Historically, US companies have been able to get around the (relatively stringent) European data-protection rules thanks to a “Safe Harbor” agreement between the US and the EU — but Max Schrems, an Austrian privacy activist, has successfully argued that the NSA’s mass surveillance programs violate European law and invalidates the Safe Harbor. (more…)
LUXEMBOURG — The European Union’s highest court ruled Tuesday in favor of an Austrian law student who claims a trans-Atlantic data protection agreement doesn’t adequately protect consumers, a verdict that could have far-reaching implications for tech companies doing business in Europe.
Facebook has responded to a decision by the EU Court of Justice to deem the Safe Harbor agreement invalid, Business Insider reports. The company said that this case “is not about Facebook” and ” the Advocate General himself said that Facebook has done nothing wrong.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s new Law Enforcement Technology Primer for Civilian Oversight Bodies is a short, easy-to-understand guide for non-technical people that explains the new surveillance technology that local law-enforcement agencies are increasingly relying upon, often in secret, and without any civilian oversight. (more…)
Twitter wants to make a Twitter for people who don’t get Twitter.
Just 24 hours after Twitter announced that Jack Dorsey would become the company’s permanent CEO, Project Lightning, the company’s long-promised way to follow events, has finally emerged. It’s now called ‘Moments’ and marks the first fundamental product change since the company’s launch. The new ‘Moments’ button Moments is a new button in the official app that provides a way to follow along with TV shows, sports, news and other events with a curated experience. Viewing a moment, from left to right When you click into a moment, you’ll start seeing a full-screen experience that combines tweets, videos, Vines and GIFs into…
Now that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is finalized, the real fight starts
For most of a decade, government negotiators from around the Pacific Rim have met in utmost secrecy to negotiate a “trade deal” that was kept secret from legislatures, though executives from the world’s biggest corporations were allowed in the room and even got to draft parts of the treaty. (more…)
Get ready for television ads that feel a lot more personal.
The app market continues to evolve as developers and users explore the possibilities of mobile technology. From business security concerns to developers news to consumer product highlights, these five trends could change tomorrow’s mobile app landscape. App Security In mid-September of 2014 at the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit in Dubai, Garner, Inc., announced that 75 percent of mobile applications will fail basic security testing in 2015. A full year later, no progress appears to have been made in the level of security for mobile apps. Bluebox Security announced in a recent survey on mobile travel apps that developers…
The spread of knowledge about the NSA’s surveillance programs has shaken the trust of customers in U.S. Internet companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple: especially non-U.S. customers who have discovered how weak the legal protections over their data is under U.S. law. It should come as no surprise, then, that the European Court of Justice (CJEU) has decided that United States companies can no longer be automatically trusted with the personal data of Europeans.
Reddit, the self-proclaimed ‘front page of the internet’, will launch a news site today called Upvoted that will serve up the best content from its community. Upvoted will feature stories, infographics, illustrations, videos, and podcasts on everything from news to sports and lifestyle. However, it won’t allow users to comment or even vote on posts. A dedicated team of around ten members, led by journalist and former Myspace editorial director Vickie Chang, will create stories for the site based on the best posts from Reddit. Upvoted will be an experiment for Reddit to see if it can regain the traffic…
Maciej Cegłowski’s posted another of his barn-burning speeches about the Internet’s problems, their origins and their solutions (previously), a talk from the Fremtidens Internet conference in Copenhagen called “What Happens Next Will Amaze You.” (more…)
Facebook claims its practice of forcing users to go by their “real names” (or “authentic identities” as Facebook spins it) makes the social network a safer place. In fact, the company has often claimed that the policy protects women who use the social media platform, even when faced with community advocates pointing out that the policy facilitates harassment, silencing, and even physical violence towards its most vulnerable users. EFF has been among the voices telling Facebook that its real name policy is in serious need of revisiting, and we’ve heard from users across the world that they’ve been kicked off the siteunfairly.
When people say “privacy is dead”, it’s usually for one of two reasons. Either they truly believe that privacy is irrelevant or unachievable in today’s hyper-connected world or, more often, that not enough is being done to protect privacy when huge amounts of personal information are being posted online. Although I agree more could be done to protect privacy online, I believe that privacy is not dead, it’s just changing forms. While it’s true that we’re sharing more information online than ever before, this doesn’t mean that we no longer care about privacy. On the contrary, some curious trends in
Slack, the team messaging service that’s been labelled as an “email killer,” is going to kill far more than just email. For most medium to large businesses, productivity software has been something of a spaghetti bowl. You might have a tool like Yammer for internal social networking, Google Apps for email, Microsoft Office for document editing and GoToMeeting for video calling. You can, of course, go all-in on a particular suite of tools to avoid some of that mess, but so far no one suite has been much of a haven. If you’re all in on Google, you need to bet on Gmail…
Reddit now has its very own content site—but the so-called front page of the Internet is leaving its community behind.
The crooks that Edward Snowden outed (and their complicit overseers in government) like to talk about how Snowden violated an oath when he gave journalists documents that established that security services in at least five countries were breaking their own laws in order to pursue unimaginably aggressive mass surveillance. (more…)
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