Posts Tagged ‘privacy’
May 17th, 2010, 7 comments
Maintaining your privacy online isn't as simple as Pirillo puts it, but his tweet made me laugh, because it's such an important point. Awareness and prudence are more critical than any piece of software or privacy setting when it comes to protecting your personal data. Over at Fast Company this week, I took a stab at the most important things you can do to protect your privacy online. It's common sense, worthy of repetition.
Online Privacy: Check Yourself (Before You Wreck Yourself) [Fast Company]
April 28th, 2010, 5 comments
Just because you've set your Facebook profile to "Friends only" access doesn't mean someone who is not your friend can't see it. One of the most confusing aspects of Facebook's privacy settings is an area where you specify what information your friends can share about you through applications and web sites, even parts of your profile you made private.
By default, regardless of how private your Facebook profile is, your friends can share the following pieces of information about you, straight from the screenshot on the right: Personal Info (activities, interests, etc), Status updates, Online presence, Website, Family and relationship status, Education and work, My videos, My links, My notes, My photos, Photos and videos I'm tagged in, About me, My birthday, and My hometown.
This whole friends-can-share-private-things by default can lead to some awkward situations, like one I ran into last week.
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Update Your Google Account Password Recovery Options
December 19th, 2009, 3 comments
Now that you're auditing your online account security, log into your Google account(s) and visit the Account Recovery Options page. Here you can update your secret question and answer, your secondary email address, and even associate your mobile phone number with your account so you can get a password recovery code via text message. (Just a tip: don't set your Google Voice number as the phone number or automatically forward mail from your secondary email accounts to your Gmail account--if you do, in the event that you lose your password, the recovery process won't work.)
Bruce Schneier’s Answer to Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Privacy
December 9th, 2009, 6 comments
"...if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable." This is what you say in response to "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." (via)
Google: “Faces are objects that can be recognized”
December 7th, 2009
Now that you can point your cameraphone at an object and get Google search results back about that image, what about photographing a stranger and getting Google results back for his or her name? With facial recognition in Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, that doesn't seem far-fetched. Today Google confirmed that the search engine could recognize faces based on photos, but they decided not to enable that functionality until they "work through issues of user privacy." (These quotes may not be exact; pulled from Danny Sullivan's liveblog of Google’s Web Search “Evolution” Event today.)
June 19th, 2009, 1 comment
What I love most about my friend Penelope Trunk's Twitter feed (and all her writing) is that it's raw, personal, and hilarious. But I imagine getting served with legal documents that involve a printout of it wasn't so hilarious.
Yahoo Search as an Alternative to Telling Google Everything
May 20th, 2009, 2 comments
Seems a foregone conclusion that Google's the best search engine on the web, but at this point, there's not that much of a gap between the second-place engine, Yahoo, and the big G. This morning over at Lifehacker I confessed that amidst all my Gmail, Google Voice, Android, Google Docs, and GCal usage, I pointed my web search keyword at Yahoo to break Google's monopoly on my personal data. Resistance isn't futile!
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