Bigmouthmedia search engine news: privacy-security

Search engines may be forced to display links to safety info

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, may have to display links to information concerning how to browse the web safely if the recommendations of a new report are adopted.

Conducted by clinical psychologist Dr Tanya Byron, the report was commissioned by the Labour government and focuses on the risks posed to children by the internet.

In addition to its proposals concerning search engines, the document suggests that sites which host videos uploaded by users, such as YouTube, should be made to screen their content more vigorously to protect youngsters.

Commenting on the issue, Google, which acquired YouTube in a $1.65 billion stock-for-stock transaction in November 2006, stated: "Google is deeply committed to protecting children on the internet and providing all of our users with a safe experience online."

It added that YouTube already provides users with a mechanism for flagging content which they believe to be inappropriate.

Dr Byron's 200-page report also recommends new measures forcing computer manufacturers to sell machines with Kite-marked parental control software, as well as making internet service providers give parents guidance on how to activate such software.

In its response to her suggestions, the government has revealed that it will provide full backing to the report.

However, Tony Neate, managing director of Get Safe Online, expressed his reservations about additional regulations, stating: "Laws should be a last resort," the Times reports.

He added: "I'm a great believer in self-regulation and if you can get the industry involved and work together to develop codes of practice, that's the best way forward."

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Google Apps suite causes privacy concerns in Canada

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Members of staff at a Canadian university have raised concerns over possible compromises of their private data that have arisen as a result of the institution's use of Google's applications suite, it has been revealed.

Controversy has broken out a Lakehead University in Canada after employees were told not to use the Apps suite for personal or sensitive information.

Google Apps features a number of web applications, including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk.

Staff at Lakehead University, which was one of the first large-scale operations to adopt the service, were warned that, because the information they input into the Apps suite is stored on Google's servers in the US, their personal information may be at risk.

Whereas under Canadian law user data is protected, US authorities have the right to read everything under the conditions of the Patriot Act.

Commenting on the issue, Tom Puk, a former president of Lakehead's faculty association, stated: "The [university] did this on the cheap. By getting this free from Google, [it] gave away our rights," the Globe and Mail reports.

He added: "You would have no idea what they are up to with your information until, perhaps, it is too late. We do not want to be subject to laws of the Patriot Act."

Mr Puk has brought a complaint against the university because, under the terms of his contract of employment, he is guaranteed private electronic communications in line with Canada's privacy laws.

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MySpace launches developer platform

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Social networking website MySpace has announced the launch of its new developer platform.

The MySpace Developer Platform, set to go live to website users in early March, will result in the creation of applications that are compatible with Google's OpenSocial standard and follows the successful launch of Facebook's own platform last year.

Users of the MySpace website will be able to add email services, games and other widgets to their profiles without using external websites as a result of the platform's launch.

Developers will be able to test their applications on a maximum of five MySpace users a month before rolling them out for a full launch.

They will have access to all data that is publicly available on registered profiles, with users able to limit visibility by changing their account settings so that only their friends can see their profile.

Another security feature will use a technology called Kaja, which has been developed by Google, Kyle Brinkman of MySpace told CNET News.com. This will help to eliminate code vulnerabilities, he said.

Google announced the launch of OpenSocial in November last year. The standard comprises a set of common application programming interfaces that allow developers to build applications for deployment across multiple websites.

Sites that have signed up to make use of the standard include Bebo, Engage.com, orkut, Plaxo, Friendster, hi5, imeem, LinkedIn, mixi, Ning, Oracle, Six Apart, Viadeo and XING, among others.

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Privacy query sparks Google upset

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Search engine giant Google has criticised lawmakers for questioning whether its takeover of DoubleClick will affect citizens' web privacy in their scrutiny of data issues in Europe.

European parliamentarians and privacy advocates brought up the subject of whether the $3.1 billion transaction would affect internet privacy in an online data protection hearing on Monday, Reuters reports.

Google announced its intention to acquire the digital marketing technology firm in April last year and the deal was recently given the go ahead by the Federal Trade Commission, a commissioner for which said at the hearing that the topic of privacy had not entered into its discussions.

