Edward Snowden’s personal email provider Lavabit has shuttered its email service, active immediately. Instead of complying with government orders, the email service provider ended all email service on Thursday and is continuing the fight in appeals court. Further, the company is under federal gag orders, presumably from US secret courts, to remain silent on the details.

Here is the posted message from Lavabit’s CEO Ladar Levison detailing the decision:

My Fellow Users,

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on—the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests. Read more

Mobile app industry groups and privacy advocates are making headway on establishing a new set of  mobile app guidelines that will give consumers more transperancy about what personal information is being taken from their phones and tablets and given to marketers.

USA Today has more: “The plan will likely provide a brief, easy-to-read snapshot of an app’s privacy policies, similar to nutrition labels on food packages. The snapshot would give consumers the bottom line on what information the software collects, such as physical location, surfing habits and personal contacts, and how that data might be used or shared with other companies.”

But even if the industry adopts these new guidelines, which appears likely, they won’t be required to do so. App developers would be encouraged by industry groups to adopt these best practices, but it’s up to them to implement these practices.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a privacy rights group, is calling the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Samsung the publisher of the app that supports Jay-Z’s new album “Magna Carta Holy Grail.” According to EPIC, Samsung is violating consumer privacy through its data collection practices.

As The New York Times pointed out, the app requires users to give it permission to access the identity of the phone owner and the email addresses and social media accounts associated with the phone. The app then tweets on behalf of users in exchange for free downloads of the new album. EPIC has asked the FTC to make Samsung pull the app until the privacy problems are worked out. Here is an excerpt from the statement that EPIC released:

The Magna Carta App collects massive amounts of personal information from users, including location data and data pulled from other accounts and other apps on the users phones. The Magna Carta app also includes hidden spam techniques that force users to promote the album.  Read more

Ghostery is a free add-on for Firefox that can help you detect invisible web tracking via web-tags, web bugs, pixels, beacons, and all sorts of ad networks powered by your personal browsing data. Ghostery’s comprehensive add-on allows you to see each company’s tracking behavior with links to their individual privacy policy as well as relevant opt-out options for each company. There’s also an easy way to block any unwanted tracking:

At Ghostery, we believe in enabling informed decisions about your control over your online privacy. The more you learn about the companies trading your online behavioral data, the better you can make decisions about how to control your exposure to those companies.

Ghostery allows zero-tolerance blocking of anything ad related, complete (visible) open communication with ad companies, or countless measures in between – determined by you, the informed web user.

Read more

Researchers at UC San Diego have found that many apps collect the iPhone unique identifier (UDID) – despite Apple’s privacy policy. The company has been rejecting apps that collect user UDIDs since May 1, but it appears that at least a third of apps have been shown to do just that.

Starting May 1, the App Store will no longer accept new apps or app updates that access UDIDs. Please update your apps and servers to associate users with the Vendor or Advertising identifiers introduced in iOS 6.

The researchers actually used an app to collect some privacy data – ProtectMYPivacy. The app monitors access from other apps and notifies users who can also choose to block access. Read more

Hacking is undoubtedly illegal for civilians, but how does it stack up against rape? According the highly public Steubenville rape case, “hacktivists” can actually get more jail time than rapists. By hacking into social media accounts to obtain tweets, videos, and Instagram photos, Anonymous hacktivist Deric Lostutter could face up to 10 years in federal prison. Since the convicted rapists were minors they will hardly face their maximum sentencing of two years. Witnesses and those who covered up the crime will not be facing any jail time.

Given the barrage of controversy from the NSA, Wikileaks, and Anonymous, what kind of message is the judicial system sending to the American Public? Hacking is legal so long as it’s government sanctioned, but if it’s not you’re better off raping?

Does the NSA PRISM scandal make you wary of digitally sharing your personal information? Online security tools company MyPermissions has upgraded its app to help you better understand and control how apps and websites are accessing your personal data online. Using MyPermissions Cleaner you can find out which sites and apps are trying to access your personal information and them approve or remove these apps based on how you feel about this. The app offers you real-time mobile alerts, so as soon as a site tries to gain access, you can get an alert.

Here is more about how it works from the press release:

MyPermissions scans connected application permissions pages across social networks and cloud services, and has tracked the permissions of nearly 300,000 apps. Its mobile, live alerts for Facebook, Google, Twitter, DropBox, and Instagram let consumers know whenever an application accesses their personally identifiable information (PII), and gives them the choice to allow access to their data, or revoke it.

Blackeberry Messenger allows users to chare what they are currently listening and watching – but that could also mean porn. Users on Crackberry forum posted a screenshot demonstrating this very vulnerability. The messenger client revealed the user was currently “listening to pornhub.com.”

Blackberry’s default setting does not share videos or songs to the messenger’s status updates, so you have to turn on the “show what I am listening to” feature in order to have an embarrassing porn update slip into your status. Consider yourself warned.

Clueful is a handy webapp that can help you identify what information your apps are collecting. The app was created by the security company  Bitdefender, but was removed by Apple from the app store in July of 2012. Since then, Bitdefender has been offering Clueful as a standalone webapp.

Apple’s app store is known to remove malicious apps, though it seems dubious to select an app that offers something the app store doesn’t – privacy clarity. Unlike Google Play, the app store does not clearly define privacy information for each app. This webapp version of Clueful is the easiest and fastest way to see what kind of data each app is siphoning from your phone.

Apple’s choice to remove the app is disconcerting given the latest privacy controversy with Path and Google. Path was collecting entire address book data from users and storing the information on its servers – all without users’ consent. One user noted that the practice of collecting users’ data was completely antithetical to its stated privacy policy:

What Personal Information Do We Collect? Read more

Facebook is releasing its data to suicide prevention nonprofit, SAVE.org, in hopes of preventing future tragedies. The collaboration resulted from the recent suicide of internet activist, Aaron Schwartz.

About 100 deaths from suicide occur each day in America. Young adults as especially at risk – suicide is the third leading cause of death among those between the ages of 15-24. Likewise, Facebook’s median user age is 22, making the social network a rich source for studies of social behaviors leading up to suicide.

Facebook is not alone in its humanitarian efforts to prevent suicide. Using Google’s search engine to look up information regarding suicide will bring up the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Likewise, Twitter’s public data is available to any researchers wishing to mine information – it’s already being used to track the flu. Read more