Consider three recent news articles about online privacy:
Google+ added a new feature that shows view counts on everything you post, including your photos. It’s enabled by default, but if you don’t want to be part of the popularity contest, there’s a setting to turn it off.
There is a new privacy tool called XPrivacy for Android that protects you from apps that are hungry for your personal information (it does this by by feeding them fake data).
A new study reveals that several education technology providers have intrusive privacy policies. Students and parents might want to take this into account in making choices about online education services.
These are just a few examples of the dozens of articles that come out every month informing privacy-conscious users that they need to change some setting, install a tool, or otherwise take some action to protect their privacy. In particular, companies often release new features with permissive defaults and an opt-out setting. It seems that online privacy requires eternal vigilance.
Read Arvind's full blog post at Freedom To Tinker.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:04/21/2014