Tag Archives | Privacy

How to Tell Me You Let Somebody Steal My Personal Information

I’ve been getting a lot of urgent messages from major companies I do business with lately. Urgent messages telling me that information I gave them has been stolen by unknown parties.

Yup, I’m not only a PlayStation Network member–and therefore a victim of the current Sony security breach–but also a customer of at least three companies (Marriott, TiVo, and 1-800-Flowers) who were involved in the recent data theft from marketing company Epsilon. I wrote about this for my new TIME.com Technologizer column, But after reading all this correspondence, I have some advice for the corporate entities who send these e-mails. (I care about this stuff in part because I have the uneasy feeling I’m going to be getting a lot more of these messages in the future.)

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Apple Responds to the iOS Location-Logging Discovery

It took a week, but Apple has published questions and answers about the discovery that iOS devices keep an unencrypted file with months of data that can be used to figure out where the device has been. It does a good job of explaining what the data is (a subset of a database of Wi-Fi hotspots, some of which may be up to a hundred miles from where the device is), what it’s used for (pinpointing the device’s location more quickly than can be done with GPS alone), and why it stores so much data and does so even if you shut off location services (because it’s buggy). It also confirms that Apple can’t use the data to track you–it sees it only in anonymous, encrypted form. And it says it’s collecting anonymous traffic data for a service–built-in turn-by-turn navigation?–which it plans to release eventually.

Apple says that it’ll release an update in the next few weeks that collects less data and none at all if location services are turned off, and doesn’t back it up to iTunes. And in the next major iOS revision, it’ll encrypt the data on the device.

Was reaction to all this overblown? Yes, since some of it suggested that Apple had access to data it could use to track individual consumers, a scenario that the evidence didn’t support. But it’s important that we know what our phones know about us. The researchers who wrote about this did Apple customers a favor–and they seem to have done Apple a favor, too, by finding bugs in iOS.

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Smartphone Users are Concerned About Privacy

In light of the news that iOS4 likes to track your every move, Nielsen’s poll results released Thursday appear especially prescient. The firm found that a majority of both women and men have privacy concerns when it comes to check-ins and location-based apps on their smartphones.

Women appear a bit more concerned about the issue, with 59 percent saying so versus 52 percent of men. Concerns about big brother watching you seemed to build with age: those 25-34 showed the least concern (half of all respondents), which increased to 63 percent of those 55 and older.

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Your iPhone Logs Where You’ve Been. Why?

Where have you been lately? If you’ve got an iPhone or a 3G iPad, it knows. And two researchers have discovered that these devices store a record of your locations in an unencrypted file that gets backed up to your computer.

The researchers says that the information seems to be based on cell-phone tower triangulation, not GPS. They’re going to discuss what they’ve found at today’s Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, California. They’ve also released an open-source Mac application that maps out information from the file. That’s data for the iPad 2 I’ve been using at right, correctly showing that it’s been all around the Bay Area and also visited Austin, Texas.

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More Pointless Privacy Trolling Over Color

As if the Chicken Little “the sky is falling” privacy recriminations over the Color photo-sharing app since last week’s launch weren’t enough, privacy advocates are ready to pounce once again. This time a security researcher says that the application is vulnerable to “geolocation spoofing,” essentially meaning a user could fake his location to view images at that location.

Veracode chief technology officer Chris Wysopal is the man behind this latest statement, and said the spoof is done by use of a unofficial third-party app on a jailbroken iPhone. Of course, the whole flaw is dependent on that — normal iPhones would not be susceptible to this as Apple would never let such an app in the App Store. Most iPhones aren’t jailbroken.

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Voyurl: A Cool, Creepy Way to Browse the Web

Want to see every website that I’ve visited over the last day or two? Sign up for Voyurl, and then knock yourself out.

Voyurl is a web service that obliterates the conventions of privacy on the Internet. Once you’ve signed up for the service and installed an extension in Firefox, Chrome or Safari, it tracks your every move and automatically posts your history on the web. You’re free to look at the browsing history of all users in one giant timeline, and you can follow specific users as well.

Yes, there are privacy safeguards. At any time, you can shut the extension off, stream your history anonymously or just share links on a site-by-site basis. But the main idea behind Voyurl is that there’s nothing wrong with sharing your activity on the Internet or snooping on the activity of others. (Voyurl’s motto: “It’s okay to look.”)

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Once Again, Facebook Will Share Personal Data with Third Parties

Social networking site Facebook created quite a stir last month when it announced that it would share much more personal details of its users — such as addresses and phone numbers — with third party developers. The move was so controversial that the company quickly reversed its plans and delayed the offering while it weighed its options. It also attracted the ire of Congress.

In a response to Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), the company now says it plans to go ahead with offering the functionality. “We expect that, once the feature is re-enabled, Facebook will again permit users to authorize applications to obtain their contact information,” the company wrote, adding it was looking into ways to “further enhance user control.”

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