privacy - page 15

These days, any photo you shoot with your iPhone or other smartphone will typically contain location data (unless you have that feature turned off) to allow apps like iPhoto to place your images on a map.

Even photo-sharing services use this data, with some — like Flickr — posting it prominently on your photo pages (along with all the other EXIF data, like shutter speed and f-stop).

If you don’t want the location of your photos to be known, the Yosemite version of OS X’s Preview can take care of it for you. Let’s strip that location data before we post that photo to the Web, OK?

We all make compromises daily when it comes to online security. Everybody wants to be safe and secure when making purchases online, but practically none of us do everything necessary to keep our data secure.

“People, myself included, are basically lazy,” web developer Joe Tortuga told Cult of Mac, “and ease of use is inversely related to security. If it’s too difficult, then people just won’t do it.”

With all the recent hacks into private as well as corporate data — like the credit card grab from Home Depot and the hack into Sony’s files, there’s no better time to learn some of the things we all can do to protect ourselves. We spoke to some online security experts to get their advice.

OS X Yosemite has changed the way your Mac deals with your privacy. On the one hand, Apple has decided to enable hard drive encryption by default, despite the FBI requests not to.

On the other hand, every time you type in Spotlight, your location and local search terms are sent to Apple, and, according to developer Landon Fuller, other third parties like Microsoft.

Fuller’s created a website, Fix Mac OS X Yosemite, where he’s posted up a way to stop Yosemite from sending such private data out. He’s also been contributing to a developer project on GitHub to find out and fix other ways that OS X phones home.

Updated security measures in iOS 8 make it impossible for Apple to give your data to the cops — even if the company wanted to.

Previously Apple could access a significant amount of data on any iOS device, which it would do if law enforcement approached the company with a seized device and a valid search warrant. Apple’s stronger encryption and updated privacy policy now mean it can no longer pull data from devices that have the latest version of the mobile OS installed.

“On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection of your passcode,” Apple notes on its website. “Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data. So it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8.”

The second part of Tim Cook’s interview with Charlie Rose is scheduled to air tonight on PBS, and as a teaser the show has released a short video of the CEO explaining that Apple’s stance on user privacy and company transparency is basically to never become like Google.

“You are not our product,” says Cook. “I think everyone has to ask, ‘How do companies make their money?’ Follow the money. And if they’re making money mainly by collecting gobs of personal data, I think you have a right to be worried and you should really understand what’s happening with that data.”

Watch the three-minute clip below:

The idea behind Secret is that you can share anything to your social circle with the comfort of total anonymity. Users’ identities are kept hidden, and that’s what’s supposed to make the app enjoyable or whatever.

As it turns out, it’s not that hard to see who someone actually is on Secret. The catch is that you need their email address.

After the Chinese media called iOS’s ability to track an iPhone’s location a “national security concern,” Apple has responded with a lengthy statement detailing its commitment to customer privacy.

Yesterday China’s state-run CCTV ran a segment heavily criticizing the “Frequent Locations” feature in iOS 7 that records where the device has been in detail on a map. The implications of the report were that Apple was sharing the data with other companies and governments.

Today Apple responded to the allegations by saying that it is “deeply committed to protecting the privacy of all our customers” and that it has never created a backdoor for any government agency.

There are few companies you can trust with your private data ever since the revelations leaked by Edward Snowden shook the tech world last year, but according to the latest report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, our iPhone-making friends in Cupertino have gone from being a privacy chump to the people’s champ in just a year.

We’ve all got them: the freaky friends. Those who comment on and like every. single. status update.

Those who post long, ranting political polemics to your happy cat poster images. The friends that creep you out in a subtle, yet plausibly deniable way.

Or maybe there’s the friends you want to get your freak on with who really don’t need to see you in those embarrassing photo updates that you send to your frat brothers.

However you rank your friends, Facebook has some non-intuitive list tools to help you finely tune your groups of friends. Here’s how to use them, and then how to view your profile through the lens of any specific person on your friends list, to make sure your list tweak was effective.

Protecting user privacy and sensitive information might drive Snapchat’s disappearing messages, but the Federal Trade Commission is keeping its eye on the company just in case!

The FTC has announced that it is settling with Snapchat after an investigation into the company’s privacy practices. The reason? The number of work arounds that allow photos and videos sent via Snapchat to be covertly captured.

