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Category Archives: data privacy

Why we do ‘let our guard down’: Online privacy

02-Apr-13

We care about our online privacy, but we also like convenience a whole lot. And not only convenience, but often a good deal or discount beats out any worry about data security. What do deals and convenience have to do with privacy? A whole lot. An article by Somini Sengupta at the New York Times [...]

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PS4, gaming & the new privacy reality

11-Mar-13

One thing we all need to teach our kids now is that the privacy spectrum we really need to be aware of isn’t so much private-to-public as private-to-convenient – or, from kids’ perspective, private-to-social (or just to-spontaneous-&-fun). The more convenience we want (e.g., not bothering with password-protecting our phones or giving services all kinds of [...]

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The new, revised COPPA

20-Dec-12

The US Federal Trade Commission’s revisions to the COPPA Rule announced today (12/19/12), are aimed at syncing up a rule mandated by a 1998 law with today’s technology and with “the way children use the Internet, mobile devices and social networking,” the FTC says in its press release. For example, the personal information that services [...]

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Facebook’s latest privacy changes are fixes

14-Dec-12

Facebook’s announcement about its latest privacy tweaks this week was a bit of a non-story. The site has been steadily improving users’ experience with privacy controls, making settings less complex and more on-the-spot, or as-you-post over several iterations. This week’s was just another such iteration. For example, a helpful little “privacy shortcut” that will shortly [...]

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FTC still not satisfied with kid app privacy

10-Dec-12

Only 20% of the 400 children’s apps the FTC analyzed “provided disclosures about their data collection practices,” the New York Times reported today – and the apps that did linked to long, dense privacy policies that few users could comprehend. The Federal Trade Commission’s announcement does not surprise; it’s an update of the Commission’s report [...]

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Privacy policies made palatable (or at least digestible)!

27-Nov-12

No way anybody’s going to abandon privacy policies anytime soon – not with the FTC’s and others’ calls for ever greater disclosure of mobile and Web services’ privacy practices (e.g., see this). But no one reads them – even if they could get through all the legal verbiage without nodding off. Knowing this, Mozilla, the [...]

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The ‘minimum age’ & other unintended consequences of COPPA

08-Aug-12

It’s tough to be the FTC – or anyone else trying to make rules for user-driven (social) media. It’s hard enough to make static rules address fast-changing technology. Then there’s the problem of changing understanding of consumers – the intended beneficiaries of the rules and the users of user-driven media – as we all adjust [...]

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FTC finds kid apps’ privacy practices ‘disAPPointing’

17-Feb-12

The US Federal Trade Commission has turned this week’s wakeup call about mobile-app privacy into a conference call, adding kids’ privacy to the conversation. The title of its just-released report “Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures are Disappointing” (that’s the FTC authors’ cute italicization) summarizes the Commission’s conclusions well. But to make their point [...]

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A parent/author/tech pundit’s view on how to teach kids privacy

29-Apr-11

We need to stop demonizing and blocking social media and start teaching our kids best practices in using it, I hear him saying. You can tell I agree!

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‘The right to disappear’: Future of privacy in Europe?

15-Apr-11

The EU wants to give users greater control over their digital data in a media environment where control is distributed among users and between users and media companies to an unprecedented degree.

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