Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Daily news service TechLawJournal (subscription) reports that the U.S. District Court (DC) has granted summary judgment to the National Security Agency in EPIC v. NSA, a federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case regarding the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s request for records regarding Google’s relationship with the NSA. EPIC requested a wide array of records [...]
PaidContent.org has posted a chart showing “Who’s Getting Buzz Settlement Money.” This refers to the $9.5 million payout following the Federal Trade Commission settlement with Google a class action suit over its “Buzz” social networking service. Last week, the Federal Trade Commission entered into a consent decree with Google over its botched rollout of Buzz [...]
Facebook has had a tough month. The site’s latest round of privacy changes, implemented last month, spurred stiff backlash — not just from so-called privacy advocates, but also from several U.S. Senators. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shot back with an op-ed in The Washington Post, as Braden discussed here yesterday. I’ve had much to say [...]
Last week, the Electronic Privacy Information Center released a petition from a group it spearheaded, asking the Department of Homeland Security to suspend deployment of whole-body imaging (aka “strip-search machines”) at airports. The petition is a thorough attack on the utility of the machines, the process (or lack of process) by which DHS has moved [...]
I’m a big fan of CNET’s “Buzz Out Loud” podcast and often enjoy co-host Molly Wood’s occasional “Molly Rant” but I’m disappointed to see her jumping on the Google-bashing bandwagon with her latest rant: “Google Buzz: Privacy nightmare.” Instead of appreciating the “privacy by design” features of Buzz, she seems to be rushing to privacy [...]
Says Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. I wonder what the FTC will think about this prospect in the report Congress asked them to send this year about video games. I think it’s safe to assume that the thought of life-like sex and violence will create a true technopanic.
Unlike with wiretaps, law enforcement agents are not required by federal statutes to obtain search warrants before employing pen registers or trap and trace devices. These devices record non-content information regarding telephone calls and Internet communications. (Of course, “non-content information” has quite a bit of content – who is talking to whom, how often, and [...]
Earlier this month, Google made news when it announced that its cloud computing productivity suite Google Docs had suffered a technical glitch that temporarily compromised a subset of users’ shared documents. After becoming aware of this glitch, Google notified its users via email and posted an entry to the Official Google Docs Blog that offered [...]
Facebook sparked a major user uprising when it amended its terms of service earlier this month to grant the social networking site greater licensing rights over user-submitted content. The implications of Facebook’s amended Terms of Use were originally uncovered by The Consumerist this past Sunday in a story entitled, “Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: ‘We [...]
Over the past year or so, many market-oriented critics of Google, like Scott Cleland and Richard Bennett, have criticized the company for aligning itself with Left-leaning causes and intellectuals. Lately, however, what I find interesting is how many leading leftist intellectuals and organizations have begun turning on the company and becoming far more critical of [...]
February 13, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
