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privacy policy


Childhood Identity Theft: What Parents Need to Know About COPPA Rights

Parents, are you taking advantage of your COPPA rights?

After all, your child’s sensitive personal information is extremely valuable. But you have to know your rights before you can start to protect your child’s online identity and security. But nowadays, where to begin?

Lately it seems that children are born and have their entire lives documented online — first it’s by parents uploading newborn photos (along with child’s name and birth date!) to Instagram and Facebook (all of the photos shared with dodgy security settings at best).

Next it’s uploading innocent home videos to YouTube that expose not just a glimpse into the family home, but also potentially reveal personal details like home address, where and when you take vacations, when you celebrate birthdays, and with whom, along with the names, faces, and approximate ages of every family member (why not have the camera zoom in on recent bank statements to make a cybercrook’s job that much easier?).

Read more to learn ways to protect your family — and which popular websites are taking advantage of your child’s personal information.

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Is Skype Spying On You?

For many years, Skype took user privacy very seriously.

Skype, which provides free online calls and cheap phone calls to hundreds of millions of people around the world, has always been known for using strong encryption and complex peer-to-peer network connections. As a result, Skype calls are notoriously hard to intercept.

The company was very proud of its strong user security record, and even publicly stated that it could not conduct wiretaps because of its secure encryption techniques.

But this apparently is no longer the case. Read More

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LinkedIn Founder Says Privacy Is For ‘Old People’

An article on BusinessInsider calls recent comments by the founder of LinkedIn “the most arrogant comment I’ve heard from a business executive since Leona Helmsley said ‘only the little people pay taxes.’ It’s sad, disappointing, and yet, characteristic.” What did Reid Hoffman say? The founder of the largest social network for professional people in the world says “all these concerns about privacy tend to be old people issues.” Read More

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Congress: Seeking Answers to Supercookies, Groupon Consumer Privacy

The co-chairs of the Congressional Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus — Representatives Edward Markey and Joe Barton — wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission demanding answers about “supercookies” and whether some websites are able to recreate users’ profiles after people deleted their regular cookies. This follows their letter to Groupon’s CEO asking similar questions about whether customers’ personal information could be vulnerable to hackers. Click the headline above to read more. Read More

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Free Wifi Is Fun, But Who’s Responsible?

Got five minutes? Do yourself a favor the next time you use free WiFi at Starbucks – or McDonalds, Panera Bread, or heck, even Fuddruckers (who knew they offered free WiFi?) – and devote a few minutes to check out our ongoing, handy resource that collects corporate Terms & Conditions. Ok, not many people really ever think about reading them – what with their legal mumbo-jumbo and all — but corporate Terms & Conditions policies exist for a reason. And there are some scary things in them. That’s why it’s worth taking time to scan one the next time you are in a free public wireless hotspot. Something to chew on for sure the next time you hop online, whether it’s in Starbucks, McDonald’s, or beyond. Read More

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Groupon Amends Privacy Policy to Collect More Sensitive Information, Shopping History

According to Smart Money, Groupon has expanded its rules about what the site may do with users’ personal information, including a user’s birth date, shopping history, and location. The article notes that worried consumers can take a few steps to protect their privacy. For example, it says you should sign up for deal sites “with an email account you could easily ditch — say, a Hotmail account that you use exclusively for buying things or receiving newsletters. That’s far better than signing up using an existing social networking account, which a growing number of sites will let you do.” Read More

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In Plain English: TripAdvisor’s Privacy Policy and How ‘Anonymous’ Travel Reviews Get On Facebook

TripAdvisor – with its honest, candid, and opinionated travel reviews — became the first travel company to hop aboard Facebook’s Instant Personalization train to Eroded Privacy-ville. It’s not that Instant Personalization is bad, per se, but the problem is that users need to opt out, rather than opt in, to this feature. Other websites that have signed up for Instant Personalization include Yelp (local retail reviews), Rotten Tomatoes (movie reviews), and Pandora (music reviews). Again, those sites require an opt-out mechanism, which certainly is not always readily apparent to the average user. Yes, it’s still the Wild West among online corporate privacy policies, so who knows how your online travel musings could be used against you in the real world. Read More

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Five Ways the FTC Hopes to Protect Your Privacy on Mobile Devices

The Federal Trade Commission recently had a meeting with Congress to explain how it is protecting consumers’ privacy on mobile devices. The FTC said it is working to create solutions that protect consumers without stifling technology innovations, but what exactly does that mean for the millions of smartphone and tablet users out there? Check out five highlights from the testimony you need to know. Read More

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Survey: 75% of Top Apps Lack Privacy Policies

A new report shows that 22 of the top 30 paid mobile apps lack even a basic privacy policy. The creators of the Future of Privacy Forum survey even downloaded a sample of the paid apps to determine whether they would get to see a policy at any point during the download processs. This article on MediaPost.com says a privacy policy is “the essential first step for companies to take to be accountable for their practices of collecting and using online data.”

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In Plain English: WebMD’s Privacy Policy Says Blog and Community Posts ‘Open to the Public’

In its multi-pronged, in-depth privacy policy, WebMD shares how it uses and discloses information about you — and the truth may surprise you. In one particular section in Part 4 (D. Community, Health Communities, Blogs and other Public Forums), it calls attention to what users need to understand about chatting online, blogging about health topics, and sharing personal details in public forums. While it may seem obvious, any information shared is open to the public and is not private. Read More

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