Internet Word of the Month – Hackerazzi

October 18, 2011

The rapid evolution of new internet related words is nearly as fast as the development of new technologies making it a struggle to keep up – even for dictionaries. To help you stay up to speed with this new techno-lingo, here’s our second word-of-the-month.

This month’s word? Hackerazzi…..

Have fun incorporating it into your lexicon!

Linda


Who has Primary Responsibility for Internet Safety, Security & Privacy?

October 18, 2011

If we could only figure out the answer to this question we could sue the irresponsible company, government entity, person, or standards body and get on with things – or not.

Unfortunately, the ugly truth is that we all share in the responsibility of protecting ourselves and others online – and like any project undertaken by committee things can get messed up.

There are five key stakeholder groups when it comes to protecting the internet: Industry companies & organizations; Governments & regulators; Law enforcement & oversight boards; Individuals & families; and Schools & other educational resources. Here is an overview of who should be responsible for which safety elements:

Government & regulators have primary responsibility to ensure internet services aren’t built without proper safety, security and privacy impact evaluations. Government is responsible to ensure clear regulations are in place and responsible for tightly monitoring products that impact consumers daily lives. It is the role of government to ensure these products are in compliance with baseline safety features, and this responsibility must extend to internet products and services; particularly since so many internet companies have demonstrated a failure to design, test and implement for safety, security and privacy.

Society has also tasked government with ensuring the dissemination of public service messages yet much of the current internet safety, security and privacy messaging fails to provide useful, actionable information. The result is that a high percentage of the population remains unaware of the safeguards they need to have in place to be safer online.

Government & regulators also have the primary responsibility of protecting consumer data. For most consumers, information posted and exposed by the federal, state, county and local government agencies represents your greatest risk of becoming a victim of identity theft.

There is a world of difference between requiring governments to be transparent in their actions – often called sunshine laws or freedom of information legislation – to guarantee access to data held by the government, and the wholesale exploitation of consumer’s information by posting birth, marriage, death, property, power of attorney, voter records, criminal records, and more online where individual criminals, would be stalkers, freaks or wholesale criminal organizations can leverage the data in a way that threatens the safety, security, privacy and financial stability of every man, woman and child in the country.

While I support “right-to-know” laws, these need to focus on government actions and stop at the door of private individuals.

Companies have primary responsibility when they provide consumers access to products or services that can hurdle them through cyberspace at warp speed, collect, trade, and sell consumer data. Unfortunately, feeding the bottom line wins out over protecting consumer interests in most cases and companies simply provide consumers access to services and urge them to go have fun; while make it nearly impossible to really understand the safety, privacy and security tradeoffs they’ve just made.

Companies have the primary responsibility to enforce their codes of conduct and ensure users have a reasonable level of safety and control over their data destiny. We hold amusement parks responsible for negligent conditions that allow injuries to occur, it is reasonable to apply the same standard to ‘virtual’ amusement parks. In their own online environments they must be the first line of consumer defense.

Companies have primary responsibility to post notices when a product is about to be expanded and to inform consumers about changes that will add new levels of safety and privacy. As companies rush to add great new features they too often cut corners. Being first with a feature, or a fast follower, requires tradeoffs and all too often the first thing cut and the last piece reluctantly added are safety, security and privacy elements that specifically help users manage their exposure.

Service providers will continue to innovate and this is good for everyone. However, consumers have the right to be informed about each new feature that affects their exposure to risk, and be able to determine whether the risk potential is appropriate for themselves and their families. Automatic ‘upgrades’ without notification can bear a strong resemblance to ‘bait and switch’. The Internet industry has for years promoted self-regulation of online tools & services, but they have largely failed to deliver adequate safeguards for consumers.

Here is a standard by which companies should be measured when considering whether they have stepped up to their responsibilities:

Consumer Internet Safety and Privacy Rights – A Standard for Respectful Companies

ALL Internet users have the expectation of a safe Internet experience, and respectful companies strive to provide quality safety and privacy options that are easily discovered and used by consumers.  Your safety and privacy, as well as the safety and privacy of your family on the Internet should be core elements of online product and service design.