“If a company markets privacy and security as key selling points in pitching its service to consumers, it is critical that it keep those promises,” FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez says. “Any company that makes misrepresentations to consumers about its privacy and security practices risks FTC action.”

The data-hungry tentacles of the NSA have managed to choke America’s top tech firms into silent submission on data requests, but after months of demanding more transparency, Apple is ready to defy authorities and let you know when the NSA wants your data.

Prosecutors warn that such a move will undermine investigations by tipping off criminals and allowing them to destroy sensitive data, but according to the Washington Post, Apple and others have already changed their policies.

Chatting on Facebook has become rather de rigueur for many of us these days, as the social networking giant makes it easier and easier to stay in touch via its blue and white website and dedicated mobile apps.

If you’re anything like me, chances are that your buddies chat you up as often on Facebook Messenger as they do on iMessage. This multiple platform chatting solution is all fine and dandy when you’re just dealing with your friends, but what about the boss? Your mother in law? That friend who is trolling your Facebook page to see why you’re not at her party?

You need a way to hide the fact that you’re online and chatting from these folks, and we’re going to tell you how.

High-school senior Omar Martin Del Campo and his small team of developers have found a way to make text messaging even more secure. Peek lets you chat with friends via the app and your messages are erased as you read them.

The app asks you to authenticate with Twitter or Facebook to ensure your identity to your friends, and then you can chat away in the fairly clean, purple-themed interface on offer.

“Our focus,” said Del Campo in an email with Cult of Mac, “is a great user experience, beautiful design, simplicity and safe and secure messaging.”

Every once in a while, you might want to password protect a PDF file with encryption. While there are several nice third-party apps that will do the trick, the simplest way to do this is with the built-in image and PDF viewer, Preview.

Ever wondered if somebody you thought you could trust is going through your phone when it’s out of sight?

That’s the (all too pertinent) premise behind Catchr, a new app designed to give users peace of mind while they are away from their iPhone. While the app won’t protect against “leaky apps” or other forms of government eavesdropping, it can tell you whether your phone has been moved, and which applications have been started or stopped during your absence — along with plotting on a map where your iPhone has been during the time Catchr is running.

Last week, a speech recognition developer found a potential exploit in the Chrome web browser that could possibly let malicious web sites activate your Mac’s microphone and listen in on any sounds your mic might pick up around you. Even if you’re not actively using your computer, the mic could be active and conversations, meetings, and phone calls could potentially be recorded or listened in on.

Luckily, there’s a way to keep this from happening, because–however remote the possibility–it’s always a good idea to keep your private information, including real-world conversations, private.

Of course, if you don’t use the Chrome browser at all, this won’t apply to you.

If you want to be sure your data is secure on your Mac, Apple has provided an easy way to do so. They’ve created File Vault, accessed via the System Preferences, to encrypt your startup drive with some heavy duty file security.

You’ll need OS X Lion or later, and you’ll have to have an OS X Recovery partition on your drive. This last bit is typically installed on newer Macs, anyway, but to test it out, reboot your Mac and hold the Command-R key down. If you see an OS X Recovery screen, you’re good to go.

Setting up FileVault is even easier than that. Just launch System Preferences and click on Security & Privacy to get started.

When you browse the web with mobile Safari, you’ll come across sites that ask you to create a login, and that usually requires a password.

You can save your passwords in mobile Safari automatically, but there are some sites that request passwords not be saved. There’s a workaround, though, if you feel like you should be able to save whatever passwords you darn well please, and it’s buried in the Settings app.

The web is full of all kinds of links, both clearly labeled ones as well as links with varying degrees of treacherousness (Rick Roll, we’re looking at you). While finding yourself sent to a video of Rick Astley may be fairly innocuous, there are times when you’re on the web and you come across a link that could possibly do something more serious.

That’s where the mobile web browsers in iOS 7 come in. I’ve tried this trick in both Safari and Chrome, but there may be other, less popular browsers that do the same thing: your mileage may vary.

DeGeo is an app that removes the location data from your photos before sharing them, while leaving non-location metadata intact. As someone who switches off the location option in Instagram whenever I’m at my home or a friend’s home, I’m totally into this $1 data stripper.

