Monday, August 29, 2011
"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has argued that privacy is no longer "a social norm." And former Google CEO Eric Schmidt once famously opined, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
However, in reality, many ordinary, law-abiding citizens are (justifiably) much more worried about online privacy than these famous executives are. Many individuals and organizations are concerned about a variety of threats: oppressive government regimes, hackers bent on stealing their personal information and corporate marketers who want to track their every move."
Source:
datamation
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
"Using off-the-shelf facial-recognition software and students' photos posted on Facebook, Alessandro Acquisiti, a CMU researcher, showed attendees at the annual Black Hat security conference how he was able to positively identify 30 percent of students walking around campus.
Acquisti also searched dating sites for users within 50 miles of a zip code and correlated them with approximately 110,000 Facebook profiles of users who also lived in that same area. The cloud-computing cluster at CMU obtained results in 15 hours and was able to positively identify 10 percent of the users on online dating sites, according to Acquisiti. Narrowing the geographic area increased the match rate."
Source:
eweek