The Sorry State Of Online Privacy
The Cloud is looming large, offering us ways to store and share our data in ways that were never before possible. We can effortlessly share our documents and photos with our families and friends, while maintaining control over their spread using powerful granular privacy controls. But it’s quickly becoming clear that the cloud isn’t ready for us. Because the services we rely on are letting us down with a frequency that is simply unacceptable.
I’ve been putting this post off for a while, mostly because I didn’t want to point to a single breach and call it a trend. But in only the last two months, we’ve covered at least three major web services that suffered security lapses tied to software bugs or scaling issues. In our posts covering these problems, one of our commentors will inevitably say something along the lines of, “that’s what you get for uploading your data to X service“. And the more problems I see, the more I’m beginning to agree with them.
For a recap, let’s revisit some of the problems we’ve recently seen.
In March I wrote about a bug in Google Docs that would share your files with people whom you’d never given access to. Granted, it would only share these files with contacts you’d previously interacted with, and not the entire world, but this did little to ameliorate the issue - in some cases it would be better to share a supposedly private document with a stranger than a coworker.
Check also related entries:
- TV Ad Blames Politician for Facebook Privacy Problems [VIDEO]
- TRUSTe Secures $12 Million To Certify Online Privacy
- Abine Launches To Help Web Users Regain Control Over Their Privacy, Acquires T.A.C.O.
- Mashable’s Ben Parr Gives Facebook Privacy Tips on CNN [VIDEO]
- The Social Web’s Say on the State of the Union [STATS]