While other web browsers exist and thrive on iOS, Safari is the one Apple includes with it’s iOS system software, and it’s probably the one most of us use often, no small thanks to the fact that it’s integrated at the system level. Every click through, unless third-party apps (like Mailbox) allow something different, takes us to Safari as our main browser.

Therefore, if you’re looking for ways to protect more of your privacy, you’ll want to enable the Do Not Track feature in mobile Safari, as well as possibly block cookies, which are bits of code that store your preferences on website servers for return visits.

There are few tech terms more loaded than “user privacy” here in 2013.

Back in January Cult of Mac reported that Apple had lost its spot on a list of the 20 most trusted companies when it comes to user information. That was long before the revelations of Edward Snowden and PRISMgate (the subject of an entire recent issue of our Newsstand magazine), which made everyone super-jumpy about data collection and what it means for personal liberties.

The fines just keep mounting for Google. In the wake of last year’s Safarigate, in which Google was revealed to be tracking millions of iOS & Mac Safari users against their knowledge, Google first agreed to pay a $22.5 million fine to the FTC, the largest such fine in history. But it’s not stopping there, with Google now agreeing to pay $17 million to settle the issue with 37 states.

This week’s edition of Cult of Mac Magazine explores the issue of privacy in the PRISM age. Whether you have anything to hide or not, awareness of what data you are sending out and who can see it as always a good thing.

We’ve got great how-tos to about keeping things locked down in your email, browser, instant messaging and backups as well as what to know about the key privacy settings in iOS 7 and how to cover your privates with social media apps.

For those of you who have, ahem, things to hide from a snooping spouse, roommate or parent, we’ve also got you covered.

And if you think you’re an open book, we talk to an artist who broadcast his life from his iPhone screen to an open web page for an entire year. He tells us what happens when your wife gets in the act and your mother always knows what you’re up to.

Publisher Leander Kahney discusses his foray into the private lives of Apple designers while researching his latest book and our exclusive Apple Genius column discusses drinking on the job and vintage Macs.

We hope you check it out – and let us know what you think!

When we share our innermost thoughts on a blog, send pictures of loved ones through Facebook, or even divulge the unhealthy foods we ate for dinner from our iPhone, we trust the companies that run those services with our data. Companies like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Companies like Dropbox, AT&T, Foursquare, and Linked In.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), initially funded by three big donors in 1990 including Apple’s own Steve Wozniak, published its third yearly report on the best and worst of these companies.

The results may surprise you: Apple has one of the worst scores on the chart.

The Cupertino company gets only one star – on par with internet behemoth Yahoo and telcom giant AT&T – and that was awarded for fighting for privacy rights in congress. (It’s worth noting that Yahoo’s one star gets an extra sparkly patina due to the company’s “silent battle for user privacy” in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court).

The report examined the public policies of major internet companies, including service providers, cloud storage companies, blogging platforms, social networking sites, and the like, to figure out whether they were committed to backing us up when our own government wants access to our data. The point of the report is to motivate companies to be more transparent, and do better.

EFF’s scorecard was released in the spring, before NSA and PRISM were in the spotlight, but the criteria were prescient.

Companies were rated by whether they:

• Require a warrant for content of communications.
• Tell users about government data requests.
• Publish transparency reports.
• Publish law enforcement guidelines.
• Fight for users’ privacy rights in courts.
• Fight for users’ privacy in Congress.

Apple earned its lone star for joining the Digital Due Process Coalition. However it does not require a warrant, tell users about government data requests, publish transparent reports or law enforcement guidelines, nor does it fight for users’ privacy rights in court.

Compare this to a company like Twitter, which does all of these things. The microblogging service scores favorably across all the EFF categories, as does internet provider Sonic.net.

Google rates a five out of six, falling short a star for not telling users about government access requests; Dropbox ranks the same, demoted a star for not fighting for users’ privacy rights in court.

Overall, it’s great to know how private our communications are. (Or not, as the case may be.) Reports like this one are a step towards transparency and understanding of our own ability to interact privately, at least within the realm of the law. If a company we trust is cavalier about our own data, perhaps we should contact them and ask them why they aren’t scoring so well. Maybe the companies will make some changes in policy, or maybe they’ll lose some customers when they don’t.

Either way, if privacy is important to you, you can see above exactly how important it isn’t, and the companies it isn’t important to.

You can download the full PDF report here.

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation