Privacy

The first in a series of meetings to decide concrete enforcement terms for President Obama's digital "Privacy Bill of Rights" has just been announced for July 12, 2012, and its focus is on mobile apps.

The National Communications and Telecommunication Administration (U.S. Department of Commerce) has decided that it's time to put President Obama's Privacy Bill of Rights into practice.

To begin, they've just invited all "privacy stakeholders" to "generate robust input" for the first consumer data transparency code of conduct.

NTIA has selected mobile app transparency as the focus of the first privacy multi-stakeholder more

Facebook has removed an app called "Verify Your Account" that attempted to trick people by posing as an official Facebook message.

"This app has been disabled," a Facebook spokeswoman confirmed via email. "We take action against apps that violate our platform policies as laid out here: https://developers.facebook.com/policy/, in order to maintain a trustworthy experience for users."

A colleague got a notification from a friend more

Apple will offer users a way to manage which applications have permission to access their contact information as part of a new privacy control panel that's coming in iOS 6.

The feature comes in tandem with a new privacy pop-up that asks whether users want to give a particular application access to contacts, as pointed out by MacRumors today.

Apple said it would add such a feature as part of a "future software release," back in February, though the company did not specify when exactly that would be.

At the company's annual developer conference earlier this week, Apple more

Digital photographs, whether they come from your point-and-shoot camera, dSLR, or your smartphone, contain hidden data. Most of the data is harmless, like the model of the camera and settings used in the shot. You might, however, want to limit the sharing of GPS data, which could reveal where you live, work, or where your kids go to school.

If you want to keep all the data intact, but make a scrubbed copy to share safely, you more

Two hacking groups have taken aim at two very distinct targets in a data dump on Pastebin.

First up, the hacking organization known as SpexSec today posted the passports and visa information of more than 200 suspected terrorists. In a posting on Pastebin, the organization said that it hopes the data will help the U.S. "close down on some investigations."

"Like we promised, our primary suspects include the U.S Government for torturous and deceptive acts on our own soil, the Educational system for exuberantly being blown-over and belligerently not patching the holes in their system, and anybody else more

He rocketed to privacy stardom over two decades ago with the release of PGP, the first widely available program that made it easy to encrypt e-mail. Now Phil Zimmermann wants to do the same thing for phone calls.

Zimmermann's new company, Silent Circle, plans to release a beta version of an iPhone and Android app in late July that encrypts phone calls and other communications. A final version is scheduled to follow in late September.

This time around, Zimmermann is facing not the possibility of prison time on charges of violating encryption export laws, but a more traditional challenge: more

So few people voted on proposed changes to Facebook's privacy and user rights policies that even though most of the votes were against the changes the company will be adopting the revised policies after all.

Only 342,632 people participated in the vote, which ran for a week and ended this morning, according to a blog post announcing the official results on the Facebook Site Governance page. That's less than 1 percent -- .038 percent to be exact -- of the total 900 million active monthly Facebook users. The results would be binding only if 30 percent of more

Three companies have warned users in the last 24 hours that their customers' passwords appear to be floating around on the Internet, including on a Russian forum where hackers boasted about cracking them. I suspect more companies will follow suit.

Curious about what this all means to you? Read on.

What exactly happened?
Earlier this week a file containing what looked like 6.5 million passwords and another with 1.5 million passwords was discovered on a Russian hacker forum on InsidePro.com, which offers password-cracking tools. Someone using the handle "dwdm" had posted the original list and asked others more

LinkedIn said today that it has contacted police about the compromise of its users' passwords that hackers were actively cracking earlier this week.

"Yesterday we learned that approximately 6.5 million hashed LinkedIn passwords were posted on a hacker site. Most of the passwords on the list appear to remain hashed and hard to decode, but unfortunately a small subset of the hashed passwords was decoded and published," Vicente Silveira, a director at the professional social-networking site, wrote in a blog post. "We are also actively working with law enforcement, which is investigating this matter."

The damage appears to be more