Everything privacy
If you work for IBM, you are welcome to bring your iPhone 4S to work with you but forget about using Apple’s voice driven digital assistant, Siri. IBM has banned the use of Siri on all of its networks due to concerns over privacy. Siri works by sending anything you ask it to a data center in North Carolina; after that, no one really knows exactly what happens with that data once it has been dealt with.
This week Twitter announced a new version of its "Who to Follow" feature, making it a far more personal recommendation engine. The way it works, however, is that if you're logged into Twitter in the web browser, any site that calls Twitter code -- like a Tweet or Follow button -- can report your presence on that site back to Twitter. Gadget sites. Car sites. Movie sites. Porn sites. Gaming sites. Any. Site.
Here's how to turn it off.
Foursquare has revoked API access to the iOS app Girls Around Me, forcing them to take their tracking app down from the Apple App Store. This follows a scathing editorial on Cult of Mac in which the privacy implications of the app were called into question. The Russian developer, i-Free, has since issued a statement claiming that they've done nothing wrong, and that they're only using APIs on Foursquare and Facebook to enable users to find the names and locations of girls and guys nearby.
The new column. It comes after last week's column 2. If that confuses you, just call it the column (3rd edition). Yeah, I went there. It's been a heckuva week so cut me some slack. We've all been running on equal parts adrenalin and recklessly strong coffee and might soon be going into a collective apoplexy not dissimilar to what I'm sure faced the CEOs of rival tablet manufacturers sometime Wednesday afternoon. Yeah, I went there too. Here's why...
For a long time now, Apps have been able to access your Camera Roll as long as you give the app permission to access your location. The reason it needs that permission is that there may be geolocation (GPS) date included in your photos, and Apple protects that. Once you grant the location permission, however, the app has unfettered access to your photos and can do pretty much anything it wants with them, including great things like applying filters, doing edits, and sharing via social services. That's how all the popular photography apps work.
With the upcoming release of OS X Mountain Lion, Apple will be fully integrating Twitter social sharing across all of their included apps, as well as extending a developer API for 3rd party apps available through the Mac App Store. This follows similar integration in iOS 5 last year and leaves one huge, lingering question: where's the Facebook integration?
Google can keep track of everything you've ever searched for using their Web History service, even if you've cleared the browser history on your iPhone, iPad, or PC. Now that Google is changing their privacy policy -- which some view as an excellent simplification and standardization and others see as a disturbing data grab -- it means your search results won't be kept separately but potentially shared with each and every other Google service.
California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris announced today that Apple has agreed to better protect iOS users' privacy by disclosing the permissions an App Store app will require before a user downloads or purchases an app.
Google is facing an inquest after it was discovered that it had been bypassing Apple’s Safari privacy settings on its Mac and iOS platforms. Google, Vibrant Media Inc., WPP PLC's Media Innovation Group LLC and Gannett Co.'s PointRoll Inother advertising companies have been tracking the web browsing habits of Safari and Safari Mobile users even though Safari has built in security protection to prevent that from happening.
After the whole mess with social networking app, Path, uploading Contact data from iPhone users without asking, the U.S. Congress has started to get involved. Energy and Commerce Committee member Henry Waxman and Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade Subcommittee member G. K. Butterfield issued an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook asking some probing questions regarding the iOS developer agreement.
