Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

Facebook may release more user data: students

U.S. social media group Facebook seems ready to publish categories of data it collects from users, an Austrian student group lobbying for stricter privacy rules said on Tuesday, Reuters reports. Facebook had agreed in December to overhaul privacy protection for more than half a billion users outside North America after a three-month investigation found that its privacy policies were overly complex and lacked transparency.

“This (data) access issue as well as having disclosed all the data categories they are holding about users is something where we found some progress,” Max Schrems, spokesman for the europe-v-facebook.org group, told reporters after meeting Facebook representatives in Vienna on Tuesday…

Click here for the full story…Read More

Facebook faces flak over privacy changes

Facebook's updated privacy policy has attracted national attention.
Facebook's updated privacy policy has attracted national attention.

A Washington, D.C.-based privacy advocacy group and nine other organizations have filed a complaint against Facebook over the online social network’s latest privacy changes.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) said it has asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into the changes Facebook has made to its users’ privacy settings and to force Facebook to restore its old privacy safeguards. The changes, unveiled last week, include treating users’ names, profile photo, friends list, gender, and other data as publicly available information.

The complaint says the changes diminish user privacy by disclosing personal information to the public that was previously restricted. (See “How to protect your privacy on Facebook.”)…Read More

How to protect your privacy on Facebook

Keeping information private on Facebook is easy if you follow several steps.
Keeping information private on Facebook is possible if you follow several steps.

Over the past week, Facebook has been nudging its users to review and update their privacy settings. The site has given users many granular controls over their privacy, more than what’s available on other major social networks. Still, in updating their privacy settings, several users might have made more information about themselves public than what they had intended.

If you want to stay out of people’s view, but still want to be on Facebook, here are some things to look out for as you take another look at your settings. (See “Facebook faces flak over privacy changes.”)

1. Some of your information is viewable by everyone.…Read More