New campaign targets online privacy for children and teens

New campaign says legislature must support children's online privacy.
Common Sense Media's new campaign asks schools to do more to teach students about online privacy.

Amid growing concern about how much information students are revealing about themselves in their personal profiles on social networking web sites and other online services, the national child advocacy group Common Sense Media is asking adults, parents, and teens to help make a stand for online privacy by demanding that companies provide an “opt-in” feature for sharing the information of all children under the age of 18.

Common Sense Media’s national campaign, called “Do Not Track Kids,” began from what the group considered to be startling statistics about online privacy.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 50 of the most popular U.S. web sites are placing intrusive tracking technology on visitors’ computers—in some cases, more than 100 tracking tools at a time. Fifty sites popular with U.S. teens and children placed more than 4,000 “cookies,” “beacons,” and other tracking technologies on their sites, the Journal reported—and that’s 30 percent more than were found on similar sites aimed at adults.…Read More

Do students need more online privacy education?

One privacy expert says colleges should stress internet-use policies in the aftermath of the Rutgers suicide.
One privacy expert says colleges should stress internet-use policies in the aftermath of the Rutgers suicide.

Privacy advocates say the rules regarding internet privacy and appropriate online behavior should be stressed at colleges and universities, especially among incoming freshmen, in the wake of a Rutgers University student’s suicide after a video of him having sex was posted on the web without his consent.

A lawyer for Tyler Clementi, who was a freshman at Rutgers in New Brunswick, N.J., confirmed that Clementi had jumped off the George Washington Bridge last month. Clementi’s suicide came days after the student’s private sex acts were made available in an online broadcast set up by two students—Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, both 18—who were later charged with invasion of privacy, according to Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce J. Kaplan.

The investigation began “after Rutgers police learned that the camera had been placed in the 18-year-old student’s dorm room without permission,” according to a Sept. 28 release from Kaplan’s office. Kaplan said Wei was released after surrendering to Rutgers University Police Sept. 27. Ravi was released on $25,000 bail.…Read More

Rutgers student kills self after sex act broadcast online

Two Rutgers students have been charged with invasion of privacy for the acts that reportedly led to a classmate's death.
Two Rutgers students have been charged with invasion of privacy for the acts that reportedly led to a classmate's death.

A Rutgers University student jumped to his death off a bridge a day after authorities say two classmates surreptitiously recorded him having sex with a man in his dorm room and broadcast it over the internet.

Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge last week, said his family’s attorney, Paul Mainardi. Police recovered a man’s body on Sept. 29 in the Hudson River just north of the bridge, and authorities were trying to determine if it was Clementi’s.

ABC News and the Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., reported that Clementi left on his Facebook page on Sept. 22 a note that read: “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” On Sept. 29, his Facebook page was accessible only to friends.…Read More

Facebook Places: Marketing tool or educational asset?

UK's Facebook Places ad campaign guides students to an educational web site.
UK's Facebook Places ad campaign guides students to an educational web site.

The University of Kentucky, if all goes according to the campus’s marketing plan, could pop up in 1.3 million Facebook news feeds during the fall semester—and students might just learn something about maintaining online privacy in the process.

The Lexington, Ky., university placed six-foot wooden Facebook Places logos in six campus locations with the heaviest foot traffic to encourage students to “check in” using Facebook’s geo-tagging application, which lets users show friends where they are—the campus library, for instance.

Places, which is similar to geo-tagging services Yelp, Gowalla, Booyah, and Foursquare, launched in August and drew skeptical reviews from many in higher education. Facebook users must opt into Places before the application displays the person’s location.…Read More

Code that tracks users’ browsing prompts lawsuits

Sandra Person Burns used to love browsing and shopping online. Until she realized she was being tracked by software on her computer that she thought she had erased, reports the New York Times. Ms. Person Burns, 67, a retired health care executive who lives in Jackson, Miss., said she is wary of online shopping: “Instead of going to Amazon, I’m going to the local bookstore.” Ms. Person Burns is one of a growing number of consumers who are taking legal action against companies that track computer users’ activity on the internet. At issue is a little-known piece of computer code placed on hard drives by the Flash program from Adobe when users watch videos on popular web sites like YouTube and Hulu. The technology, so-called Flash cookies, is bringing an increasing number of federal lawsuits against media and technology companies and growing criticism from some privacy advocates who say the software may also allow the companies to create detailed profiles of consumers without their knowledge…

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Columbia grad sues Google to unmask malicious poster

A growing number of people and businesses have tried to force blogs and web sites to disclose who's trashing them.
A growing number of people and businesses have tried to force blogs and web sites to disclose who's trashing them.

A business consultant wants a court to force YouTube and its owner, Google Inc., to reveal the identity of someone who posted what she says are unauthorized videos of her and online comments that hurt her reputation to a Columbia Business School web site while she was attending the school.

Carla Franklin, a former model and actress turned MBA, said in a legal petition filed Aug. 16 that she believes a Google user or users impugned her sexual mores in comments made under pseudonyms on a Columbia Business School web site.

