Worst Companies At Protecting User Privacy: Skype, Verizon, Yahoo 113
First time accepted submitter SmartAboutThings writes "Apple and Microsoft are one of the worst companies at protecting our privacy, according to EFF's privacy report. Dropbox, Twitter and Sonic have some of the best scores." "Sonic" is California ISP Sonic.net, which tops the field with the EFF's only 4-star rating. Of ISPs with national presence, ATT and Comcast come in with a single star apiece, and Verizon gets a goose egg.
Freenet and private "Twitter" - Sone (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, for real privacy we should become holders of the data.
Freenet is quite cool with privacy&anonimity (slow and high latency, but most private solution I know).
And Sone plugin offers anonymous "twitter" that can not be censored not tracked because
everyone holds the data [parts] mirrored on their p2p nodes,
and only YOU the publisher have the PRIVATE KEYs to your identity, same as with ssh or gpg
no one can confiscate that (especially when they can't find you - therefore the anonymity part,
problem, police-state?)
freenetproject.org and you see Sone plugin after installation on 1st page.
Beware - reduce storage size or use SSD or separated hard-drive to not experience slow-down of computer.
This is solely about governmental privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
The EFF did nothing at all to consider privacy in general, and in particular with regards to businesses and other private entities. The chart is only about how the companies are interacting with governmental bodies (e.g. Congress, law enforcement). Facebook is widely regarded as being horrible when it comes to privacy, but it's because they keep abusing their access to everyone's information by sharing it with third-parties, using it to follow them around the Internet, and failing to follow the settings the user has indicated.
Even companies that have been more benign have problems. Dropbox, for instance, had a notable bug earlier this year or late last where anyone could access anyone else's account. Their employees also have access to everyone's data and can read it at any time unless you encrypt it yourself. Where is the consideration for those sorts of factors?
I'm far more concerned with companies sharing my information for profit than I am with companies sharing my information with the government. You can support privacy laws in Washington all you want, but when the rubber hits the road if you're selling me out for a quick buck, I don't want to be providing you with my information.
Re:Skype? (Score:5, Interesting)
Skype probably has a backdoor to allow governments to listen in [h-online.com], although the code is heavily obfuscated to try to prevent people from finding out the details via reverse engineering.
Re:This is solely about governmental privacy (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention that Dropbox are quick to give full access to your Dropbox to any third party app developer who sets "full access" in their dev token - you can't override that when you install said app.