In a nutshell, online consumers should demand these rights:

  1. Establishing safety and privacy settings should be an element in the registration, or activation of a specific feature’s, process.  This includes informing you in easily understood language about the potential consequences of your choices. This allows, and requires, you to make your own choices, rather than being pushed into hidden, default settings.
  2. During the registration or activation process, articles of the terms and conditions, and privacy policy, that might affect your privacy or safety, or that of a minor in your care, should be presented to you in easy to understand language, not in a long, complicated legal document in small font.
  3. You should expect complete, easily understood information and age appropriate recommendations about every safety and privacy feature in a product or service.
  4. You should expect to easily report abuse of the products or abuse through the products of you or someone in your care.
  5. You should expect a notice or alert if a significant safety or privacy risk is discovered in an online product or service you or someone in your care is using.
  6. The provider needs to publish on a regular basis statistics demonstrating how well the company enforces its policies.  Such statistics should include; the number and types of abuse reports, number of investigations conducted, and number and type of corrective actions taken by the provider.
  7. When services or products are upgraded, you have the right to be informed of new features or changes to existing features and their impact on your – or your child’s – safety or privacy in advance of the rollout.
  8. When the terms of use or privacy policy of any provider are about to change, you have the right to be informed in advance of the changes and their impact on your – or your child’s – safety and privacy.
  9. When a provider informs you of changes to their features, privacy policy, or terms and conditions, they should provide you with a clearly discoverable, way to either opt out, or block the change, or to terminate your account.
  10. When terminating an account, your provider should enable you to remove permanently and completely all of your personal information, posts, photos, and any other personal content you may have provided or uploaded, or that has been collected by the provider about you.

Law enforcement has primary responsibility to monitor society’s safety, prevent crime and bring to justice those who break the law. Yet, this is a tall order when adequate laws & regulations are missing to facilitate enforcement, adequate safety features weren’t built into the products to minimize the potential for exploitation, and there has been a critical failure to allocate the funding, training and resources law enforcement needs in order to provide the level of safety we expect.

Crime has always enjoyed better funding than law enforcement, but without assurances of basic safety the public will not be able to fully realize the tremendous opportunities the Internet has to offer – and criminals will run rampant.

Schools have primary responsibility for teaching youth and adults the tools and skills they need to be successful members of society. Mastering the Internet and the necessary safety security and privacy skills need to use the internet successfully are critical life skills. But, no one has taught teachers how to teach Internet safety, or provided a solid curriculum for classrooms. While on the one hand we seem flooded with ‘safety information’ there is a shortage of factual, practical, flexible and free information for consumers to take action on. To address this issue, the LOOKBOTHWAYS Foundation has created the NetSkills4Life curriculum. The first 4 lessons of the full K-12 interactive online and FREE curriculum is available to the public now, more lessons are being developed as quickly as possible.

Families have the primary responsibility of teaching their children how to become honest, ethical and capable adults. In today’s world that includes teaching our children to be honest, ethical and capable online. While this is a unique challenge that parents of previous generations have not had to master, it’s time to suck it up and learn how to pass these skills on to our children.

Technology advances and a parent’s job is to keep up. Did parents whine when cars were created and they had to teach their kids to drive and understand traffic safety? What about when phones were invented? Did parents throw up their arms and give up?   The internet has been a critical part of society for at least 10 years now so step up and learn; you don’t have to be a techspert (technical expert) to successfully help your children master the tools and responsibilities they need to be successful.

Parents have the responsibility to say YES to their children’s online activities. Far too many parents (and schools) take the kneejerk ‘no’ response route and this is perhaps the worst possible choice. Failing to allow youth to learn to use the internet sets them up to fail when they finally get out from under their parent’s reach.  Or it forces youth to sneak behind their parents back and use the internet without the support and guidance of a parent.

Instead, parents need to teach the skills and social responsibilities needed to use new online tools and when youth have demonstrated they have mastered both the skills and the responsibilities they need to be allowed to use the services that are appropriate for them. This also means that parents have the responsibility to respect the age restrictions placed on sites, and to teach their children to respect these age boundaries.

