News Byte
Peter Kafka in Mobile on August 13, 2011 at 5:40 am PT
Authorities said they shut down cellphone service on parts of San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit on Thursday night to stifle a planned protest on the subway system. A BART statement defended the move “as one of many tactics to ensure the safety of everyone on the platform.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation immediately described the move as a “Mubarak”; others noted the parallels with the United Kingdom’s proposal to limit phone and social media services in the wake of that country’s riots.
Ina Fried in Mobile on January 10, 2011 at 5:14 pm PT
Apple may not have been in Vegas, but its legions of followers were. The maker of the Mac and iPhone prefers having the stage to itself, but an entire section of CES was devoted to iStuff. Mobilized toured the show floor and has a video report.
Liz Gannes in Social on December 30, 2010 at 11:09 am PT
If you run a user-generated content site, takedown notices from copyright holders are a fact of life. That even goes for Twitter, where messages are limited to 140 characters of text. The site received on the order of 300 takedown notices in the last month.
Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on December 2, 2010 at 10:58 am PT
San Francisco lawyer Jennifer Granick, until recently civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is joining the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Zwillinger Genetski. Granick gained a reputation as a lawyer willing to defend accused computer hackers.
Peter Kafka in Media on June 23, 2010 at 10:57 am PT
High-profile technology attorney Fred von Lohmann is reportedly leaving the Electronic Frontier Foundation and heading to Google, where he’ll be the search giant’s new senior copyright counsel. In the intellectual property world, that’s a big deal.
John Paczkowski in Social on May 26, 2010 at 4:20 pm PT
Announcing Facebook’s newest set of privacy controls this morning, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “We are really going to try to not have another backlash.” If backlash is the metric for evaluating the company’s approach to member privacy, it seems to have done okay, at least at this early juncture. Within hours of Facebook’s announcement of new privacy controls, four of its most outspoken critics weighed in on them. And all had positive things to say.
Peter Kafka in Media on May 17, 2010 at 11:47 am PT
Your identity as a dog may still be safe on the Internet. Everything else about you, though, is looking increasingly like an open book.
Latest data point: No matter what you do to stay anonymous, there’s a good chance your Web browser is betraying your identity, by leaving a unique fingerprint every time you visit a site.
Voices
Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on October 30, 2009 at 8:42 am PT
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest effort to call out what it considers violations of copyright and trademark law comes in the form of a mock-awards page, complete with “honorees,” called the Takedown Hall of Shame.
The tech-advocacy group highlights a handful of cases it calls “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse,” usually involving businesses or organizations that cry foul–or issue takedown notices–even when their copyrighted materials are used in accordance with fair-use laws.
Voices
Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on September 16, 2009 at 1:13 pm PT
The Federal Trade Commission is planning three public discussions, starting in December, devoted to technology and consumer privacy.
According to the FTC, the roundtables will address topics such as social networking, cloud computing, online advertising and mobile marketing, the goal being “to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation.”
Voices
Andrew LaVallee, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on September 1, 2009 at 2:11 pm PT
Ten privacy groups urged Congress on Tuesday to take greater steps to limit advertising that tracks consumers’ behavior online.
The coalition, which included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumers Union and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, singled out behavioral advertising, in which Internet users are tracked, analyzed and served ads based on the information gleaned from their movements, in its recommendations.
