privacy - page 15

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

Cell phone numbers are a direct path that often lead straight to us, regardless of where we are or what we’re doing. And once we’ve given someone our number, they have it for good. And if things go south, the only option is to change your number, right?

Pretty much — but that’s easy to do if you used a new app called RingMeMaybe to give them a temporary number in the first place.

Think your messages are private? Think again!

A Cult of Mac reader, asking to remain anonymous, sent in a tip about how he caught his girlfriend reading Messages on his iPhone.

Privacy is important to this fellow, but he suspected that his love was sneaking peeks at his text and iMessages.

So he took a couple of steps to catch her in the act.

Google’s Chrome for iOS is a heck of a browser on iOS, and a great alternative to using Safari, except for the fact that it’s not quite as integrated into the experience as Safari is.

Because of that, if you use Chrome and want to clear out your browser data to keep others from checking out what you’ve been doing on the web, you won’t be able to do so in the official Settings app like you can with Safari data.

Here’s how to clear your cache files, browsing history, and any cookies from Chrome in iOS.

I have to admit, I’m less than wary of all the tracking that goes on with the iOS devices my kids have access to. Now that they both have at least an iPod touch and access to my iPads, I’m feeling a bit on the worried side about them sharing any of their web or app activity.

Luckily, there’s an app called Disconnect Kids that installs on any iOS device and then helps kids (and their parents) understand what this tracking stuff is, and how to block it. It then helps those very same kids and parents do just that.

We already know that companies can track our location in real-time through a smartphone’s GPS and serve deals or ads relevant to your location, but what if your iPhone could predict where you’re going to go in 24 hours?

A group of researchers have created an algorithm that uses location tracking data on people’s phones to predict where they will be 24 hours from the present. Shockingly, the average error is within a mere 20 meters.  

Apple has been facing a number of privacy issues and lawsuits in the U.S. for the last year or so, but things aren’t going any better abroad either. A German court ruled that Apple will have to change some of its practices for how it handles consumer data.

The Berlin court recently struck down 8 of 15 provisions Apple’s listed in its general data-use terms. The court found that the 8 terms deviate too much from German laws because Apple is asking for “global consent” to use consumer data without telling them how the data will be used.

Somehow, Apple managed to cram in a ton of web browsing functionality into a teeny, tiny package called Safari. To distinguish the mobile web browser from the one of the same name on OS X, we’ll call it Mobile Safari and be done with it.

Regardless of the name, the mobile version of Safari is chock full of features both subtle and hidden. Here are five great tips and tricks to help you master Mobile Safari on your own iOS device, whether that be an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

If you share your songs and movies via iTunes on your home network, you might not want just any old people to access your shared media or playlists, even if you let them onto your Wi-Fi. While iTunes lets you share all the types of media it can serve up, maybe your kids or office mates don’t need to listen to those hardcore rap tunes.

It’s fairly easy to protect your shared items with a password, using the iTunes Preferences. Here’s how to do just that.

There are so many pictures of clouds, coffee, sunsets and trees on Instagram, that sometimes it can be hard as hell to find pictures of things you actually care about, like family and friends. Instagram is rolling out a new photo tagging feature today that will help make finding people way easier – which might be a good or bad thing.

The new feature, called Photos of You, allows users to tag friends who are in the photo. A new Photos of You section now graces the your profile, where you can find all the Instagram photo’s you’ve been tagged in. Just like on Facebook, if you don’t want to be tagged in a certain picture, you can decided to remove it.

Here’s a video Instagram released to promote Photos of You:

Everyone’s favorite digital rights crusaders Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have just released an annual report, ranking the biggest companies in tech for who does the best job protecting your data from being rifled through by the Federal Government.

Google’s really good about it. Apple? They’ll give away all your emails and data if the government just breathes on them, and they won’t bother telling you about it either.

Google updated its Google Search app earlier this week to introduce Google Now to iOS. The feature brings Android’s awesome digital assistant to your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, allowing you to get information like the weather, sports scores, and travel assistance all in one place.

But many users have found that it also has a significantly negative affect on battery life. Because many of Google Now’s “cards” rely on location data, the service constantly gets updates on its whereabouts from nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots, and this means it’s eating away at your battery all the time.

Path was recently fined $800,000 by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for deceiving its users “by collecting personal information from their mobile device address books without their knowledge and consent.” Last year, the social network was caught storing all of its users’ contacts on its servers under the radar. Now users have started accusing Path of spamming friends to join the service via text message.