Individuals have the primary responsibility for their own safety and ethical use – certainly from the time they reach adulthood. Childhood is a transitional phase where children gain more responsibility as they show they can master situations. For example, while a 16 year old may not be ready to take full responsibility for their online security or privacy, they are ready to be held fully responsible for their online behavior towards others.

In spite of being able to identify the responsibilities of all these stakeholder groups, the internet has not become a safer place.

What’s missing? Commitment.  Each stakeholder group must become more committed and invest more in Internet safety, security, privacy, and in creating a positive online environment. Beyond that commitment each stakeholder group must deliver on three key action areas – providing education, creating a safer product, services and online environment infrastructure, and enforcing the safety, security, privacy, and respect of everyone online. This must happen in a far more coordinated method that is being employed today.

Integration of initiatives is complicated, but the level of collaboration required is not new. We’ve done it in other areas like road safety, drug safety, health issues, etc. it is past time that we put the same level of collaboration in place online.

Without synchronized efforts by all stakeholder groups the web of safety will continue to have gaps that far too many consumers of all ages will fall through.

Seen as a table, responsibilities look like this:

Linda


FTC Asked to Investigate Use of Supercookies

October 2, 2011

The House of Representatives bipartisan privacy caucus has asked the FTC to look into companies’ use of supercookies – which are like traditional tracking cookies on steroids.

A basic “cookie,” is a small file that websites install on consumers’ computers and other internet connected devices that allow the website or service to track the user’s online activities.  These cookies can be deleted by a user, effectively wiping out a website’s ability to track that user.

Supercookies on the other hand, are capable of re-creating users’ profiles even after people delete regular cookies, and these new tracking methods are almost impossible for computer users to detect, according to researchers at Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley and reported in the Wall Street Journal.

In a letter written by Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Tex.), the co-chairmen of the bipartisan privacy caucus, they state that the use of supercookies invades user privacy and may be a violation of the FTC’s unfair and deceptive acts guidelines.

Speaking on the subject, Barton said, “I think supercookies should be outlawed because their existence eats away at consumer choice and privacy.”

Among the companies researchers identified as having employed supercookies are MSN.com and Hulu.com; both companies have said they have since taken action to change their tracking.

It will be interesting to see how the FTC rules on supercookie technology implementations; we can only hope that consumer privacy comes out on top.

Linda


FTC: Trample Children’s Privacy, and You’ll Pay the Price

August 31, 2011

The FTC has levied a $50k fine against the developer of such children’s apps as Zombie Duck Hunt, Truth or Dare and Cootie Catcher, Emily’s Girl World, Emily’s Dress Up and Emily’s Runway High Fashion, for collecting information from children without first gaining parental consent.

W3 Innovations was charged with collecting and storing children’s email addresses and allowing children to post personal information on public message boards, a violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) which requires parental consent for data collection about or from a child under the age of 13.

The apps found in violation of COPPA laws were marketed towards children in the Apple App store where more than 50,000 downloads were made before the FTC discovered the company was encouraging children to independently enter personal data through the games according to an article on digitaltrends.com. Additionally, the Emily apps encouraged children to email comments to “Emily” on the Emily blog.

Jon Leibowitz, the chairman of the commission said in a statement, “The F.T.C.’s COPPA Rule requires parental notice and consent before collecting children’s personal information online, whether through a Web site or a mobile app. Companies must give parents the opportunity to make smart choices when it comes to their children’s sharing of information on smart phones.”

This marks the first mobile COPPA case the FTC has reviewed, and it is unlikely to be the last. While I wholly support the protection of children’s privacy and regulations around obtaining parental consent, the antiquated methods currently employed to gain this consent need some rethinking.

In an age of instant access, companies and parents must be able to exchange an information request and verifiable consent within moments or the experience for the child wanting to play a game is really poor.

Industry, it’s time to step up to better methods for authentication and approval, those who don’t will find their apps aren’t used.

