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The University of California published a report about Internet privacy. 1.000 Americans were interviewed last summer. The result: 55% are more concerned about privacy issues then they were five years ago - mainly because they know more about the subject now. But still only 14% read privacy policies on websites. Besides that younger Internet users belief that their privacy is protected by the law.

A survey which was released as part of the Pacific-wide Privacy Week (last week) shows that people in New Zealand are very concerned about their Internet privacy.It is of main concern how social networks use personal information and how search engines and websites are tracking online behaviour for targeted advertising.

Abstract In today's digital world, personal privacy has become the number one issue for consumers [9]. Consumers' confidence in personal privacy is directly affecting and limiting the growth of the Internet commercial development. Therefore, it has become a necessity to address the consumers privacy concerns for the interests of the parties involved.

Internet Policy Task Force is the name of the new initiative the U.S. Commerce Department founded. During the next months it will take a closer look at current policy frameworks and explore ways to address challenges of the new internet economy and society. It will finally advise the White House on how to improve privacy for individuals online. The article mentions current discussions about privacy issues Google and facebook have to face. But obviously these did not directly lead to the kick off of the initiative.

Article about a family from L.A. whose 18-year old daughter had a car accident. Pictures of her dead body were leaked by the California Highway Patrol and soon spread on the Internet. The family went to court to claim privacy. The article describes how the trial "reshaped the boundaries of privacy law in the Internet age".

Ofcom has conducted a survey in the UK on the handling of personal data online. The result: In the light of recent news about privacy issues online (Facebook for example) people have become more weary about Internet privacy. The Scottish are the least worried. Also interesting: "about a quarter of internet users say they 'lack confidence' in installing filerting software or security features."

Article sums up the news around Facebook and Google Street View of the last weeks. The sleeping issue of privacy is said to have woken up. The U.S. Congress as well as the Federal Communications Commission and a Federal Trade Commission are asked to take action.

Facebook apologized and promised to improve it's privacy control for its users, by making it more impler and more coherence for users to understand and further to take the control back.

In the US a coalition consisting of Google, Microsoft, Ebay, AT&T, and Intel is fighting for a change of the Electronics Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) that was enacted in 1986. The coalition stresses the fact that the Internet has changed tremendously since then and the law therefore needs to be adapted. It protects files in the homes of people but law enforcement entities do not need judicial warrant to view files stored with ISPs, in the cloud or get GPS data from mobile phones.\nDefinitely a case worth fighting for - and an opportunity for Google & Co. to get good press. What about the law that allows checking and copying peoples' computer harddrives at airports though?

Under sever fire of privacy, Facebook is now tighten their privay policy to ease the fire. The thing is, when it comes to people, it's not that easy to solve. It's no longer a website that JUST allowing users exchage their status and connected to each other, but with more and more apps, people have the feeling that they are being spied on whenever wherever.

Interesting article based on survey that give details and updated information about Facebook stressing privacy issues. The survey has been made by F-Secure, an internet security firm with a sample of 450 Facebook users This article has been published three days after another one titled: "Facebook in new privacy row". See the link below: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/7623492/Facebook-in-new-privacy-row.html

Ilse Aigner, Germany's minister of food, agriculture and consumer protection, who usually concentrates on issues over rotten meat, genetically engineered corn and imitation cheese, recently took on a different kind of issue: the Internet and data privacy. Suddenly Aigner finds herself facing online giants Amazon, Facebook and, above all, Google. Soon Google plans to send cars equipped with cameras out onto Germany's roads once again for the company's Street View project. Aigner is now insisting that Google should ask permission before violating the privacy of German citizens. The minister's attack and the following discussions reveal just how divided the German government is when it comes to the online world. The debate revolves around questions of national security and individual self-determination on the Internet. But it also concerns the power of the large giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and MySpace, as well as the question of what these companies are doing with the records of our everyday data, and how they will be able to obtain information from us, influence us or perhaps even control us in the future. It seem like, once again, a German politician is exploiting the popular issue of internet privacy and censorship in a superficial way in the hope of scoring political points.

Privacy addressed by Zukerberg. Shall we believe him? Article goes hand in hand with this week's readings. 

People are taking actions to express their feeling about Facebook privacy issue.

PJFenwick is doing a PhD on facebook privacy and his explorations have shown that even when you lock up your settings, your friends (and friends of) can leak your information all over the place. "But by far the most interesting part of all of this have been dark users. Like dark matter, these users are not directly observable, usually because they've completely disabled API access. In fact, some of these users are completely dark unless you're a friend. They don't show up in search results. They don't show up on friends' lists. You can't send them messages. If you try to navigate to their user page (assuming you know it exists), you get redirected back to your homepage. These users have their privacy settings turned up real high, and are supposed to be hard to find. However like dark matter, dark users are observable due to their effects on the rest of the universe. If a dark user comments on a stream entry, I can see that comment. More importantly, I can see their user-ID, and I can generate a URL to a page that will contain their name. I can then watch for their activities elsewhere. Granted, I can't directly search for their activity, but I can observe their effects on my friends. For want of a better term, I've been calling this "dark stalking". What makes this all rather chilling is that I'm doing all of this via the application API. If your friend has installed an application, then it can access quite a lot of information about you, unless you turn it off. If your friend has granted the application the read_stream privilege, then it can read your status stream. Even if a friend of a friend has done this, and you comment on your friend's status entries, it's possible to infer your existence and retrieve those discussions through dark stalking."

This is like PJFenwick in 3D. Eric Gradman has great art work "The Cloud Mirror" which demonstrates many interesting social features about privacy, identity and people. Like we queue up to make idiots of ourselves and hand over our password on public computers without question. All done using Facebook Connect and Python.

Should customers in Internet cafes be monitored? The governments' fear of terrorism stands against user privacy. Up to now no official regimentations for internet cafes in the EU exist, Scotland Yard now advises administrators of public web spaces to regularly control their customers' activities.

The Dutch consumers'association is trying to take some responsibility for privacy online away from the consumer and shift it to the owners of social networking websites. The association believes it is too difficult and time consuming for consumers to set the privacy settings themselves.

Everyone's probably bookmarked this article already! Sentencing senior Google execs on the grounds of profiting from illegal acts is probably also technically correct. Google's defense is the neutrality of the internet, which is questionable as Google do adjust content to suit, for their own profit. Which layer is this issue on? Will increasing controls on content change our internet beyond recognition? Marcuse says that tolerance can not tolerate hateful speech and acts or it is no longer truly tolerant. That's quite a conundrum!

Google speaks out on censorship and the violation of user privacy in China. Yahoo in the US agrees but its Chinese partner Alibaba Group does not. Are they afraid of a backlash from Beijing and fear for their ungoing business success? Makes me wonder how bad the quagmire in China really is...