However, yesterday saw Peter Fleischer, Google's global privacy counsel, take issue with the European parliamentarians' query into privacy.

"People [are] trying to take a privacy case and shoehorn it into a competition law review," he stated.

Dutch parliamentarian Sophie in 't Veld responded with the claim that Google would have a "competitive advantage" with access to DoubleClick's data and said "that side of things" should also be discussed.

Meanwhile, the same hearing saw Peter Scharr, German commissioner for data protection and head of the European Union's data privacy regulator group, recommend that IP addresses be viewed as personal information that could be used to identify individuals.

However, Mr Fleischer said that Google uses IP addresses to provide search results based on the location and language most relevant to users, and that this information could not be used to identify specific people, the Associated Press reports.

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Net criminals to target social networking sites in 2008

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Cyber criminals are set to target social networking sites over the coming year, security firms have warned.

Professionals in the field suggest that the intimate nature of such sites makes users more willing to share personal information and, consequently, more vulnerable to attacks.

Senior security researcher at ScanSafe Mary Landesman stated that social networking sites are attractive to scammers because "the technologies that play there and the third party add-ons make it an environment that is susceptible to compromise", the BBC reports.

According to the corporation, there have already been a number of such attacks perpetrated on social networks.

For example, Brazilian users of Google's Orkut - a networking and discussion site - were recently subjected to a threat caused by a worm that tried to steal bank account details.

As well as the technical vulnerabilities that social networking sites are susceptible to, the amount of information that individuals willingly share with others is also described as problematic.

Commenting on the issue, David Porter, head of security and risk at business and technology consulting firm Detica, stated: "It is remarkable that people use social networking websites to publish details about their lives, loves, jobs and hobbies to the entire world ... Such data is invaluable to identity fraudsters."

In a BBC article yesterday, Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism at security solutions provider Secure Computing, stated that 2007 saw high-tech crime become firmly entrenched.

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2007 'saw high-tech crime become firmly entrenched'

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Cyber criminals are becoming increasingly advanced and 2007 was the year that hi-tech crime became firmly established and entrenched, an expert has said.

According to Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism at security solutions provider Secure Computing, "the bad guys are becoming more sophisticated and that means it is becoming more difficult to stay safe", the BBC reports.

He added that he sees no end to the rise in online crime until "we effectively reduce the value of personal information to the point where for the hackers it is useless".

Joe Telafici, vice president of operations for McAfee's Avert Labs, went on to say that the majority of attacks perpetrated are now done for money.

The last year saw the effective extinction of young hackers who wrote malicious programmes and viruses for fun, he stated.

While some of the attacks, such as phishing runs, were obviously concerned with stealing money from internet users' credit cards or bank accounts, others that looked more innocuous were also done with cash in mind, according to Mr Telafici.

For example, Trojans placed in banner advertisements that attempt to hijack a home PC were designed to get hold of information that can be rented out for a fee to spammers and other internet criminals.

Recently, search engine provider Google was affected by a web hijacking campaign in which malicious websites used by hijackers would come up in search results when users looked up seemingly innocuous terms such as "charity".

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Alterations to Google Reader cause controversy

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMT

A recent change to Google Reader has sparked controversy among some of its users.

Announced on December 14th, the alteration takes blog posts or articles that users have marked for sharing and makes them available to each person that the user has listed as a contact or friend on Google Talk.

In a company blog, Google's Chrix Finne stated: "We've linked up Reader with Google Talk (also known as chat in Gmail) to make your shared items visible to your friends from Google Talk."

This was done in order to make the process of sharing articles and blogs more convenient as it removes the need to distribute shared items links to friends, he added.

However, the move was greeted with anger by a number or users, with one - named Modulo Noh - commenting: "This is the worst feature [Google has] ever introduced," Mercury News reports.

Meanwhile, another person, called Banzaimonkey, added that the people on his contact list are not necessarily his friends, stating: "This is a major privacy concern."