Linda


47% of Consumers Are Underprotected when Banking Online

August 28, 2011

Consumers typically belong to one of three types of online banking behavior; and age plays a strong role in which type you belong to according to new research by McAfee that has been packaged up as a handy educational guide. Here’s how they break down the three types, and an overview of the advice McAfee gives to each group:

  1. “Competent But A Little Careless”: Ages 18-24This group is the most comfortable with technology but they tend to be overconfident, sometimes forgetting to put basic security practices into place.

    Advice: Smarten up; your confidence is not well placed. This group spends an average of 32 hours a week online, and because of their comfort level with technology, they confidently use new technologies – 44% prefer online banking. Yet 68% of users in this age bracket don’t even have a basic anti-virus program installed, and 41% have never heard of malicious software. Only 30% say they are actively protecting themselves. While this group is comfortable doing things online, they’re doing it without protection and are highly vulnerable to attack.

  2. “Confident But Casual”: Ages 25-45This group uses the Internet for both work and personal reasons and are the most frequent online banking users. However, they are sometimes casual about security.

    Advice: If you’re casual about security, you’re compromised. This group uses the internet heavily for work, entertainment, to make purchases…and to bank online. Those ages 31-44 do more online banking than any other demographic group, and they are more likely to get their financial information online. While this group is 5% more likely to use antivirus software than their younger counterparts, a 47% antivirus adoption rate is still shockingly poor. Unfortunately, this group’s faith in their security skills is likely to be a stumbling block as the majority believe they are doing enough to stay safe, with only 35% saying they needed more information.

  3. “Conservative But Cautious”: Over 45 years old This group is not as familiar as younger generations with technology, and a smaller portion use online banking. They tend to be more cautious when going online, and are in fact better protected than the other groups because research shows a higher percentage have security software.

    Advice: Though you are the best protected group, you need more security.  This group has a mixed track record in technology adoption as they don’t have as many connected devices, are less tech-savvy and spend less time online, but they are the group that spends the most on everything from their telecom fees to PC purchases. Younger boomers bank online, but those over 55 are far less likely to do so.  Fortunately though this group is the best protected by security software, it is also the group that knows they need more security information.

To learn the specific steps each target group should take, check out the full Online Banking Safety Guide, Graphics and Video on the McAfee blog.

Linda


Shame on LinkedIn; Don’t You Dare Put Me In Your Ads

August 16, 2011

100 million LinkedIn users may be in for a nasty surprise. Last week the company stealth added a feature to use your name and photo in advertising campaigns – and the company has set all users to accepting this abuse by default. This invasive feature came without any notice and it is a classic example of the really shoddy business practices that treat users with disregard.

Where was the announcement on user’s home pages informing you of the change and your choices? 

In one fell swoop LinkedIn joined the ilk of  Companies that change their terms of use and privacy policies without notice, add features that impact your privacy, security or safety without notice, that default (or later change) your settings to public.

These companies knowingly exploit you and your information for their next buck, and if this is what the company’s recent IPO represents, it will be time to dump the company.

Discovering how to opt out is ridiculously convoluted.

Not only does LinkedIn default you into their ad scheme without notice, opting out isn’t intuitive. To remove yourself from involuntarily becoming part of an advertisement take the following steps:

  1. Click on your name to see the dropdown with Settings
  2. Click on the Account option
  3. Select Manage Social Advertising
  4. Uncheck the box saying LinkedIn can use your name and photo in social advertising

Companies that respect their consumers work hard to give you full control over the information they collect and store about you. They are respectful of how they share any information about you and selective in choosing the companies with whom they share your information.

Respectful companies make it easy to understand their privacy policies and terms of use, notify you in advance of any significant changes to their terms or services, make it easy for you to remove your information from their sites and put strong measures in place to secure your data. Learn more about how respectful companies behave in my blogs Your Internet Safety and Privacy Rights – Standards for Respectful Companies, Privacy Policy Changes – Some Companies Get Notification Right, and Kudos to Groupon for Notifying Consumers of Privacy Changes – and Doing so in Advance of Rollout.

Right now, the public remains a sleeping giant, but naptime is over.

