Safety Security & Privacy

There’s no denying that Facebook’s voting system for privacy policies is flawed — when halting any measure requires enough votes to populate a large country, the attempt at democracy is more of a token gesture. As proposed, the company has launched an Ask Our Chief Privacy Officer page that’s a tad more engaging. Fill out Continue Reading →

Google gets “dozens” of requests for users’ information from governments, courts and police forces around the world every day, according to the company. These requests are up 70% over the last three years, but exactly how Google handles data demands from government agencies has been a mystery — until now. Google released on Monday new Continue Reading →

If you’re not claiming to be famous, normally people couldn’t care less who you say your are on the Internet. In fact, most people actively don’t care. Instagram isn’t in that crowd however. After its recent TOS update, it’s been harassing more and more users to confirm their identities with pictures of government-issued IDs. The Continue Reading →

Shelly Palmer chats with Rosanna Scotto and Dave Price on Fox 5’s Good Day New York about Facebook Graph Search and Google’s Physical Passwords. Continue Reading →

2012 may be known as the year that broke the password. We were continually hearing about a website, e-mail server or Twitter account that got hacked and ruined someone’s day. Google’s had enough. In a report that will be published later this month, Google’s security team looks to the future of passwords, and they’re a Continue Reading →

No good deed, huh. A student from Dawson College in Montreal has been expelled for his involvement in the uncovering of a potentially horrible flaw in his school’s online directories. Sounds dumb, right? Even worse: Everyone more or less agrees he meant no harm. Here’s what happened: Ahmed Al-Khabaz, a Computer Science student at Dawson, Continue Reading →

Want an easier way to log into your Gmail account? How about a quick tap on your computer with the ring on your finger? This may be closer than you think. Google’s security team outlines this sort of ring-finger authentication in a new research paper, set to be published late this month in the engineering Continue Reading →

From embarrassing party photos to confusing privacy settings, there’s no doubt that social media can cause you harm if you aren’t careful. This rings particularly true for younger generations accustomed to sharing liberally across various social networks, and it’ll only get worse with Facebook’s Graph Search. If you’ve ever felt the need to get your Continue Reading →

Remember “liking” a group on Facebook called, “Big Booty Rules?” You will… when someone uses Graph Search to find it… and you. The biggest news in the tech world this week was Graph Search: Facebook’s first true attempt at search. It’s an “inside baseball” name for a very interesting search tool. Graph Search is not Continue Reading →

Along with birthdays, names of pets and ascending number sequences, add one more thing to the list of password no-nos: good grammar. An algorithm developed by Ashwini Rao and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, makes light work of cracking long passwords which make grammatical sense as a whole phrase, even if they Continue Reading →