privacy

Delegates to a United Nations summit agreed today that a U.N. body should take a more "active" role in shaping the future of the Internet, a move that had been opposed by the United States and its allies that had warned of greater government control.

The agreement by delegates from the International Telecommunication Union's 192 member nations, a majority of whom raised their placards in support of the language, took place after 1:30 a.m. local time in Dubai. It came after the head of the ITU, a U.N. agency, had promised not to … Read more

Facebook has pulled the plug on community voting, following an anemic voter turnout, and today's new privacy changes in the aftermath of that decision bear ill tidings for consumer privacy.

For one thing, though not even 700,000 of the more than 1 billion Facebook subscribers voted, nearly 88 percent of those who did vote cast their ballot against the changes. But Facebook's not likely to listen to them.

Facebook is rewriting a lot of its policies to make them easier to understand, surely a noble act. Options like being able to ask somebody who's tagged you … Read more

Get ready -- Facebook is making changes to how users access its privacy settings, again. The social network hopes this latest overhaul will make the now bloated process easier to understand, according to a blog post today from Sam Lessin, a director of product for Facebook.

The changes, which come a day after Facebook implemented its new privacy polices, are mainly cosmetic. Facebook is not changing what settings you can set, except for the option to block searches of your profile within the social network. The network has already begun phasing out this feature and soon it will be removed … Read more

The developer of a mobile app for children temporarily pulled the free game from the Apple App Store and Google Android Play store today after learning it was the subject of a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission.

Mobbles, a geolocation game in which children collect and care for virtual pets, collected personal information such as e-mail addresses without parental consent, according to a complaint filed yesterday by the Center for Digital Democracy. The federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requires Web site operators to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children younger than … Read more

It's official. The independent auditor Facebook hired to double-check its latest vote has confirmed the vote count, and Facebook's new user polices go into effect today.

In addition to adding language that lets Facebook share your data with affiliates, like Instagram, and providing clarification on how it uses your data for advertising, the new policy also does away with the voting practice entirely.

While it's all over for voting, Facebook said it still wants to hear from users.

"We hope you'll stay vocal and involved," Elliot Schrage, Facebook's VP of communications, said in … Read more

Sometimes it takes a little nudge to do what we know we should.

After a blogger disclosed that photo-sharing service Path was uploading and storing people's complete contacts lists without having asked permission, user outrage ensued. A month later, a group filed suit against Apple, Path, Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, and eight other sites for doing the same.

The scandal led to Apple saying any apps that collect user contact lists without permission are in violation of its app guidelines. It then rolled out a software change to begin actively enforcing stronger contacts protection.

At the time, Path founder Dave … Read more

In February 2012, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a report titled Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures are Disappointing (PDF) that pointed out that there was "little or no" privacy information available to parents in the Android Google Play and Apple iOS app stores prior to download and scarce data in the apps themselves or on the app vendors websites.

And on Monday, the FTC issued a follow up report, Mobile Apps for Kids Disclosures Still Not Making the Grade that complains that "despite many high-visibility efforts to increase transparency in the mobile marketplace, little … Read more

Update, 12:10 p.m. PT: Well, it's past noon PT. Facebook hasn't officially called it yet, but a look at the Facebook app tallying votes, show only 588,923 votes cast. That's not nearly enough to make the decision of users stick.

So much for a quasi-democratic Facebook. So far, the social network's users haven't cast anywhere near enough votes to preserve users' ability to veto Facebook's policy changes.

Facebook users have until noon today to vote on Facebook's recently proposed policy changes relating to data use and privacy. Unless at least … Read more