A few interesting links collected December 9th through December 10th:
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From the Desk of David Pogue – Free Speech (Recognition) – NYTimes.com – Remember the Gmail brouhaha? … At the time, everyone was hysterical about the supposed privacy violation: Google will be reading my e-mail! Of course, no humans were looking at your e-mail. It was just a bunch of servers analyzing keywords. Today, everybody’s forgotten all about it. But now the issue rises again with Dragon Dictation.
As for the names in your Contacts: they’re sent to Nuance so that the app will recognize the names when you dictate them. No other information (phone numbers, e-mail, addresses, etc.) is transmitted.
What I don’t understand is: Why don’t these same people worry that Verizon or AT&T is listening in to their cellphone calls every single day? Why don’t they worry that MasterCard is peeking into their buying habits? How do they know Microsoft and Apple aren’t slurping down private documents off the hard drive and laughing their heads off?
I mean, if you’re gonna be paranoid, at least be rational about it.
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- Jon22 » today’s grammar lesson: rob enderle – Rob Enderle is the Sarah Palin of the technology world, minus all the fun jokes about the front-door view of Russia.
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Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly | Electronic Frontier Foundation – privacy option telling Facebook to “not share any information about me through the Facebook API.”
That option has disappeared, and now apps can get all of your “publicly available information” whenever a friend of yours adds an app.
Facebook defends this change by arguing that very few users actually ever selected that option — in the same breath that they talk about how complicated and hard to find the previous privacy settings were. Rather than eliminating the option, Facebook should have made it more prominent and done a better job of publicizing it. Instead, the company has sent a clear message: if you don’t want to share your personal data with hundreds or even thousands of nameless, faceless Facebook app developers — some of whom are obviously far from honest — then you shouldn’t use Facebook.