Franklin says someone also posted unauthorized YouTube clips of her appearing in a small-budget independent movie.…Read More

Momentum building for federal online privacy rules

Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., plans to introduce an online privacy bill that would create standards for how consumer information is collected and used for marketing, reports the Washington Post. The bill also would give users more control over how their internet activity and profiles are accessed by advertisers and web sites. Kerry’s bill, announced in a July 27 news release during a hearing on online privacy held by the Senate commerce committee, follows two privacy bills introduced in the House in recent months aimed at protecting sensitive information such as health and financial data. Kerry said he hopes his bill will be passed at the beginning of the next Congress. The legislative proposals add momentum to a push by consumer groups to create stronger federal rules for how companies such as Facebook, Apple, Amazon.com, and Google can track user activity and place ads based on that information. Facebook faced criticism for creating complex changes to its privacy polices last year that made some data more publicly available. Apple and AT&T were criticized for a data breach that revealed the network identities of iPad users, while Google said it accidentally snooped on residential Wi-Fi networks as it collected information for location-based applications. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, meanwhile, noted during the hearing that web sites and advertisers have been working to come up with their own rules for how to collect and use information in a way that doesn’t violate privacy rights…

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Study: Young adults do care about online privacy

Young adults should be informed about online privacy, experts say.
Young adults should be informed about online privacy, experts say.

All the dirty laundry younger people seem to air on social networks these days might lead older Americans to conclude that today’s tech-savvy generation doesn’t care about privacy.

Such an assumption fits happily with declarations that privacy is dead, as online marketers and social sites such as Facebook try to persuade people to share even more about who they are, what they are thinking, and where they are at any given time.

But it’s not quite true, a new study finds. Despite mounds of anecdotes about college students sharing booze-chugging party photos, posting raunchy messages, and badmouthing potential employers online, young adults generally care as much about privacy as older Americans.…Read More

How privacy vanishes online

Using bits of data from social-networking web sites, researchers have gleaned people’s names, ages, and even Social Security numbers, reports the New York Times—raising concerns that people are doling out too much personal information on the internet. Services like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae, such as birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched. Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number. “Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete,” said Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy division. “You can find out who an individual is without it.” So far, this type of powerful data mining, which relies on sophisticated statistical correlations, is mostly in the realm of university researchers, not identity thieves and marketers. But the FTC is worried that rules to protect privacy have not kept up with technology. The agency is convening the third of three workshops on the issue on March 17…

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Why no one cares about privacy anymore

Google co-founder Sergey Brin adores the company’s social network called Google Buzz, CNet reports. We know this because an engineer working five feet from Brin used Google Buzz to say so. “I just finished eating dinner with Sergey and four other Buzz engineers in one of Google’s cafes,” engineer John Costigan wrote a day after the Twitter-and-Facebook-esque service was announced. “He was particularly impressed with the smooth launch and the great media response it generated.” You might call Brin’s enthusiasm premature, especially since privacy criticisms prompted Google to make a series of quick changes a few days later. Activists have asked the Federal Trade Commission to “compel” Google to reprogram Buzz a third time to adhere to the no doubt well-informed specifications of Beltway lawyers. A class action lawsuit filed on behalf of an aggrieved second-year law student is underway. But a funny thing happened on the way to the courthouse: relatively few Google Buzz users seem to mind. Within four days of its launch, millions of people proved Brin right by using the messaging service to publish 9 million posts. A backlash to the backlash developed, with more thoughtful commentators pointing out that Google Buzz disclosed your “followers” and who you were “following” only if you had elected to publish that information publicly on your Google profile in the first place…

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Redrawing the route to online privacy

On the internet, things get old fast. One prime candidate for the digital dustbin, it seems, is the current approach to protecting privacy on the internet, according to the New York Times. It is an artifact of the 1990s, intended as a light-touch policy to nurture innovation in an emerging industry. And its central concept is “notice and choice,” in which web sites post notices of their privacy policies and users can then make choices about sites they frequent and the levels of privacy they prefer. But policy and privacy experts agree that the relentless rise of internet data harvesting has overrun the old approach of using lengthy written notices to safeguard privacy. These statements are rarely read, are often confusing and can’t hope to capture the complexity of modern data-handling practices. As a result, experts say, consumers typically have little meaningful choice about the online use of their personal information — whether their birth dates, addresses, credit card numbers or web-browsing habits.

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Site asks social networkers to rethink revelations

Frequent updates on web sites like Twitter could make users vulnerable.
Frequent updates on web sites like Twitter could make users vulnerable.

As more people reveal their whereabouts on social networks, a new site has sprung up to remind students and others that letting everyone know where you are — and, by extension, where you’re not — could leave you vulnerable to those with less-than-friendly intentions. The site’s name says it all: Please Rob Me.

Launched last week, Please Rob Me is exceptionally straightforward. Pretty much all it does is show posts that appear on Twitter from a location-sharing service, Foursquare, that has become popular on college campuses. Please Rob Me puts these posts into a long, chronological list it refers to as ”Recent Empty Homes.”

Please Rob Me assembles its list by taking information that Twitter makes freely available so that many web sites can show tweets. But the point of Please Rob Me could be made with data that flows on dozens of other sites as well.…Read More