WICHITA, Kan. – A Facebook user in Kansas has filed a federal lawsuit against the social networking giant, claiming it violated wiretap laws with a tracking cookie that records web browsing history after logging off of Facebook.
Smartphone apps have come under increasing scrutiny in the last year, with a growing body of research and reporting showing that companies provide little information about what — or how — user data is collected and shared
Despite promising that they won’t reveal users’ personal data, some of the most highly trafficked Web sites transmit usernames, email addresses, addresses, and even birth dates to ad networks and other third parties, a new study confirms
Please click here to read a guest post by FPF’s Jules Polonetsky for steps consumers can take to protect their privacy before downloading apps.
GPS navigation and cellular-signal triangulation can help us to find our way around — or to help someone else find us. If you happen to be a lost pet, an Alzheimer’s patient or a small child, that’s a good thing.
But what about the rest of us? Where do we stand legally in terms of being tracked by cellular carriers, smartphone app makers or the government?
This feature enables marketers and website owners to provide effective privacy regulations on a global basis. In conjunction with the BrightTag ONE platform, the new offering provides a privacy toolkit that enables brands to:
CHICAGO, IL, Nov 16, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — BrightTag, a technology platform provider for the digital marketing industry, today announced the general availability of BrightTag ONE-Click Privacy, a new feature for brand marketers and website owners using the BrightTag ONE(TM) server-direct integration platform for data collection and distribution
Yesterday, the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Tracking Protection Working Group released the first public working drafts of a proposed “Do Not Track” (DNT) standard. According to the W3C’s press release, the group seeks to find the appropriate balance to “address both the privacy concerns of users and regulators, and the business models of the Web, which today rely heavily on advertising revenue.”
The Working Group released two documents for related standards: The “Tracking Preference Expression” standard and The “Tracking Compliance and Scope Specification.” The Tracking Preferences Expression standards would enable users to verify whether or not the user has a preference to allow tracking of the user’s online activity, as well as a way to decipher whether the website will honor the user’s preferences. The Tracking Compliance and Scope Specification aims to provide websites with practices to comply with a DNT preference.
These documents are still in the very early stages of development and there are many issues that the group must work through before a consensus is reached, such as defining “tracking” for the purposes of the standards. Some early consensus agreements however, do seem to be emerging around the idea that the DNT focus is primarily on third party tracking. (Although the bounds of what it means to be a “first party” and whether a first party has any obligations are still being debated).
FPF is a member of the W3C multi-stakeholder group with a range of people from companies such as Adobe, Apple, Deutsche Telekom AG, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Stanford University, The Center of Democracy and Technology, The Nielsen Company, TRUSTe, W3C, and Yahoo!. Also participating as invited experts, are representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Consumer Watchdog, the German Independent Center for Privacy Protection (ULD), and Leiden University. “We are confident that this multi-stakeholder group has gathered the key participants who can ensure that a DNT standard advances individual privacy in a technical and business practical manner,” said FPF’s Jules Polonetsky in support of the release. The final standards will be released in mid-2012.
Mozilla recently reported that over a two-month span (September and October 2011), 5.6% of users have turned on DNT on their Firefox web browsers while 17.1% of users have turned on DNT on their Firefox mobile browsers. Mozilla has also indicated that it will not enable DNT by default. For a list of companies that already respect the DNT header, see http://donottrack.us/implementations.
-Lia Sheena
Being on Facebook always had its risks. You register, sign in and built yourself a pretty neat profile, but if you forget or are oblivious to making some adjustments to your privacy settings, you can be pretty sure that everybody might have access to your personal information and whatever you post on the site (ranging from pictures to the latest YouTube video).
FPF co-chair Chris Wolf blogged yesterday about the recent industry Report on privacy rules as a potential impediment to trade, the APEC agreement on cross-border data flows and Obama Administration official Danny Weitzner’s warning against overly restrictive privacy rules and the benefits of enforceable industry codes of conduct. The blog post is available here.