If you want a better internet experience, if you want to be respected, protected, secure and in control online it will only come by rewarding companies that do the right thing and letting companies disrespect you know you’re angry.

Trampling consumer privacy once is all any company should be able to get away with. If LinkedIn pulls a second stunt like this it will be time to dump the company – they will quickly figure out what that does to their IPO.

STORY UPDATE: LinkedIn responds to privacy uproar: LinkedIn is scaling back the level of detail it provides in its “social ads,” which showed if members in a users’ network followed certain products or services. In a blog post Thursday, produce management director Ryan Roslansky said that the company will now list how many members in a person’s network are following an advertised product instead of using individual profile pictures.

Chalk up one for the users – it’s not a perfect response, but certainly better than the full exploitation.

Linda


When it Comes to Online Ad Tracking, You Can Opt out Any Time You’d Like – But Can You Ever Leave?

August 16, 2011

Even when users take steps to opt out of online tracking, many ad companies still track their activity according to preliminary research findings by Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society.

As Arvind Narayanan, Postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Internet and Society puts it “A 1993 New Yorker cartoon famously proclaimed, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The Web is a very different place today; you now leave countless footprints online. You log into websites. You share stuff on social networks. You search for information about yourself and your friends, family, and colleagues. And yet, in the debate about online tracking, ad networks and tracking companies would have you believe we’re still in the early 90s — they regularly advance, and get away with, “anonymization” or “we don’t collect Personally Identifiable Information” as an answer to privacy concerns.

In the language of computer science, clickstreams — browsing histories that companies collect — are not anonymous at all; rather, they are pseudonymous. The latter term is not only more technically appropriate, it is much more reflective of the fact that at any point after the data has been collected, the tracking company might try to attach an identity to the pseudonym (unique ID) that your data is labeled with. Thus, identification of a user affects not only future tracking, but also retroactively affects the data that’s already been collected. Identification needs to happen only once, ever, per user.

Will tracking companies actually take steps to identify or deanonymize users? It’s hard to tell, but there are hints that this is already happening: for example, many companies claim to be able to link online and offline activity, which is impossible without identity.

Regardless, what I will show you is that if they’re not doing it, it’s not because there are any technical barriers. Essentially, then, the privacy assurance reduces to: “Trust us. We won’t misuse your browsing history.”  I highly recommend you read his full article.

Advertisers fund the internet – in exchange for personal information

Remember the dot.com bubble burst of 2000? It happened because internet companies built their content and services on one key concept – that we, the consumers, would subscribe to use their services. There was just one fatal flaw – consumers wanted everything to be free. But free doesn’t pay the bills, let alone turn a profit, and internet companies either went bankrupt or changed their revenue model to ad funded.

Reasonably, advertisers want a return on their investment for funding the internet and their primary requirement – as with any advertising – is to be able to segment internet user demographics so they don’t waste money marketing shaving cream to toddlers.

Internet companies quickly learned that the more targeted the ads could be, the more advertisers were willing to pay them for access to their users… from there it doesn’t take a leap to understand how we’ve come to a place where ads follow us , and behavioral advertising is the name of the game.

In theory you are able to opt-out, in reality you’ll never know

A do-not-track feature has been added to both the Mozilla Firefox and the Microsoft IE 9 browsers that supposedly allows users to check a box in their preferences indicating they do not wish to have their online purchases, browsing patterns, search strings, or personal information be tracked. Once checked, any website the user goes to receives notice of their preference.

However, there is no law requiring companies to respect consumers do-not-track preference, and according to Stanford’s research few websites comply with users requests for privacy; choosing instead to continue tracking the user without their knowledge.  They do so in at least 5 ways, as shown on Stanford’s website and paraphrased here:

1. The third party is sometimes a first party

Companies with the biggest reach in terms of third-party tracking, such as Google and Facebook, are often also companies that users have a first-party relationship with. When you visit these sites directly, you’re giving them your identity, and there is no technical barrier to them associating your identity with your clickstream collected in the third-party context.

