Articles about Privacy

For the past three years Google has released transparency reports, which loosely translate to tattling on the government and other entities that attempt to extract information from the search giant. None are likely happy with this reporting, but it is all public record and fair game.

"Today, for the seventh time, we’re releasing new numbers showing requests from governments to remove content from our services", states Google's legal director Susan Infantino.

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Not every business embraces BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). The reasons for rejecting it are usually down to security concerns -- firms are understandably worried about their data falling into the wrong hands if the device gets lost or stolen once it leaves the building.

Security specialist Symantec surveyed 236 attendees at this year’s Symantec Vision, its annual user and technical conference held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, to find out how companies were handling BYOD, and despite the small sample size the results were interesting:

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As we all recap the Boston bombing and manhunt events in our minds, looking for lessons learned, the one that sticks out in my head is the value of surveillance cameras. They were essential to catching the perpetrators and doing so quickly. More aggressive use of them might have resulted in even faster capture, and the civil rights and privacy concerns people express about them are hysterical overreaction.

The value of surveillance cameras was obvious almost immediately after the event. I remember many experts interviewed predicting that they would be used to narrow down suspects rather quickly. In fact, you don't need an expert to understand this. The only people who didn't seem to understand it well were the Tsarnaev brothers. They stayed in town and tried to go on with their lives, indicating that thought they wouldn't be detected. They must have freaked out when they saw their pictures on the news, but they still didn't get out of Dodge.

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Your privacy is Microsoft’s priority. At least that’s what the software giant is saying. According to Ryan Gavin, General Manager, Windows, the company takes its responsibilities for protecting your privacy very seriously.

To prove this, Microsoft is launching a new consumer awareness campaign focused on online privacy. There’s a special information and tools page at www.Microsoft.com/YourPrivacy (which is so private it doesn’t currently exist), and an ad campaign to "kick start awareness and conversation".

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Every time you create, modify or access a folder on your PC, Windows records these details in the Registry. There’s nothing shady about this -- the action is a key part of recording your folder view settings, and maintaining a list of your favorite folders -- but it does introduce a privacy risk, as snoopers can use the data to track some of your PC activities.

Exactly how much information is exposed here will vary, but if you’re not already familiar with the issue then it makes sense to check your PC with the free ShellBag AnalyZer & Cleaner. There’s no adware, no installation required, just download and launch the program and in a few seconds you’ll have the full picture.

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Anonymous proxies can be a very useful privacy tool, hiding your IP address from websites, and perhaps allowing you to bypass local restrictions on the websites and pages you can visit.

The technology can also be complicated, interfering with your regular network settings, and drastically cutting your online performance, of course. But Freegate proves that it doesn’t have to be that way.

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Dropbox adds features gangbusters in an effort to compete with rivals like SkyDrive, which is now built into Office 2013 and will get deeper Windows integration when "Blue" is released. Now Dropbox for business has announced it will be adding single sign-on, or SSO, a feature the company claims is near the top of the request list from business users.

Dropbox's Anand Subramani claims the company is working with Ping Identity, Okta, OneLogin, Centrify, and Symplified to make this new feature a reality. If a company has already built its own SAML-based federated authentication process then it will work with Dropbox also. Once logged in to your system, there’s no need to sign in to Dropbox separately. Subramani also promises that "using the industry-standard Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), this implementation of single sign-on integrates easily with any large identity provider your company may use as long as it also supports SAML".

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Here’s the contradiction: you need secure, unique and hard-to-remember passwords to protect your online (and offline) accounts from being hacked. However, remembering those secure, unique and hard-to-remember passwords is another matter entirely. Thankfully there is a solution, and it’s called a password manager.

There are dozens of password managers to choose from, but in this guide we’ll showcase four of the better ones, ensuring that you set safe, secure passwords without having to worry about remembering them.

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Last month Google released a transparency report revealing how often law enforcement inquires about users' private data. Hint: it's more often than you want to believe. Not to be outdone, today Microsoft posts its own data, which the company refers to as the "2012 Law Enforcement Requests Report".

While the number of requests may seem staggering, there is some perspective to be had in all of this. First the raw data reported -- "Microsoft and Skype received a total of 75,378 law enforcement requests. Those requests potentially impacted 137,424 accounts". Sounds rather high doesn't it?

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Google is characterized in some many different ways. While some of us look to the Mountain View, Calif.-based company as our savior, others refer to it in terms like "Skynet" -- the computer and artificial intelligence system that runs the world in the Terminator movie series. That latter reputation is one Google tries hard to change; Transparency Reports are example.

Today, Google's Legal Director, Richard Salgado, announced that the company will be adding National Security Letters to its report. "When conducting national security investigations, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation can issue a National Security Letter (NSL) to obtain identifying information about a subscriber from telephone and Internet companies", stated Salgado.

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Browser password manager LastPass 2.0.20 has been released for all major web browsers. The new release, also available for 64-bit versions of Windows is accompanied by the LastPass for Windows 8 app, which gives users access to their LastPass account directly from the Modern UI interface in Windows 8.

Version 2.0.20 now automatically calculates the user’s security score and displays it next to the Security Challenge link in the user’s vault. It also extends support -- albeit in beta -- to the Maxthon web browser.

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After I left school I went into sales. And one of the first things I was taught was this: never disparage the competition. Never say bad things about them -- even if what you’re saying is true, or you believe it to be at least -- because it makes the firm you’re representing seem petty and small.

Clearly this is a lesson Microsoft needs to learn. The firm’s marketing department, in particular whoever came up with the Scroogled campaign, is doing its best to turn the Redmond, Wash.-based technology giant into a petty, whining child, complaining about a rival rather than championing its own products. Instead of shouting triumphantly, "Use Outlook.com because it’s great and has all these benefits", Microsoft is reduced to grumbling, "Don’t use Gmail because it reads your emails". It’s not an aggressive information campaign as some people have described it. It’s a sad and frankly pathetic strategy.

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Microsoft's efforts to downplay Google's Gmail over its own Outlook.com service are well known amongst the tech crowd. In late-November the Redmond, Wash.-based corporation claimed that a third of new Outlook.com signups were people switching from Google's email service, and after the web giant dropped support for EAS, Microsoft quickly advised Gmail users to make the same switch. Now Microsoft is at it again, launching a new crusade titled "Don't Get Scroogled by Gmail".

The purpose of the campaign, according to the software firm, is to "educate consumers that Google goes through their personal emails to sell ads". Don't Get Scroogled by Gmail is aimed at American Gmail users and is supported by a GfK Roper study commissioned by Microsoft that found "70 percent of consumers don’t know that major email providers routinely engage in the practice of reading through their personal email to sell ads", with a vast majority of people, 88 percent, disapproving of this practise once the information was brought to their attention.

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According to Symantec, businesses are increasingly at risk of insider IP theft, with staff moving, sharing and exposing sensitive data on a daily basis and, worse still, taking confidential information with them when they change employers.

A new survey conducted by The Ponemon Institute, and based on responses from 3,317 individuals in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Brazil, China and Korea, shows that half of employees admit to taking corporate data when they leave a job, with 40 percent saying they intend to use the data in their new position.

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Open-source password management tool KeePass 2.21 has been released. Version 2.21, also available as a standalone portable build, adds a number of new features, including a hex viewer mode, support for a user-defined group separator in the Generic CSV Importer and various tweaks, improvements and bug fixes.

KeePass is designed to act a single, central repository for a user’s sensitive data, from logons to credit card details. This information is encrypted with a single, master password, allowing the user to securely lock away their personal details when not required.

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