Tag: Yahoo!

11 Million users quit Facebook over spying

facebookA new report by the Daily Mail reveals Facebook users are abandoning the social media giant at an unprecedented rate over privacy concerns.

New research shows Facebook has lost a total of eleven million users, nine million in the US and two million in Britain. Researchers at the University of Vienna analyzed 600 users and found that almost half quit as a result of privacy concerns.

Studies show the majority of users that quit the site were older males.

Facebook, among other tech giants, have been repeatedly under scrutiny for their lack of user privacy, including turning over thousands of user’s info to the government. In August, Infowars revealed Facebook submitted information on approximately 38,000 users in 74 countries during the first half of 2013.

Over half of the requests originated from inside of the United States. Tech giants are unable to reveal absolute numbers on how many requests they’ve submitted to because the government prohibits them from doing so. However, companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo have formed a unique alliance and are fighting back.

The tech alliance is putting pressure on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court by filing motions asking to publicly disclose more details about secret national intelligence requests, instead of just releasing approximations.

“We believe there is more information that the public deserves to know, and that would help foster an informed debate about whether government security programs adequately balance privacy interests when attempting to keep the public safe,” said Facebook’s general counsel Colin Stretch.

“Editor of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behaviour and Social Networking which published the findings, said: ‘Given high profile stories such as WikiLeaks and the recent NSA surveillance reports, individual citizens are becoming increasingly more wary of cyber-related privacy concerns,’” reported Mail Online.

Facebook has also been under close examination for their recently updated “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” policy which states users’ profile data including their profile picture, name and personal information “could show up as part of a Facebook ad their friends may see on the site,” according to a report by Mashable.

Even more controversy surrounded the social media giant when they announced the update of the “Tag Suggest” feature, which would allow facial recognition technology “to speed up the process of ‘tagging’ friends and acquaintances who appear in photos posed on the network,” reported Reuters.

As you can see, users’ concerns over privacy, or lack thereof, are certainly substantiated. However, if your information isn’t being collected through Facebook, NSA’s spy program, PRISM, is sure to scoop up your info in some other way, most likely through email or cellular data. – infowars.com

 

Tech giants deny knowledge of PRISM spy operation

techgiantsAs the dust settles on the revelation that the U.S. government has been mining data from most of Silicon Valley’s largest companies in a program called “PRISM,” one question stands out: How did the NSA get access?

Apple, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, the largest companies involved in PRISM, the existence of which was revealed last night in a simultaneous Washington Post and Guardian scoop, have categorically denied knowledge of or participation in the program in a series of statements, while acknowledging that they do provide targeted access to the government when required to do so by law, generally according to court orders.

“We have never heard of PRISM,” says Apple’s spokesman. “If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it,” says Microsoft’s. “We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network,” says Yahoo!’s. “Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data,” says Google’s.

Even unofficially, the tech companies seemed baffled by the allegations. The Guardian spoke with tech executives off the record, all of whom were “confused” by the documents published in the paper. None had ever heard of PRISM.

So what gives? Does the government have backdoor access so secret that not even their targets are aware? Are the tech companies lying? Or are they forbidden—as Verizon allegedly is with its NSA arrangement—from acknowledging its existence to an absurd extent? – gawker.com