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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.

Feds investigating makers of cell-phone apps for kids

More than 20 percent of the apps examined included links to social media services, meaning children could post comments, photos, or videos that could harm their reputations or offend other people.

The government is investigating whether software companies that make cell phone apps have violated the privacy rights of children by quietly collecting personal information from mobile devices and sharing it with advertisers and data brokers, the Federal Trade Commission said Dec. 10.

Such apps can capture a child’s physical location, phone numbers of their friends, and more.

The FTC described the marketplace for mobile applications—dominated by online stores operated by Apple and Google—as a digital danger zone with inadequate oversight over online privacy. In a report by the FTC’s own experts, it said the industry has grown rapidly but has failed to ensure that the privacy of young consumers is adequately protected.…Read More

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How a lone grad student scooped the government—and what it means for your online privacy

The FTC is ill-equipped to find out, on its own, what companies like Google and Facebook are doing behind the scenes, a ProPublica investigation reveals.

(Editor’s note: As the FTC tries to protect consumers’ online privacy—by publishing a report targeting the data-collection practices of mobile apps for kids, for instance, and launching a voluntary Do Not Track program for tech companies—an investigative report from the nonprofit journalism service ProPublica reveals how hamstrung the agency is in these efforts. Here’s ProPublica’s report, which was co-published with Wired.)

Jonathan Mayer had a hunch.

A gifted computer scientist, Mayer suspected that online advertisers might be getting around browser settings that are designed to block tracking devices known as cookies. If his instinct was right, advertisers were following people as they moved from one website to another even though their browsers were configured to prevent this sort of digital shadowing. Working long hours at his office, Mayer ran a series of clever tests in which he purchased ads that acted as sniffers for the sort of unauthorized cookies he was looking for. He hit the jackpot, unearthing one of the biggest privacy scandals of the past year: Google was secretly planting cookies on a vast number of iPhone browsers. Mayer thinks millions of iPhones were targeted by Google.…Read More

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FTC drops Google StreetView inquiry; other countries, not so much

The Federal Trade Commission has ended its inquiry of Google and the data it collected from unsecured wireless hotspots, citing the company’s improved privacy policies, reports ZDNet. Not only will the FTC not fine Google, but regulators “had received assurances from Google that it ‘has not used and will not use any of the payload data collected in any Google product or service, now or in the future.’” If only Google could get off so easily elsewhere in the world. In Italy, Google is facing tough new requirements for marking the StreetView cars and registering their itineraries, while the Czech Republic has banned the StreetView program entirely and Germany insisted upon a system by which homeowners could opt out of the service (244,000 households did, by the way)…

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Schools fall victim to P2P security breaches

 

Sharing files over unsecured P2P networks can result in data breaches.
Sharing files over unsecured P2P networks can result in data breaches.

 

Peer-to-peer file sharing in schools and colleges has come under scrutiny again after a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) probe turned up massive security breaches that made student grades, Social Security numbers, and medical records accessible to anyone connected to the peer-to-peer networks at several institutions.…Read More

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