This morning (GMT) stories began moving on Google’s alleged Net Neutrality killing deal with Verizon. By this afternoon, the two companies denied they were in cahoots to cash in on regulating speeds and access based on an individual choice of what to do online. What really happened there will all shake out eventually. Maybe someone will leak it. There was a more troubling piece of news about Google’s CEO the previous day that portends to worse things on the horizon. Read the rest of this entry…
Until Facebook’s privacy policies settle down, people using the website should make sure to check what about their profile is visible to the public at large. One easy way to do this is to log out of Facebook and then look up your profile page. If you know someone you haven’t yet befriended on Facebook, Read the rest of this entry…
People should be able to delete ALL their personal information and content from any website with the simple push of a button, but many social network websites including Facebook are making it more difficult to do. Read the rest of this entry…
A Chinese Internet user browses for information on the popular search engine Google. Photograph: Reuters/Corbis
Google announced today that it would stop  sensoring search results in China following a hack attempt the company said appeared to be aimed at gathering information on human rights activists.
On its own blog, the company stated “We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech.”
Great news. A little late and after some bad business, but a step in the right direction, none the less. Maybe only Nixon could go to China.
While google says it will be discussing with China how it will be able to allow unfiltered results into the country from here on out, it seems clear that the government has no intentions of allowing the free flow of informaton to continue without attempts to track who is accessing it. Google should immediately unfilter results and move its offices out of the country, and then more safely promote unfettered web access by channeling some of their incredibly smart staff’s efforts toward projects that protect privacy in China and help more websurfers there quickly and safely bypass firewalls.
Google CEO Google CEO Eric Schmidt says privacy doesn’t matter, but has seen fit to to tell his company that all CNet reporters were to be blacklisted for a year simply because CNET published information on Schmidt’s neighborhood, hobbies, political donations and so forth, which it found through Google searches.
BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow correctly points out that it was Schmidt himself who suggested that “if you want to keep something private, ‘maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place’ (in other words, ‘innocent people have nothing to hide.’)” adding “Hey, Eric: if you don’t want us to know how much money you make, where you live, and what you do with your spare time, maybe you shouldn’t have a house, earn a salary, or have any hobbies, right?”
The Committee would agree and would add that there are all sorts of things someone may need to keep private. Google is in effect, blocking many people from accessing some of the best social tools for grassroots organising by constanly erroring on the side of letting it all hang out.
Ahead of a planned Facebook/Google data agreement, we encourage people who may have reasons to be concerned to increase their privacy settings, delete some information or introduce false information. Read the rest of this entry…
Lifehacker today features a great post on how to clean your web browsing history and also keep the footprints of your digital wanderings to an absolute minimum. Some very obscure tips here that will really keep people looking to stay off the radar off of it. Most people don’t know all the places on their own machines that records website visits. It includes some very good advice on firing up the old terminal window and really cleaning your history. Via Lifehacker
NOTE: This post has been following a continuing saga taking place between ZDNet and Yahoo! over the alleged release of 200,000 Iranian accounts to the Iranian government. ZDNet has retracted the story in full, and it does look to be false.
“First, the post was based on a single source who had a clear agenda. That source wasn‚Äôt properly filtered and his charges weren‚Äôt verifiable by credible sources.
Second, we never called Yahoo to verify the report or get an appropriate response. Blog networks still need to follow journalism 101 and Yahoo should have been called. In summary, our checks and balances went awry. We put a lot of trust in our bloggers to get it right and frankly we let you down with this report.”
It happens in some of the world’s biggest news rooms, and websites are at risk of doing it just as the New York Times or Washington Post could be. Bad information makes its way into the light of publication. In this case, it was a post by ZDnet’s Richard Koman, which accused Yahoo! of providing the Iranian government the account details of nearly 200,ooo users in order to convince the regime to unblock its service. Read the rest of this entry…