2. Leakage of identifiers from first-party to third-party sites

In a paper published just a few months ago, Balachander Krishnamurthy, Konstantin Naryshkin and Craig Wills exposed the various ways in which users’ information can and does leak from first parties to third parties. Fully three-quarters of sites leaked sensitive information or user IDs. There are at least four mechanisms by which identity is leaked: Email address or user ID in the Referer header, potentially identifying demographic information (gender, ZIP, interests) in the Request-URI, identifiers in shared cookies resulting from “hidden third-party” servers, and username or real name in page title.

3. The third party buys your identity

Ever seen one of those “Win a free iPod!” surveys? The business model for many of these outfits, going by the euphemism “lead-generation sites,” is to collect and sell your personal information. Increasingly, these sites have ties with tracking companies.

When you reveal your identity to a survey site, there are two ways in which it could get associated with your browsing history. First, the survey site itself could have a significant third-party presence on other sites you visit. When you visit the survey site and sign up, they can simply associate that information with the clickstream they’ve already collected about you. Later on, they can also act as an identity provider to sites on which they have a third-party presence.

Alternately, they could pass on your identity to trackers that are embedded in the survey site, allowing the tracker to link your identifying information with their cookie, and in turn associate it with your browsing history. In other words, the tracker has your browsing history, the survey site has your identity, and the two can be linked via the referrer header and other types of information leakage.

4. Hacks

A variety of browser and server-side bugs can exploited to discover users’ social identities. The known bugs have all been fixed, but computer security is a never-ending process of finding and fixing bugs.

5. Deanonymization

So far I’ve talked about identifying a user when they interact with the third party directly or indirectly. However, if the mountain of deanonymization research that has accumulated in the last few years has shown us one thing, it is that the data itself can be deanonymized by correlating its external information.

The logic is straightforward: in the course of a typical day, you might comment on a news article about your hometown, tweet a recipe from your favorite cooking site, and have a conversation on a friend’s blog. By these actions, you have established a public record of having visited these three specific URLs. How many other people do you expect will have visited all three, and at roughly the same times that you did? With a very high probability, no one else. This means that an algorithm combing through a database of anonymized clickstreams can easily match your clickstream to your identity. And that’s in a single day. Tracking logs usually stretch to months and years.

Legislation pending

The unveiling of secret tracking has galvanized congress, the FTC and even the president. Bills have been proposed to create do-not-track lists with industry compliance requirements for all users, and for minors. The European Unions “right to be forgotten” model, which would give users the right to require companies to remove all of their information from websites, is coming into favor.

If your data privacy matters to you – and it should – don’t remain silent. Let your elected officials know you support legislation that gives you the ultimate control over your information.

Linda


Civil Rights Get Trampled in Internet Background Checks

July 27, 2011

The new ruling by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, that gives data mining companies like Social Intelligence Corp, legal coverage to archive years of consumers posts on social networks and sell this information to would be employers as part of their background checking service for job applicants is concerning on a number of levels.

These concerns include ownership of information, the meaning and value of privacy settings, the long-term impact on consumers – particularly minors who have a harder time thinking of the future when they are posting in the now.  But there is another aspect that also needs careful consideration, and this is the potential impact to our civil liberties.

Through hard fought battles in the 20th century, we gained the right to protection from discrimination based on gender, religion, race, color, national origin, age, marital or family status, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, political affiliation, financial status, and more. To protect these rights it became illegal for would be employers to even ask questions about these topics.

Today, would-be employers don’t have to ask the illegal questions of the candidate, the information is but a background check away if you ask the data miners to provide it. The very discrimination that civil rights were established to prohibit can now happen without an employer or company ever being at legal risk.

In January 2010, Microsoft conducted research on the expanding role of online reputation. One aspect of the research looked specifically at how recruiters and HR professionals use online information in their candidate screening process.

While I am not a lawyer, it would seem to me that some of these categories clearly fall outside the boundaries of information that is legal to ask in an interview.

It would also seem to me that some of the sites being searched by recruiters and HR professionals – or by their proxies the data miners providing background information – are inappropriate.

