LISNews: Librarian News

Pippert concludes, “It might ultimately be a human problem to solve: capture content from others mindfully and use it thoughtfully, with good communication. Let others know you’re using the content and make sure you are clear to friends your preference about your content being redistributed.”

This is yet another reminder that anything you say anywhere on the web, private or not, is always subject to being shared via third party apps, screenshots, or good old fashioned copy and paste, so never say something online that you wouldn’t say in public, because there really is no such thing as privacy, which is sad and unacceptable, but true.

The developers behind ad-tracking browser plug-in Ghostery said they'd logged 137 different trackers on the Microsoft website and 107 on Apple's site, while they logged 66 on Samsung's site and 65 on HP's. Dell has 106. All of these tech sites make greater use of trackers associated with behavioural advertising than specialist retail sites such as Tesco (64), John Lewis (46) and Dabs (12).

Angry Birds, a popular mobile app, is among the seemingly innocuous programs that are raising privacy concerns by collecting personal information that is used to focus advertising. When Jason Hong, an associate professor at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, surveyed 40 users, all but two were unaware that the game was noting and storing their locations so that they could later be the targets of advertising.

The company this month began offering reports to marketers showing what Verizon subscribers are doing on their phones and other mobile devices, including what iOS and Android apps are in use in which locations. Verizon says it may link the data to third-party databases with information about customers' gender, age, and even details such as "sports enthusiast, frequent diner or pet owner."

"We're able to view just everything that they do," Bill Diggins, U.S. chief for the Verizon Wireless marketing initiative, told an industry conference earlier this year. "And that's really where data is going today. Data is the new oil."

However, ads make Facebook and Google free to use. Says Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project: "When you pay a company $80 a month, they have no business monetizing the data they're collecting."