In response to the complaints, a Google employee assured users that the search engine provider was listening to their concerns.

Indeed, while on his Christmas holidays, a spokesman for the firm emailed Mercury News a statement that the update had been built with "user choice" and "transparency" in mind.

According to founder of the Privacy Forum Lauren Weinstein, the new feature does not in fact cause major privacy concerns. However, he added that Google had mishandled the way in which it was rolled out to users.

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Google's AdSense 'threatened by Trojan'

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Google's AdSense programme has been the subject of attacks from a Trojan, an antivirus firm has announced.

According to BitDefender, the virus, dubbed Trojan.Qhost.WU, modifies infected computers' hosts file and redirects the Google AdSense link to a different address.

AdSense is an ad-serving programme which allows website owners to enable text, image and video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google.

Commenting on the threat to the application, BitDefender virus analyst Attila-Mihaly Balazs stated: "This is a serious situation that damages users and webmasters alike.

"Users are affected because the advertisements and/or the linked sites may contain malicious code, which is a very likely situation given that they are promoted using malware in the first place."

Meanwhile, webmasters are hit because the Trojan takes away viewers and, consequently, a possible source of revenue from their websites, he added.

Responding to the situation, Google commented: "We have cancelled customer accounts that display ads redirecting users to malicious sites or that advertise a product violating our software principles," Reuters reports.

Google actively works to detect and remove sites that serve malware in both its search results and its ad network, it added.

Last month, the search engine provider was affected by a web hijacking campaign in which malicious websites used by hijackers would come up in search results when users typed in innocuous terms such as "hospice".

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Common standards on privacy must be reached, says EP member

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Prior to the European Commission's (EC's) ruling over the Google DoubleClick deal, scheduled for April, a Dutch member of the European Parliament (EP) has spoken of the need to arrive on common privacy standards.

Speaking to the Associated Press, Sophie in 't Veld said European politicians would ask their regulators to take privacy into account when reviewing the deal.

The European Union (EU) assembly's civil liberties committee is set to ask data privacy officials, consumer groups, EU and US regulators and internet companies to speak at a hearing some time in January.

About the deal, Ms in 't Veld stated: "It's drawing attention to the fact that our reality is changing. There are lots of companies collecting personal data; we volunteer our personal data to get services."

She added that privacy is becoming a matter of civil liberties as governments ask firms to hand over travel and financial information on individuals in the face of terrorism.

"Ultimately we will have to arrive on common standards. The committee is not discussing the merits or details of the merger. That's not our business - that's the task of the commission," she commented.

Many people are not aware of who owns their data, what public authorities can do and what kind of legal protection they have when they use such applications as Google and Gmail, Ms in 't Veld said, adding: "It is possible to know a lot about us, where we are and what we are doing."

Since it was announced in April, the possible acquisition of DoubleClick by Google has prompted a great deal of concern over potential compromises in privacy and competition within the industry.

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Nearly half of web users search for own name

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Almost half (47 per cent) of internet users have conducted a search for their own name online, up from 22 per cent five years ago, according to new research.

The figures, produced by the Pew Research Centre, also suggest that 53 per cent have hunted for information about personal and business contacts over the web.

Additionally, it was discovered that most internet users (60 per cent) are unconcerned and unaware about the extent of the information available about them, with adults seemingly less proactive in data management than their teenage counterparts.

Indeed, a higher percentage of teens had restricted access to their profiles on social networking sites than adults.

According to the researchers, more powerful search engines have made it easier to find a match for a personal name search and the rise of blogs and social networking have increased the amount of information available.

"The cumulative traces of our online activity are more visible in the age of web 2.0. The more content we voluntarily contribute to the public or semi-public corners of the web, the more we become not only findable, but knowable," commented co-author of the report Mary Madden.

Fellow report co-author Susannah Fox added that many internet users seem to be motivated by nostalgia when searching for personal names, with the most popular search targets being someone from the past, including old friends, romances and former colleagues.

The Pew Research Centre is an independent research group that focuses on people's attitudes towards politics, the press and public policy issues.

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