With Facebook reportedly close to cutting a deal with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over privacy sins dating back to 2009, the question remains whether or not the social network's brain trust really gets the privacy issue.
Facebook was recently invaded by a robot army created by four researchers to demonstrate the ease at which online social networks can be maliciously exploited by the unscrupulous.
SocialShield isn't cheap. At $10 per month or $96 per year, this Web-based social network monitoring service costs significantly more than some of its competitors. But it also delivers a lot more, too, especially if you're using it to safeguard children who use more than one social network.
If you have kids of a certain age, chances are, they're on Facebook. A lot. Connecting with friends you may--or may not--know. Talking about things you may--or may not--understand. Keeping them safe can seem like a daunting task, but it's one that's a lot easier with the help of MinorMonitor. This free, Web-based app competes with pricier solutions such as SocialShield and ZoneAlarm's SocialGuard, and does an admirable job of alerting parents to potential threats.
Hacker collective Anonymous is at it again, and this time it is targeting websites that allow users to share child porn.
Should you be concerned about your privacy on Facebook's recently announced "frictionless sharing" plan that lets online sites and services automatically share your activity with your Facebook friends?
Facebook is tinkering with our news feeds in order to give marketers and developers more visibility. According to the Wall Street Journal, the changes may allow the social networking site to gather even more information on its users.
In an effort to stave off criticism over its "real names" policy, Google said late Monday that it will stop disabling Google+ accounts that violate the policy -- without warning the user first.
The free TrackMeNot Firefox add-on takes a unique and creative approach to protecting your privacy from search engines that can create profiles of you based on terms you search for. Rather than hiding your searches from them in some way, it takes the exact opposite tack: It inundates search engines with a blizzard of background searches from you, so that no practical profile can be built because there are too many random searches. It generates those search terms from a group of RSS feeds from sites including the New York Times, CNN, and others.
Facebook, oh Facebook. Will you ever learn?
Thanks to an anti-Google smear campaign ordered by Facebook and carried out by a PR agency, the relationship between Facebook and Google is unquestionably broken beyond repair. And that's bad news for users of both services.
Facebook users still do not use privacy controls to protect themselves, and a third of children under 18 are below the site's minimum age of 13, Consumer Reports reported in its June issue.
Representatives from Apple and Google are set to publicly speak about privacy matters next week.
Julian Assange claims that Facebook is complacent in providing the U.S. government with a way to spy on its citizens, calling it "the most appalling spying machine ever invented."
A series of internal e-mails from last year highlights how important location data is to Google, and likely gives more ammunition to privacy advocates over how these companies track your every move.