News & Commentary

Today, Google and the authors and publishers who sued Google are hoping that United States District Court Judge Denny Chin will approve their settlement and allow Google to launch the world's largest digital library and bookstore combined.

Google's new Buzz service triggered a wave of criticism last week when it launched with serious privacy holes. While the company has moved to address some of those concerns, CEO Eric Schmidt seems to be missing the point, stating that the problem was that Google "did not understand how to communicate Google Buzz and its privacy. ... There was a lot of confusion when it came out on Tuesday, and people thought that somehow we were publishing their email addresses and private information, which was not true."

Facebook recently announced that it was rolling out tools that would give users more granular control over content posted via third-party applications. More flexible privacy controls are always a welcome step, but this move does not address the privacy flaws with Facebook's third party application platform that are highlighted by our Facebook Privacy Quiz. Please demand that Facebook protect your information from third party applications!

Earlier this week, Google released Buzz, a social networking extension to its Gmail and Gchat services. But the biggest buzz about this new service concerned its privacy problems. Fortunately, Google showed once again that when you Demand Your dotRights and tell companies to respect your privacy, they will respond. Keep up the pressure and tell Google that Buzz still has some problems to fix!

Google and the NSA. It is hard to imagine a more potent–or frightening–combination when it comes to the collection and safety of Americans' private information.

On January 28, the Federal Trade Commission held its second "Exploring Privacy" roundtable to discuss privacy concerns raised by technology. In anticipation, we blogged about it generally, and explored two of the panel topics in detail (cloud computing and social networking).

Facebook is once again rolling out changes to its user interface, including new Applications and Games Dashboards that it says will "mak[e] it easier for you to find and interact with applications." And, once again, these changes affect your privacy: now other users can easily find out which applications you use, whether that's a popular game, a dating app, or our Facebook quiz. Just like the changes that made Friends Lists and Fan Pages part of your "Publicly Available Information" (PAI) that could not be restricted or made private in any way (though Facebook later relented and allowed you to hide your Friends List on your profile–but only if you hide it from everyone!), this takes information that was hard to find and puts it front and center.

Reposted from ACLU National

Recently I wrote about the allegedly Chinese cyber attack on Google and how it highlighted a point that the ACLU and security experts have been making for years – that creating government backdoors into our communications network for the purpose of surveillance creates security problems.