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

An Apple I computer from the original batch of 50 that Jobs and Woz sold to the Byte Shop in 1976 will be put on the auctioning block in Germany next month. Early estimates claim that the computer could fetch between  $300,000 – $500,000 thanks to the original packaging and working condition of the unit.

CUPERTINO, CA — The spaceship is cleared to land.

After a meeting that stretched over four-and-a-half hours, the Cupertino City Council gave Apple’s new campus the green light.

Two years have passed since Steve Jobs pitched the futuristic new headquarters to the town where he met Steve Wozniak as a high school student. Designed by Sir Norman Foster, at 176-acre Apple Campus 2 will be one of the largest building complexes in the world.

Dozens of locals came to testify that, in effect, this is a modern company town  — the sentiment from former Apple employees, enthusiastic local business owners (“Apple engineers need our coffee!”), retired teachers and even environmental groups was overwhelmingly positive — concerns over what happens when you land such a huge project in one’s backyard were numerous.

Naysayers (one of them called himself the “loneliest man in the room”) complained about the inevitable traffic brought by 16,000 Apple employees (a number expected to blossom to 24,000) who will be driving to and from work when the massive project is completed.  Other concerns were voiced about the security measures that keep the campus closed to the public and shut off a stretch of Calabazas Creek to hikers.

The 60-foot-high “fruit loop” will change the profile of the town of about 60,000, that’s for sure. Here’s hoping it’s for the better. More on the meeting and its impromptu tribute to Steve Jobs here.

Stay tuned, after this unanimous vote the council has one more procedural vote before Apple can break ground.

This story first appeared in our weekly newsstand publication Cult of Mac Magazine. 

Long before Apple’s “Think Different,” ad campaign, before the dot-com boom, before zany became the norm in startup culture, there was Nolan Bushnell, Pong and Atari – the company where Steve Jobs landed his first job.

Bushnell is the godfather of the think different mentality, an unconventional character who ran unconventional companies. He made it a personal mission to attract similarly creative, passionate people to help him to realize some of his ideas, which many people considered wacky at the time.

Jonathan Zufi is an expert at taking beautiful photos of Apple products. He’s been doing it at the Shrine of Apple for years, and now he has a new book out called Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation.

For an extensive, professional gallery of every Apple product imaginable, look no further. Zufi has assembled an immense tribute to Apple’s legacy that every fan of the company will appreciate.

The Los Altos family home that Steve Jobs grew up in will soon become a historical site, if the seven-member Los Altos Historical Commission approves a recently scheduled “historic property evaluation” on the home.

Steve Jobs and his foster parents moved into the house on 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos, California, when he was in 7th grade and continued to live there though his high school days.

It was an impromptu family reunion whose RSVP list grew rapidly. In celebration of the recent rebirth of two prototype Twiggy Macs, many legends of Cupertino relived memories and reconnected with old friends in a private party held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

Attendees, many of whom held Apple badge numbers in the single or double digits, included (among others) Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, Daniel Kottke, Chris Espinosa, Guy Kawasaki, Jerry Manock, Terry Oyama, Larry and Patti Kenyon, Rod Holt, Randy Wigginton and Wendell Sander. The soiree was arranged by longtime Apple employee Dan Kottke and Gabreal Franklin, former president of Encore systems and owner of one of the resurrected Twiggy Macs.

Apple’s venerable alumni laughed and reminisced with each other while playing with the rare prototype, commenting on early aspects of the design and who did what. “It’s got an hourglass cursor,” Andy Hertzfeld said. “I don’t remember that. Hey, I wrote that. It seems slow to me.”

Hey, did you see Jobs this weekend? If so, you probably saw it alone, in a theater completely empty except for yourself, a single loquacious cricket, and a theater usher sleeping one off. Why? Because Jobs absolutely tanked this weekend.

It’s not easy making a posthumous movie about the world’s most well-known and beloved control freak. Just ask Joshua Michael Stern, director of new Steve Jobs biopic Jobs. The film delves into the early days of Apple Computer as Stern paints a picture of a man he calls a “brutally honest character.”

Don’t go into the PG-13 Jobs expecting any bombshells about Apple’s late, great maximum leader — you won’t find any. Instead, what you’ll get is a straightforward cinematic take on Jobs’ early partnership with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (played mostly for comic relief by Josh Gad), a healthy dose of Hollywood-style boardroom intrigue and a few glimpses into Jobs’ personal life. Many of the scenes, whether factually accurate or not, have been woven into the tapestry of tech history. And Jobs, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, obviously isn’t around to fact-check the past or exert his famous control over the final product.

“Part of the shackles for me as a director was, we really had to do everything that was sort of public domain, you know, we couldn’t stray too far off of what we basically knew about Steve,” Stern told Cult of Mac during a recent interview at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in San Francisco. “But the interesting thing about Steve, being such an enigma, there really isn’t that much more to know at all. I mean, everyone knows what they know.”

Look, I’ll be straight with you, I’m not a movie critic. Nope, just an average moviegoer. But I am an Apple fan, and probably, like you, one who greatly admired Steven P. Jobs.

So ever since last Tuesday, when I got to sit through an early screening of Ashton Kutcher’s much-hyped new movie, Jobs, people have been asking me what I think of it. Is this a film that lives up to the buzz? Did Kutcher deliver? Or more often, “Just how bad was it?”

Well…