Facebook has added a thoughtful feature today that will make things easier for folks using social media to grieve the loss of a loved one. It’s called “Adding a Legacy Contact,” and it allows users to name a person who has can make limited adjustments to the deceased’s Facebook account [Keep reading]
As a leader of the oft-paranoid-sounding-privacy-sensitive crowd, let me be the first to congratulate Samsung for its honesty. Plenty of my friends in paranoia have pointed out the language included in Samsung’s new SmartTV privacy policy. Because the gizmo uses voice recognition to let owners change the channel and do [Keep reading]
The next time a company tells you that it wants your information, but “Don’t worry, it’s anonymized,” don’t believe it. A group of researchers from MIT proved this week that it can identify almost anyone using just four pieces of information in a supposedly anonymized database of credit card transactions [Keep reading]
Progressive Insurance, and its TV personality “Flo,” have for years been urging consumers to install a small electronic device called Snapshot into their cars that allows the insurer to gather safety data on drivers. Supporters say the device, sometimes called a dongle, lets Progressive offer discounts based on the way customers [Keep reading]
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who disagrees that America’s schools are in need of serious reform. And it’s an obvious leap to think technology is the fast lane to improvement. “Ed-tech” is where some of America’s thorniest issues collide, however. Big Brother. Marketing to kids. Privacy. Boondoggles. Attention deficit [Keep reading]
People are freaked out about drones being used by Peeping Toms, when the real privacy risk could be much more “innocent.” And embarassing. An Australian woman was recently photographed by a drone subbathing nude in her private backyard. Bad enough. But the photo was taken by a real estate agency [Keep reading]
You couldn’t get nine out of 10 Americans to agree that the sky is blue. So it’s remarkable that nine out of 10 say they have lost control over how their personal information is collected and used by corporations, a new survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center has found. [Keep reading]
Americans say they are worried about getting hacked, but many of them don’t take even the most basic steps to protect themselves, according to a study released Wednesday by Bitdefender. The firm’s research says that one-third of U.S. consumers don’t use anti-virus software, and 30 percent use the same [Keep reading]
“How often should you change your password?” Sounds like it should be a pretty easy question, right? After all, it gets right to the heart of most security issues that people face. Turns out, it’s a really hard question to answer. And that’s a problem, because as I spend more [Keep reading]
WASHINGTON D.C. — What if we treated data with the same scrutiny as people? When a consumer applies for a loan or a job, firms uses massive databases and can consider thousands of data points when they assess the integrity of that person. But what if consumers could, in equal [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan