Google and Apple were grilled by Congress about location privacy in mobile phones, just a week after being grilled by Congress about location privacy in mobile phones.
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In June 2010, when the new iOS 4 came out and Apple changed its privacy policy to address location privacy, Walt Mossberg raised the topic in an interview with CEO Steve Jobs.
This agreement will allow consumers the opportunity to review an app's privacy policy before they download the app rather than after, and will offer consumers a consistent location for an app's privacy policy on the application-download screen.
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Finally, how will privacy settings for location features work, and will that result in another media-fueled tornado?
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The simple version of his objection is that once a phone company knows your location, that information loses certain privacy protections, meaning law enforcement should be able to get access to it.
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Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite.
Less than a month after photo social network Instagram caught huge flak over advertiser-friendly changes to its privacy policy (and claimed it was misunderstood), another social network, the location check-in service Foursquare, has announced revenue-friendly changes to its privacy policy.
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If there's a privacy interest in not having your location tracked, then Congress needs to act.
Well, even with WIPI gone since April 2009, there was still one hurdle remaining for Apple: privacy concerns over its devices' location-based services.
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For those worried about privacy, Google defaults to not showing location data to viewers -- even if the galleries are marked "Public on the web, " but I've enabled that on this demo gallery just to show you what's possible.
As far as privacy concerns: Sherpa only records the general location of events, not the exact location, says founder Bill Ferrell.
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And Google Now requires you to compromise some privacy, by allowing the service to track your location and search history.
Apple has had to defend its privacy practices, most notably its use of iPhone location data, before congressional committees, where executives gave stumbling and vague answers.
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Other technologies, such as internet wiretapping and the ability to track the location of mobile phones, will arguably make much more substantial encroachments on privacy over the next few years.
You can choose what services to use with Google Now, so if the idea of Google parsing your e-mails sounds like an invasion of privacy, you can limit it to just Web history and location information.
Of course, given that we all carry around our own personal digital trackers these days in the form of cell and smartphones, privacy and civil liberties advocates are already moving on to the next big location legal question: should the government need a warrant to get access to the whereabouts of your phone (and thus you)?
According to Le Meur, who did acknowledge to me some privacy concerns with "faster than realtime" (especially with respect to personal financial and location data), it offers "extraordinary" opportunities to improve our own lives by learning about our bodies, finding a job or starting a business.
For example, a re-engineering of the Internet to make it easier to trace the location of cyberattackers, as some have called for, would surely be expensive, impractical and extremely harmful to privacy.
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