Every year I think people will start to get the hang of social media. After all, it’s really not much different from what we’ve done as a society forever, just more rapid-fire. Every year I am proven wrong. Perhaps we need to consider better behavior on social media as a…
Today’s sorta-infographic contains four pie charts, one of which is supposed to show a range, and the other three are ostensibly based on 12 hour clocks. Despite it’s clip-art-style graphics, it does provide some pretty interesting factoids and comes with accompanying text to explain the graphics and provide more details.…
Color is the newest social media application on the block, launched just after SxSW and relying on proximity-based media sharing instead of a friend model. Founded by names from other successful ventures along with $41 million in funding, Color seemed poised to storm the social media market. One day after…
Developers are starting to lean on the features of Facebook outside of the walled garden of Facebook itself, and there are implications for us as users that we might not be considering. The current trends of web design include giant footers, social media icons, extensive background images, and the omnipresent…
Last month Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer will be adding a “tracking protection” feature to its browser, allowing users to prevent advertising sites from tracking their activity on the web (ad targeting, really). This move was partly to stay ahead of an FTC push to mandate that browser makers add…
This may be somewhat old news by now, but given the hubbub last night that Apple and some makers of apps for the iPhone are getting sued over tracking users without consent, it seems that the struggle between privacy and features will never be old news. Back at the dawn…
Facebook Places is out. It’s the Foursquare / Gowalla / Brightkite / Loopt / etc.-killer. Or so Facebook hopes. All of those services have some pretty clear controls in place to limit how much information you share. Granted, you can mess up even their simple privacy controls and share the…
That title was more fun to write than I thought it would be.Back in March I mentioned that Google had decided that it would let users opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics (Google to Let Users Opt Out of Analytics Tracking). That day is here. News sites all…
Facebook has been taking a (well-deserved) beating lately for all its privacy (or lack of) controls. No longer is Facebook getting beat up in the world of blogs and tech journals, now it’s taking fire from the likes of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and even has…
If you know CSS, then you know that the :visited pseudo-class is a method to determine if a user has already been to the link it targets. For example, you may have styles for a:link and a:visited in your CSS file to help users see a difference between links they’ve…
Given all the flak Google has taken recently (see my post yesterday, More Social Media Privacy News), I wasn’t too surprised to see this headline come through from ReadWriteWeb: Google Will Soon Allow You to Opt Out of Google Analytics Tracking.In a blog post from yesterday (More choice for users:…
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal technology blog posted an article titled Google Buzz Exemplifies Privacy Problems, FTC Commissioner Says. The outgoing FTC Commissioner said that technology companies, specifically Google, are being too cavalier with the personal data of consumers. While qualifying her remarks as not official FTC comments, she said…