Facebook agrees $10m privacy complaint settlement

Facebook has agreed to pay $10m to charity in a settlement with five users of its site that were angry their images were used within adverts without their explicit permission.

 The case was brought against the firm after users complained Facebook had publicised items they had "liked" in its sponsored stories ads, without compensation or opt-out options. Facebook's sponsored stories system then turned users "likes" into paid advertisements that included the user's name and profile picture. 

It was confirmed Facebook had reached a settlement package in May and Reuters reported on Monday that the figure agreed upon was $10m, which will be given to charity. TG-Tech contacted Facebook for confirmation but the firm said it had no comment. According to Reuters, the court filing by judge Lucy Koh noted that Facebook had been in the wrong, based on long-established legal principles.

 "California has long recognised a right to protect one's name and likeness against appropriation by others for their advantage," Koh wrote. The settlement will only make a small dent in the firm's cash holdings but comes on the back of its disappointing launch on the stock market, which saw its share price slump amid accusations the firm was not totally transparent with its financial estimates. 

The firm's chief technical officer also announced he was stepping down from his role to launch his own start-up on Friday in another blow to the company.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More

LinkedIn stung by password theft and iOS app data bungle

Professional networking website LinkedIn has run into a pair of thorny privacy issues, after reports emerged that millions of account credentials had been leaked, while researchers also accused its iPhone app of surreptitiously snaffling users' data.

According to Norwegian website Dagens, around 6.5 million encrypted LinkedIn passwords were recently posted to a Russian hacker site. Many of those hacked passwords have now been decrypted.

Linked said in a Twitter posting that it was investigating the reports.

Our team is currently looking into reports of stolen passwords. Stay tuned for more.

— LinkedIn News (@LinkedInNews) June 6, 2012

Reporters also contacted the firm for any update but had received no information at the time of publication.

Meanwhile, a pair of researchers with Israeli firm Skycure revealed details of a data-sharing issue with LinkedIn's iOS app.

Yair Amit and his colleague Adi Sharabani found the app sent users' calendar information to the company's servers, without warning.

The problem affects users that enable the feature which allows them to view their iOS calendar within the app.

“The app doesn’t only send the participant lists of meetings; it also sends out the subject, location, time of meeting and more importantly personal meeting notes, which tend to contain highly sensitive information such as conference call details and passcodes,” the researchers wrote on a blog.

The researchers said they informed LinkedIn about the potential risk of obtaining user details without permission, but the issue had not yet been fixed.

The mobile app feature had been intended to provide a better calendar service for its users, LinkedIn's mobile product manager Joff Redfern wrote in a company blog.

“We do not store any calendar information on our servers.” he said. “We do not share or use your calendar data for purposes other than matching it with relevant LinkedIn profiles.”

LinkedIn has promised to update its app, removing the capability for calendar note information to be uploaded to its servers

Thursday, June 07, 2012 | 0 comments | Read More