If it is illegal to ask questions with discriminatory repercussions, shouldn’t it also be illegal to ask data mining companies to provide this information? To claim that soliciting this information from data mining companies – or by recruiters, HR personnel, or hiring managers – is somehow different than asking the applicant questions seems like splitting hairs.

To be clear, as the Microsoft study shows, the collection of information via the internet that can be used to discriminate against potential candidates was being done years in advance of the FTC’s ruling, but that ruling legitimizes a very concerning practice. At a minimum, shouldn’t information that would-be illegal to ask be removed from any background information served to would be employers?

Linda


Kudos to Verizon and Phonebooks.com for Deleting Cell Phone Numbers from Directory

July 20, 2011

In a significant win for mobile consumer’s privacy, Verizon wireless has worked with Phonebooks.com to remove cell phone numbers from the internet phone directory company’s service. Phonebooks.com has been the only to offer free cell phone number information.

Verizon has a history of actively opposing publication of mobile phone numbers, and this collaboration with Phonebooks.com to take a joint stance supporting consumer privacy is fantastic news for users.

From the joint press release:

“Even if a consumer’s mobile number is obtained lawfully by Phonebooks.com, we believe that Verizon Wireless customers should have the opportunity to provide informed consent before it is published,” said Steve Zipperstein, vice president of external affairs for Verizon Wireless. “We are pleased that the leadership team at Phonebooks.com agrees that the safety and privacy of all consumers is a high priority.”

“Our wireless phone database was provided at no charge, to benefit the public and assist people in finding the information they were looking for,” said Aaron Rosenthal, president of Phonebooks.com. “While anyone, at any time, was free to remove themselves from this directory, we understand that some people may have specific privacy concerns in regard to their cell phone number. The feedback we’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive. However, the concerned minority cannot be overlooked.”

To help raise awareness regarding this and the ways cell phone numbers are collected, Phonebooks.com has launched a ‘Question & Answer’ website, CellPhoneNumber.com. The site allows visitors to ask a cell phone related question; it also maintains an ongoing poll to help gauge the public’s interest in the existence of a cellular directory.

Step up and vote NO.

That last sentence in the press release should give you cause for concern – as should the current voting tally. If 90% of respondents continue to want a cell phone number directory Phonebooks.com may change their position.

Your job is to make sure your voice is heard. If you want to protect your privacy take 4 seconds RIGHT NOW to vote. http://www.cellphonenumber.com/. Then take 4 more seconds to virally ask all your friends/tweeps/associates/family, etc. to do the same.

Linda


The Always Up-to-Date Guide to Managing Your Facebook Privacy

July 9, 2011

The first sentence of this article on LifeHacker says it all; “Keeping your Facebook info private is getting harder and harder all the time – mostly because Facebook keeps trying to make it public.”

With 700 million users – and the parents of users – valiantly trying to keep up with Facebook’s ever shifting exposure tactics (a.k.a. their privacy policies) checking the Always up-to-Date Guide to Managing your Facebook Privacy by Whitson Gordon should become a recurring monthly calendar event.

I’m serious. Given the rate of new feature rollouts/information exposure opportunities, a once-a-month check to ensure you aren’t sharing as much as Facebook would like needs to be as automatic as paying your bills.

If you’re a Chrome user, you’d be wise to also consider downloading the free Internet Shame Insurance app created by another Lifehacker, Adam Pash. This tool “adds privacy reminders to Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail to help you avoid the most common online communication faux pas. The extension sits in the background and springs into action only when you’re about to post a status update or reply all.”

My only point of disagreement with Gordon’s Always Up-to-Date Guide is with the sentence ,“Despite plenty of user complaints, Facebook still hasn’t caught on to the “opt-in” philosophy”. This isn’t a dull-witted or slow moving company that still hasn’t caught on to respecting consumer’s privacy. Rather it’s a company who knows damn well the wishes of its users but blatantly chooses to ignore these in favor of more revenue.

To learn more, see my blogs Privacy Policy Changes – Some Companies Get Notification Right and Your Internet Safety and Privacy Rights – Standards for Respectful Companies.

Linda


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