We should consider ourselves lucky to witness the transition between the industrial age and the information age in the past decade. Read more…
privacy
Diaspora* connects user computers directly, just like the Torrent protocol does. This eliminates the need of a centralized server which implies that none of your private information is stored on a third server. The user is required to install the Diaspora software and has full control of what information to share.
Diaspora*’s modus operendi looks promising but all rests on whether or not the mass switches to the secured and open-source social network.
Facebook has been notorious when it comes to user’s privacy and has been repeatedly bombarded with questions every-time it came up with an increasingly eerie privacy policy. If you are too concerned about your privacy on Facebook but still want to keep up with it to the fullest, you might want to try out and excellent tool that reclaims your privacy on Facebook.
ReclaimPrivacy is a browser based Facebook privacy scanner that helps you fix privacy holes. All you need to do is to-
1) Drag n’ drop the ‘Scan for Privacy’ bookmarklet available at ReclaimPrivacy to your bookmarks toolbar.
2) Login to your Facebook account and click the ‘Scan for Privacy’ bookmarklet. Immediately, the results will be shown above your profile. The scans shows the what all information you are sharing with your friends and the rest of the world and lets you opt-out of them to keep your privacy safe.
Since years, Google has been bearing privacy related blows from every nook and corner of the world. This time we talk about ‘blows’ that are data requests and removal requests. Till today Google has kept everything under wraps but now it has decided to expose those countries which continually send them such requests.
Google released a new ‘Government Requests’ tool that shows the number of data requests and removal requests done by each country. Surprisingly, India is among the top 3 for annoying Google with removal requests and takes a close position 4 for data requests. The tool shows that India sent 142 removal requests between July 2009 and December 2009, out of which, 22.5% were simply not acceptable to Google.
Google calls it being transparent; to let a common user know what the world’s governments are up to. On it’s official blog, Google states that,
We already try to be as transparent as legally possible with respect to requests. Whenever we can, we notify users about requests that may affect them personally. If we remove content in search results, we display a message to users. The numbers we are sharing today take this transparency a step further and reflect the total number of requests we have received broken down by jurisdiction.
Seeing Google’s obsession to transparency on web, we might as well see the list of government bodies restricting Google’s services too.
