“Compare People” Facebook App Selling User Info
I’m not surprised. Something about the app struck me as quite sleazy from the beginning, but I avoided it too efficiently to notice any premium options. Maybe the features discussed here were pulled later, but I can’t seem to recall hearing about this matter before.
The same author has a later post with more details (read: screenshots) on what the premium mode that exposes the actions of your friends looks (or looked?) like.
[via:Trent E.]
FireGPG - easy GNU Privacy Guard for Firefox (including Gmail)
“FireGPG is a Firefox extension [...] which brings an interface to encrypt, decrypt, sign or verify the signature of text in any web page using GnuPG. FireGPG adds some features to the Gmail interface, to let you use GPG’s features directly in your webmail. More webmails will probably be supported in the future.”
Memphis police director sues for critical bloggers’ names
“Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin and the city of Memphis[, Tennessee] have filed a lawsuit to learn who operates a blog harshly critical of Godwin and his department.
The lawsuit asks AOL to produce all information related to the identity of an e-mail address linked to MPD Enforcer 2.0, a blog popular with police officers that has been extremely critical of police leadership at 201 Poplar.
“In what could be a landmark case of privacy and the 1st Amendment,” the anonymous bloggers write on the site, “Godwin has illegally used his position and the City of Memphis as a ram to ruin the Constitution of the United States.”
[via:Slashdot]
What Viacom wanted (but didn’t get)
A Google employee has summarized Viacom’s demands in the court case that famously lead to Google having to give out logs of pretty much all videos ever watched on Youtube.
Privacy advice: get rid of Flash Cookies
“Flash cookies are a new way of tracing your movement and storing a lot more information about you than with normal cookies. … you can’t locate them in your browser. … not shown in the list of cookies that you can see when you take a look at the cookies … in your web browser.”
The easiest way to reach the Flash Cookies list of your flash player is through a special page on macromedia.com. At this point, most people who know how to delete browsing histories or http cookies probably haven’t even heard of flash cookies and are left with a false sense of privacy. Adobe is being irresponsible when they chose to not have the cookies list present in the settings dialog you get by right clicking on any flash applet.