RSS feed for this sectionArchive | Privacy
FTC Estimates Google’s Privacy Hack Earned Up To $4 million
One of the things you hear when companies try to minimize the impact of privacy violations is an attempt to claim there was no financial harm to consumers. However, in an interesting development the Federal Trade Commission is now publicly estimating that Google’s hack around Apple’s Safari browser privacy settings earned the Internet giant up to $ 4 million.
Continue reading...Google Claims Another Wi-Spy “Mistake” After Breaking Promise
27. July 2012
Google admitted Friday to the British data protection authorities that it failed to keep its promise to destroy data its Street View cars sucked up from private Wi-Fi networks. True to its form throughout out the Wi-Spy scandal, the Internet giant claimed it was all a mistake.
Continue reading...They’re Finally Getting Google’s Number
24. May 2012
Consumer Watchdog has long held the view that Google’s executives are hypocrites, claiming their mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, while remaining deeply secretive about the company’s activities. It wasn’t a popular view of the Internet giant. I think many people used to see Google as a […]
Continue reading...Google Forging Ahead With New Policy Despite More Objections; Fines Needed
28. February 2012
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.
Continue reading...Google faces questions from Congress; session should be public
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.
Continue reading...EPIC Files Suit To Block Google’s New Data Policy
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.
Continue reading...Google’s Sad LA Saga Draws To A Close
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.
Continue reading...Pushing for online privacy on the East and West Coasts
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 […]
Continue reading...FTC ‘carefully monitoring’ online tracking
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 […]
Continue reading...We need a right to be forgotten
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 […]
Continue reading...
1. October 2012