won't mind, and none of the photos are all that racy (except for the one of a fully dressed, provocatively posed Hilton in a tanning booth), there's a lesson for us all in this social network privacy flap du jour.

"Anything you upload to a public Web site is not private; it's public. Even if you think it is password protected," says Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer … Read more