The fear of hackers and privacy peeping toms has been quelled for the moment due to the unveiling of a new two-factor account authentication by Dropbox, a cloud storage company used by social marketing firms and individuals alike. Earlier this month it was reported International Business Times that the cloud storage company Dropbox had a security breach, which led to a small number of accounts being accessed by unwelcomed parties. In addition an amount of spam was received by the users of the compromised accounts. This incident was a strong motive for the introduction of the two-factor authentication…

Everybody has a different view of social media: enthusiastic, annoyed, indifferent.  However, when it comes to being amusing, nothing beats the apocalyptic view of social media.  Nothing makes me happier than those wonderful people who view Facebook as a harbinger of the End of Days.   They’ve become increasingly rare, therefore I was pleasantly surprised to read Andrew Keen go on about how Facebook threatens to “Zuck up” the human race. Now, you probably have come across Keen’s thesis before, and he doesn’t really tread any new ground.  In a nutshell he says that the endless…

Call this a #protip for social media use. If you’re helping your grandmother count her life savings, don’t try to impress your friends by snapping a picture of it and posting it on Facebook, particularly when your home address is on your Facebook profile. That’s exactly what a 17-year-old Australian girl did while helping her 72-year-old grandmother. Thankfully, the masked robbers armed with knives and a club broke into her own house and robbed her 47-year-old mother instead. It was her mom’s house that was on her Facebook page. As Jolie O’Dell at Venture Beat put it, “Use the sense God gave a horse…

As business models go, the file-sharing business model has proven to be precarious at best in the last few months. With MegaUpload being shut down in January and other file-sharing services under heavy fire from governments and copyright advocacy groups around the world, the ruling by a higher regional court in Germany that orders RapidShare to filter user uploads has many questioning whether the industry can survive. The glimmer of hope comes in the contradictions. The highest court in the EU banned anti-piracy filters just last month because it would violate user privacy and hinder freedom…

There are so many threats to online security and privacy that many have simply given up on the notion of being protected. Their best defense is simply not putting anything online that they wouldn’t want to share with the rest of the world and the nefarious types in particular. For example, signing up for one of NBCs websites means that your username is shared with 7 other companies. For Home Depot signups, that number grows to 13 and includes your email address. We’ve all heard of how Google, Facebook, and other major companies are watching us when we aren’t aware. The list of security and privacy infractions…

If you’re not paying for a service, then you’re the product. That’s been the reality of social media for some time now and it’s coming out now that Twitter has sold access to your information to two research companies who will release it to clients who pay for the ability to mine the data. There are different packages that Twitter has made available. Datasift Inc. has the “big” package with data going back two years, while Gnip Inc. offers data that goes back 30 days. “Harvesting what someone said a year or more ago is game-changing,” said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the Privacy…

Western society has always had certain expectations of privacy that have been disturbed or reaffirmed at various times in history. We didn’t want this journalist, that politician, or this law enforcement agency trampling on our rights to do what we want (as long as others aren’t hurt as a result) during the personal times in our lives. Things have changed. Privacy is quickly becoming an illusion for many who utilize social media. The somewhat odd part is that very few seem to actually care. If someone were to ask a person if they would be willing to broadcast their physical whereabouts whenever…

It’s been over a month since Mark Zuckerberg unveiled many of the changes that have happened or will happen soon on Facebook. There have been some tweaks and missteps, but we’re finally starting to get a more clear picture of the direction of the social networking giant and what to expect in the future. Privacy, always on the mind of those critical of Facebook, has become more of an issue thanks to these changes. In the infographic below, we examine these changes and isolate the six red flags that are being raised as a result. Click to enlarge. …

Amazon is getting a lot of attention based upon the Amazon Fire tablet, but now that buzz around the initial launch announcement has subsided a bit, it’s time to take a look at real differentiator: Silk. When Amazon first introduced Silk, they didn’t wait beyond the 2nd sentence of the post before asking the question that they knew would be asked by dozens of tech bloggers: “A browser?  Do we really need another one?” Their response to those and other questions is in this video: What they didn’t address was the inherent problem with their browser: privacy. To solve the concern that tablet hardware…

Those funny pictures of your passed out on the lawn… harmless, right? What about your choice of joining the Facebook group, “I shouldn’t have to press 1 for English. We are in the United States. Learn the language.”? You’re entitled to have an opinion, aren’t you? You went out LARPing last month and you’re tagged in a photo carrying a battle axe and wearing dragon-scale armor. That’s just for fun, isn’t it? When the Feds approved the ability of Social Intelligence Corp to run social media background checks under the Fair Credit Reporting Act that allows them to comb your images, postings,…