Last year, IT security firm Sophos ran an experiment on Facebook to demonstrate just how willing people were to hand over their information to potential ID thieves. They created a fake profile page on Facebook for a small green plastic frog and sent out 200 friend requests to other Facebook users. Eighty-two of those people responded, and in doing so, divulged personal information like their email address, birthdate, workplace or school location, and phone number – all useful details for the aspiring identity thief.
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We’ve blogged here before about the burgeoning data portability movement. The appealing aspect of data portability is that it would make it easy for us to essentially copy and paste our personal information from one place into a new place.
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OK, be honest. When was the last time you read the full text of a website’s privacy policy?
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“We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’”
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Increasingly, we are putting our personal information online in order to gain access to the benefits of Web 2.0: We list and rank our favourite books on vendor sites, and in return we get recommendations for books we might never have heard of otherwise. We indicate which high school we attended on our Facebook profiles, and in return we reconnect with long-lost friends.
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The Pew Internet & American Life Project released its report on Teens and Social Media last month, which found that an overwhelming majority of American teens are using the Internet for social interaction – namely, sharing creations likes photos and videos, telling stories, and interacting with others.
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As we close out 2007, we’d like to sound a note of caution for privacy rights in Canada. We are lucky to have a variety of protections for personal information and data at the territorial, provincial and federal levels. Nevertheless, the Commissioner took a moment last week to highlight some of the steps that need to be taken by individuals, corporations and the government in the face of continuing challenges:
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In Britain, the National Consumer Council and Childnet have released the results of an extensive series of surveys and interviews with children, youth and their parents. Their work sheds some light into these groups’ activities online, including participation on youth-oriented websites, how they react to advertising aimed at children and youth, and their attitudes towards privacy.
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Several months ago, while we were brainstorming possible subjects for blog posts and holiday season features, we thought “Santa suffers a catastrophic data loss” would be a pretty funny and relevant item for the Office to cover.
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Today, we’d like to present an excerpt from a recent blog post from Alison Black, titled “respecting digital privacy.”
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