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Worst Companies At Protecting User Privacy: Skype, Verizon, Yahoo
First time accepted submitter SmartAboutThings writes "Apple and Microsoft are one of the worst companies at protecting our privacy, according to EFF's privacy report. Dropbox, Twitter and Sonic have some of the best scores." "Sonic" is California ISP Sonic.net, which tops the field with the EFF's only 4-star rating. Of ISPs with national presence, ATT and Comcast come in with a single star apiece, and Verizon gets a goose egg.
Nice to know that among the 1 ISP option you have, they have a 0-star rating in keeping information private. I'm not sure what anyone is supposed to do with this information.
Apple and Microsoft are one company now? What will they call it? Applesoft? Microple?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The EFF is grading companies based on the following criteria (quoted verbatim):
1) Tell users about data demands: a public commitment to inform users when their data is sought by the government.
2) Be transparent about government requests: transparency about when and how often companies hand data to the government.
3) Fight for users’ privacy rights in the courts
4) Fight for users’ privacy in Congress
Criteria #1 and #2 might be important, but more for people who live at the edge of the law or might be suspected (possibly wrongly) of ties to terrorist groups than to the average citizen.
Criteria #3 and #4 are peripherally important to citizens but are tactically important to the EFF.
When I think about user privacy on the Internet, I think of the aggregation and analysis of data on each person (anonymously, or identified by name) based on tracking cookies, social networking and forum posts, location and call data, online and credit card purchase history, and other information obtained via Internet search. The four categories the EFF is analyzing would be far down on the list.
The EFF did nothing at all to consider privacy in general, and in particular with regards to businesses and other private entities. The chart is only about how the companies are interacting with governmental bodies (e.g. Congress, law enforcement). Facebook is widely regarded as being horrible when it comes to privacy, but it's because they keep abusing their access to everyone's information by sharing it with third-parties, using it to follow them around the Internet, and failing to follow the settings the user has indicated.
Even companies that have been more benign have problems. Dropbox, for instance, had a notable bug earlier this year or late last where anyone could access anyone else's account. Their employees also have access to everyone's data and can read it at any time unless you encrypt it yourself. Where is the consideration for those sorts of factors?
I'm far more concerned with companies sharing my information for profit than I am with companies sharing my information with the government. You can support privacy laws in Washington all you want, but when the rubber hits the road if you're selling me out for a quick buck, I don't want to be providing you with my information.
18 companies with 4 yes/no checks. Nothing about how the companies use collected user data or how they share it. Complete fail.
How can anyone call this a report?
Skype probably has a backdoor to allow governments to listen in, although the code is heavily obfuscated to try to prevent people from finding out the details via reverse engineering.
You just know it would be rotten to the core.
Micrapple.