EFF Who Has Your Back Privacy Report Hails Apple, Yahoo

Technology companies have responded to the challenge to privacy and civil liberties unearthed by the Snowden leaks with a determined effort to increase transparency around government requests for user data. Some have done a better job than others. Large ISPs such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast...

USA FREEDOM Act Revised to Limit NSA Surveillance

UPDATE: A prior version of this story incorrectly noted that the bill revisions included a clause that would require an earlier re-authorization to the PATRIOT Act, when in fact the revisions push that re-authorization date more than two years further into the future. The House Judiciary Committe...

White House Calls for Transparency from Data Brokers

The White House redirected attention away from the data collection efforts of the intelligence community yesterday with the release of a report that urged data brokers to be more transparent about their own data harvesting. Companies such as Facebook, Google and others make a living collecting th...

Google Admits that It Reads your Emails

Google has updated its privacy terms and conditions on Monday to offer more transparency regarding its email-scanning practices. One of the world’s biggest Web internet giant, Google, made it clear that the information its users submit and share with its systems is all analyzed. Last year, Google...

Yahoo Encrypts Data Center Communication Links

Yahoo certainly has taken its share of knocks during the past nine months of surveillance revelations and Snowden leaks for its encryption shortcomings. But the bruises are healing and the company is slowly working its way back into good graces. After months of being an encryption laggard, Yahoo...

YAHOO! Now Encrypts Everything; Encrypted Yahoo Messenger Coming Soon

ON HIGH-PRIORITY YAHOO! is finally rolling out encryption implementation over their site and services in order to protect users. Yahoo is rapidly becoming one of the most aggressive supporters of encryption, as in January this year Yahoo enabled the HTTPS connections by default, that automaticall...

Government Requests for Google User Data Continue to Climb

While the number of requests for user information that Google receives from governments around the world continues to rise–climbing by 120 percent in the last four years–the company is turning over some data in fewer cases as time goes on. Google received more than 27,000 requests for user...

Microsoft Reads User Email without Warrant

Late last week it emerged that Microsoft had searched through the contents of a French blogger’s Hotmail account in order to track down the source of a leak of proprietary information from the Redmond, Wash., tech giant. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and transparency advocates have expressed...

Time Warner Cable Publishes First Transparency Report

Time Warner Cable has joined a half-dozen telecommunications and technology companies that, in the past six months, have published their first transparency report on government and law enforcement requests for user data and content. Since the Edward Snowden leaks began last June, transparency...

Comcast Transparency Report

Another day, another transparency report from a company trying to put some distance between itself and the United States’ broad surveillance apparatus. Today’s report comes from Comcast, the largest Internet service provider in the U.S., who “takes customer privacy very seriously, and holds it in...

Snowden's disclosures haven't changed much about Facebook Security

Mark Zuckerberg is continually denying working with the NSA or any other Government Intelligence Agency in serving out data they gathered through extended surveillance, and even he expressed his indignation over the damage the Government is creating for all, on the phone call to the US President...

Pinterest Issues First Transparency Report

Pinterest, the social image-sharing site known predominately for wedding planning and recipe dissemination, released its first transparency report on Friday. While the government – unsurprisingly – makes few requests of this most bubbly of social networks, the report seems to carry a broader...

Microsoft Disclosed User Content in 10% of U.S. Law Enforcement Requests

Microsoft supplied user content in response to 10.8 percent of the law enforcement requests it received from United States agencies in the second half of 2013. The company got more than 5,600 requests from U.S. agencies in the last six months of the year, and in the vast majority of those–68...

Verizon Updates 2013 Transparency Report With FISA Data

Verizon updated its transparency report yesterday, breaking down National Security Letter and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA orders for the first and second halves of 2013. The telecommunications giant released its first transparency report in late January, responding to pressure from...

CloudFlare Issues Transparency Report

CloudFlare claims government requests for user data are affecting fewer than .017 percent of their two million global customers The Web performance and security company yesterday issued the report in accordance with the Department of Justice’s new regulations for publishing information pertaining...

Fixing Trust Through Certificate Transparency

SAN FRANCISCO–The security of data being transmitted over the Web relies on a large number of moving parts, from the integrity of the machine sending the data, to the security of the browser, to the implementation of encryption, to the fragility of the certificate authority system. Experts have...

Government Surveillance Could Targeted Automated Updates

SAN FRANCISCO – As more Web-based services are encrypted, privacy advocates are concerned the next wave of aggressive surveillance activity could target automated update services that essentially provide Internet companies root access to machines. Chris Soghoian, principal technologist with the...

Google, Microsoft Privacy Officers Lobby for Transparency

SAN FRANCISCO – Privacy has been in a stranglehold for a long time. Some believe it’s a fleeting concept done irreparable harm by the Snowden revelations. Others believe it’s merely in a transition until the norms of Internet behavior are sorted out. The privacy chiefs of Google, Microsoft and...

Dropbox Updates Privacy Policy in Response to Surveillance

The online storage service Dropbox has amended its privacy policy at least in part to better address increased concerns regarding how the service perceives, responds to, and handles government requests for user-data. The new government data requests principles come as part of broader and fairly...

First AT&T Transparency Report Shows 2,000+ NSL Requests

AT&T, in its first transparency report, said that it received at least 2,000 National Security Letters and nearly 38,000 requests for location data on its subscribers in 2013. The new report from AT&T is the latest in a growing list of publications from telecom companies, Web providers and cell...