Privacy

Is Your Online Date A Valentine's Day Scam?

Valentine's Day is just around the corner, and romance is on your mind. You're searching for Mr. Right. The roses, teddy bears, and hearts in every shop and grocery store are pushing you towards rekindling an old flame or finding a new one. If you're trying to reconnect with a loved one, you might try searching for their contact information on PeopleSmart, but if you're looking for a new love, you might find yourself exploring an online dating website like eHarmony, Match.com, or OkCupid. Read more...

How PeopleSmart Thinks About Privacy

We just posted a new section on our site that talks about how we think about privacy at PeopleSmart. Our goal is to follow the law and make our products line up with social expectations for privacy. Since we just... Read more...

New PeopleSmart Privacy Center

Protecting your privacy is hard in our complicated, technology-driven world. Fraud and identity theft come from all over. In 2010, 19% of identity theft came from government documents and benefits fraud, but credit card fraud (15%), bank fraud (10%) and... Read more...

Social Search Privacy: What You Need to Know

Yesterday, we shared how to control your privacy settings with Facebook's Timeline. Today, we have more privacy tips for social networking--but now it's Google that's delivering an interesting new feature that brings with it a few privacy concerns.

Earlier this week, Google rolled out Social Search, which aims to provide more personally relevant search results. In addition to the standard search results, Social Search includes search results from your online connections, Google+ profiles, and other social sites. Read more...

How to Manage the Latest Facebook Privacy Faux Pas

Facebook may face the Federal Trade Commission over yet another privacy concern. This time, it's about Timeline. Timeline is the name for Facebook's new design that presents a user's shared information in a chronological, scrollable format that is arguably more aesthetically pleasing and definitely more exposed.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center is asking the FTC to examine how Timeline alters a user's privacy settings and Facebook handles privacy through obscurity. Privacy through obscurity refers to the idea that data is more secure if it is more difficult to access. Read more...

Jim Dempsey Talks Tech and Privacy

Recently, Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) stopped by our office to give a presentation over lunch about current privacy issues, privacy legislation, and the importance of "privacy by design." Jim is an authority in the space, having been with CDT since 1997, and is currently serving as the Vice President for Public Policy. He also shared some of the projects the CDT is working on and answered questions from our team. PeopleSmart takes privacy seriously, always seeking to stay up-to-date on the latest issues, and incorporating innovate privacy controls into our website.

Read more...

It's Time to Reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act

Recently, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act turned 25. Originally drafted in the Reagan administration, it aimed to protect citizens from government surveillance and provide people with the same sense of security they have with physical documents. The ECPA protects communication during transit and for a certain amount of time in storage.

This was fine when the main threat to personal privacy was wiretapping (as it was when the ECPA was signed into law), but the ECPA wasn't written with online storage and email in mind. Because of the way internet technologies have evolved since 1986, under the ECPA there are certain situations where the government doesn't need a warrant to access the emails, photos, and other documents you store online. Read more...

Google Shares "Good to Know" Privacy Tips

The topic of online privacy has been in the news lately. A lot. We think it's important that people understand the privacy options available to them, and stay in-the-know about how the websites they use the most handle privacy. Two of the most used websites in the world, Facebook and Google, came under fire recently for privacy encroachments. But they have also been lauded for recent enhancements. To keep you up-to-date, here are some of the latest developments.

Recently, Google launched Good to Know, a privacy portal. Read more...

New Book 'Public Parts' Explores the Future of Privacy

When Jeff Jarvis' new book Public Parts hit the shelves recently, we were intrigued. He takes a unique view of the privacy debate, arguing that "publicness" needs to be defended alongside of privacy. At PeopleSmart, this important balance is never far from our minds and we welcome new and interesting points of view that contribute this topic. Below we've summarized some of our most notable takeaways from the book.

Jarvis makes it clear that he's primarily trying to spark a discussion, rather than convert others to the kind of radical publicness he spends much of the book highlighting. Read more...

Privacy by Design: Secure Email Messaging

At PeopleSmart, we take our users' privacy very seriously. Today, we would like to spotlight a privacy feature that sets PeopleSmart apart from other sites in the industry.

Building our directory, we wanted to solve a problem other people search sites hadn't tackled. We knew that people wanted to connect via email. But if we displayed email addresses in our directory, we would be opening the service up to spammers. Unlike other websites that might expose full email addresses, or other people search directories that don't provide email address access at all, we decided to take a different approach. Read more...