Tag Archives: FTC
FTC calls for laws to protect consumer privacy on Internet
Thinkstock The Federal Trade Commission has reinforced its call for baseline online privacy legislation.
Article source: http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/~r/usatoday-TechTopStories/~3/GSsw1w1EL4E/1
FTC urgers laws to protect consumers’ privacy
The FTC said in a report Monday that privacy legislation should include providing consumers access to the information amassed on them by so-called data brokers. The report also said companies should build privacy practices into every stage of product development, give consumers simple choices about privacy and make data practices transparent, including for mobile use.
“Americans have enthusiastically migrated more and more of their lives online,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a news conference Monday in Washington, D.C., after the report was released. “As a result we have had to ask how can consumers continue to enjoy the riches of a thriving online and mobile marketplace without surrendering their privacy as the price of admission.”
The privacy framework envisioned by the agency would for the first time impose limits on the collection and use of consumer
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Do parents need more privacy info about kids’ apps?
Editor’s note: Amy Gahran writes about mobile tech for CNN.com. She is a San Francisco Bay Area writer and media consultant whose blog, Contentious.com, explores how people communicate in the online age.
(CNN) — Is that app you just downloaded surreptitiously gathering data to push targeted ads to your 6-year-old? Quite possibly.
According to a new Federal Trade Commission report, the vast majority of the thousands of mobile apps intended for children offer no privacy information, which makes it hard for parents to make informed decisions about which apps are safe to let their kids use.
In July, FTC staff searched Apple’s and Google’s app marketplaces for the term “kids” and found nearly 12,000 apps.
Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_technology/~3/bAmMsdakMIA/index.html
Q&A: Google to dig deeper into users’ lives
Google says the changes will make it easier for consumers to understand how it collects personal information, and allow the company to create more helpful and compelling services. Critics, including most of the country’s state attorneys general and a top regulator in Europe, argue that Google is trampling on people’s privacy rights in its relentless drive to sell more ads.
Here’s a look at some of the key issues to consider as Google tries to learn about you.
Q: How will Google’s privacy changes affect users?
A: Google is combining more than 60 different privacy policies so it will be able to throw all the data it gathers about each of its logged-in users into personal dossiers. The information Google learns about you while you enter requests into its search engine can be culled to suggest videos to watch when you visit the company’s YouTube site.
Users who write
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Safari no-tracking mechanism bypassed
Google came under fire today by several members of Congress after a Stanford University grad student disclosed how the search giant has been tracking the online activities of users of Apple’s Safari Web browser, despite the default use of a browser mechanism to block such tracking.
Jonathan Mayer, a grad student and privacy researcher, wrote about Google’s Safari tracking techniques in this blog posting. Mayer’s findings got wide attention after The Wall Street Journal featured it in a story published Friday.
Rachel Whetstone, Google’s senior vice president of communications and public policy, says the Journal “mischaracterizes what happened and why.”
Whetstone says the Safari browser “contained functionality that then enabled other Google advertising cookies to be set on the browser.” She says Google’s engineers “didn’t anticipate that this would happen.” The search giant has started removing these advertising cookies from Safari browsers, she says.
Even so, backlash has followed.
Article source: http://rssfeeds.usatoday.com/~r/usatoday-TechTopStories/~3/p9goikJeYTs/1
