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Blog Post
Google Forging Ahead With New Policy Despite More Objections; Fines Needed
Posted by John M. Simpson
Google is forging ahead with its plan to launch its new privacy and data handling policies this Thursday despite objections from regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.
Blog Post
Google faces questions from Congress; session should be public
Posted by John M. Simpson
17. February 2012
Google is facing more questions from Congress. The Internet giant’s deliberate circumventing of privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser — that’s the one used on iPhones and iPads — is prompting the outrage. The deliberate privacy breach was discovered by Stanford University researcher Jonathan Mayer and reported first by The Wall Street Journal.
Blog Post
EPIC Files Suit To Block Google’s New Data Policy
Posted by John M. Simpson
9. February 2012
Our friends at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) went to court Wednesday to block Google from combining data gathered from its various services without users’ consent.
Blog Post
Google’s Sad LA Saga Draws To A Close
Posted by John M. Simpson
13. December 2011
Google’s sad saga of missed deadlines and unfulfilled promises in attempting to provide the City of Los Angeles with a “cloud” based email and collaboration system appears to be drawing to a close.
Blog Post
Pushing for online privacy on the East and West Coasts
Posted by John M. Simpson
4. November 2011
The week began for me at meetings in the heart of geekdom in Silicon Valley and concluded with consumer and privacy advocates meeting in New York City. The two sessions are more related than you might first think. The New York meetings, convened by the Consumer Federation of America, were an off-the-record session for consumer [...]
Blog Post
FTC ‘carefully monitoring’ online tracking
Posted by John M. Simpson
19. August 2011
I just received an encouraging letter from the Federal Trade Commission assuring me that its Division of Privacy and Identity Protection is “carefully monitoring the privacy issues associated with online tracking.” The letter, from Maneesha Mithal, the division’s Associate Director, was in response to our recent complaint about companies who said they would not track [...]
Blog Post
We need a right to be forgotten
Posted by John M. Simpson
12. August 2011
I remember as a young newspaper reporter going to different jurisdictions where public records were kept and putting together background information on an individual. I had to have a compelling reason to do it, because although the records were public, it took considerable effort to gather the information. With the Internet and the advent of [...]
Blog Post
Is Google adding a default security setting?
Posted by John M. Simpson
9. August 2011
One of the dangers of using public Wi-Fi networks at coffee shops and the like is that anybody else on the network can read your email, Facebook postings, search requests and easily hack into your account unless the data is encrypted. The most common is SSL encryption using the HTTPS protocol. If you use it, [...]
Blog Post
Should you believe what Eric Schmidt says or what Google does?
Posted by John M. Simpson
25. July 2011
Actions speak louder than words. That’s why I’m not putting much stock in what Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt says anymore.
Blog Post
Google’s Do Not Track answer doesn’t track
Posted by John M. Simpson
3. June 2011
If you follow a company closely, like I follow Google, there is no better place to remind its executives of your continued interest than the company’s annual shareholders’ meeting. It keeps them on their toes. I own a couple of shares of Google stock, so I headed up to Mountain View Thursday to attend the [...]
Blog Post
Google claims it doesn’t understand what Do Not Track means
Posted by John M. Simpson
23. May 2011
I’ve just seen what has to be the lamest excuse ever to come out of the Googleplex. Apparently Google hasn’t implemented a Do Not Track mechanism on its Chrome browser, because, according to one of the Internet Giant’s top privacy lawyers, Keith Enright, the geeks in Mountain View “need more granularity and a more reasonable [...]
Blog Post
Senate “tussle” is good for privacy
Posted by John M. Simpson
19. May 2011
There can’t be anything better than having legislators compete to answer popular demand for better privacy protection. Hauling tech executives in and asking them to explain themselves never hurts. Twice in two weeks is even better.
Blog Post
Sen. Blumenthal demands answers on Wi-Fi privacy
Posted by John M. Simpson
18. May 2011
The forty-state probe by attorneys general slowed after then Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal was elected to the U.S. Senate, but he clearly hasn’t dropped his concerns. In a letter this week to the chief executives of Microsoft, Google, Apple, Research in Motion, Skyhook Wireless and Nokia, Blumenthal writes that widespread use of smartphones “raises [...]
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Consumer Watchdog’s Carmen Balber discusses Internet privacy and the need for an online “Do Not Track Me” list.
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28. February 2012