privacy

Four in every five mobile phone owners leave their devices undefended.

That's the stark message from a new report by Voxburner, showing that only 19% of 16-24s use security software.

The war on cookies is over, or at least the rhetoric has been turned down a notch. Back in June when the ICO, who enforce the Data Protection Act, implemented the strictest interpretation of the law, their website traffic dropped 90%.

We dubbed it Cookiepocalypse. However, it looks like the war on cookies has just ended, or at least the ground offensive is over. On 31 Jan, they updated their website with the softer interpretation of the law which assumes implied consent.

What a bizarre couple of weeks for the image conscious, or at least the photographically-minded, first Instagram severs it's close ties with Twitter, then ratchets up user anger with a dramatic changes in its terms, enabling it to sell users' photos.

Meanwhile, over at Flickr, the once beloved haunt of pictures the product development wheels have cranked into high gear with numerous updates including a well-received and surprisingly snazzy mobile app.

Update: Cookiepocalypse is over (possibly). The ICO have updated their advice, suggesting implied consent is sufficient for users. Read more

This one is going to run and run. I'm predicting that anyone in digital is going to be an expert in cookies by the end of the Summer. And not the nice baked versions either, sadly.

Imagine a 90% drop in website visitors that are willing to accept a cookie from your website. be tracked through your analytics tool? Or your advertising targeting? Or your third party shopping basket? Ouch.

That's what happened with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) implemented the new law with existing technology, over 90% of site visitors declined to accept a Google Analytics cookie, thereby disappearing from their analytics.

Whilst the powers-that-be have allowed a year for industry to figure out a way to implement the new 'daft by European standards' cookie law, its impact is dramatic, as illustrated by the graphs obtained by leading web analytics expert, Vicky Brock (@brockyvick), under a Freedom of Information (FOI) request.

UPDATE: Vicky has kindly shared the raw data from the FOI request if anyone fancies a spot of number-crunching.

A new service from Facebook is raising a few eyebrows amongst Facebook users. The Recommended Photos block appears in Facebook's right-hand column when browsing through photo albums.

Another step on Facebook's mission to do for the social graph what Google is trying to do for information? I could see the utility in this type of matching, iPhoto's face recognition feature has propped up my ageing memory when going through some old group photos. Perhaps this feature will do the same.

Foursquare is Google Latitude meets Facebook, with a dash of Twitter and a dollop of Qype. It’s more addictive than a big stew of smack and crack. In less than a year, the geo-location gaming platform managed to rack up 275,000 users. Today, it’s more like 3 million.

But should we really be worried about privacy? We’ve been posting our information online, in one form or another, for ages. Common sense shall surely prevail.

Privacy is at the top of people’s online agenda. As an investor in businesses with specific offerings around people’s online data and digital data, not surprisingly it is at the top of my agenda too. I believe that the industry needs privacy definitions and principles that the average Internet user can understand, not shrouded in legal or technical jargon.

In my recent post on Privacy for a Facebook Generation I proposed that businesses should operate on six easy to understand levels of privacy: