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Google update aims to show you how it uses your data
If you’re tired of hunting aimlessly for privacy information in your Google account settings, this announcement is for you. Google said Thursday it’s made account settings easier to navigate and understand. “We always want to make sure that people feel in control of what data they’re sharing data with Google,” Tamar Yehoshua, the Google vice president who oversees account security, said in an interview with CNET. “It’s important to us that they understand what they’re signing up for.” It’s important for users, too. The changes have been in place for a week. Android users can now search all setting within Google Account hub to find specific topics, use a revamped…
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Facebook releases 500 pages of damage control in response to Senators’ questions
When Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress in April, the CEO faced a public grilling from lawmakers — and left them with several lingering questions. Now, Facebook has followed up with 500 of pages of answers to written questions from two Senate committees, although some of the responses may be cause for even more digging. In the documents, Facebook strikes a cautious tone as it answers questions about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, ad targeting, moderation policies, and more, giving a broad, if shallow, look at the company’s policies and practices. The documents seem, by design, to shed little new light — many of the questions are answered by pointing to publicly available…
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Facebook alerts 14M to privacy bug that changed status composer to public
Facebook has another privacy screwup on its hands. A bug in May accidentally changed the suggested privacy setting for status updates to public from whatever users had set it to last, potentially causing them to post sensitive friends-only content to the whole world. Facebook is now notifying 14 million people around the world who were potentially impacted by the bug to review their status updates and lock them down tighter if need be. Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan wrote to TechCrunch in a statement: “We recently found a bug that automatically suggested posting publicly when some people were creating their Facebook posts. We have fixed this issue and starting today…
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I Left My Out-of-Office on Permanently and I’ve Never Been Happier
Twenty reasons why you should never be instantly available. Every hard worker knows the sheer ecstasy of logging onto one’s work email and switching on the “out-of-office” alert system before a big trip. (Honestly, is there any better feeling?) But when you travel as much as I do—as a self-employed writer, I spend practically half my life at 30,000 feet and on foreign soil—you learn a dirty little secret: you should never, ever, ever, turn that alert off. Seriously. I don’t. My out-of-office alert is activated regardless of whether I’m in China or I’m sitting at my desk in my New York apartment. Yes, it’s activated right now, thank you…
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The Do’s and Don’ts of Choosing a WordPress Theme
There are thousands (10,000-plus) of WordPress themes out there. So many that it would take days on end to search through them all. So how do you narrow it down to find the perfect one for your site? Choosing the right theme is obviously important – the right one should give your content pizzazz, keeping it responsive across devices, while also loading in the blink of an eye. Yet with so many themes in the pool, it can be a rather daunting task to pick the best one possible. Before buying a theme, or investing your time in customizing one, be sure to read through this list of do’s and…
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Why You Should Encrypt Your Email
Security is mostly hype, right? You don’t really need to bother with all those complicated passwords, antivirus software, firewalls and such. Its all just software salesmen and security consultants trying to scare everyone so they can sell their products and services. I don’t actually disagree with their statements at times but there are common sense steps everyone should take to secure their computers & networks and there is certainly no shortage of hype in the news. However, as one of the common sense measures that aren’t pure hype you should consider encrypting your email communications. If you are on vacation you might send a picture postcard to a friend or…
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Ad Blockers are breaking the Internet
Ad blockers don’t just block ads on the internet – they actually break websites such as British Airways and Vodafone, a new study has found. According to tests conducted on the UK’s 100 most popular websites, ad blockers didn’t just block pop-ups, but accidentally corrupted useful parts of a website, such as an airline check-in screens or retail order tracking pages. If you were browsing, all you would see is an error message or simply a chunk missing on screen, but no explanation for what was behind it. In the study by London ad-tech company Oriel, the researchers tested 24 common ad blockers, including Adblock, Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin,…
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Is Commenting on Blogs a Smart Traffic Strategy?
No… and yes. It depends on how you do it. Some people do it horrendously wrong. Let’s take a look. Curiosity-Click Traffic is Crap If one of your primary traffic strategies is to leave fast comments on the posts of larger blogs in your niche just to get a few clicks from the passing traffic, stop. You could get more traffic from one piece of stellar content than months of that type of comment strategy. And without good content, there’s no reason to attract a few “curiosity clicks” anyway. What’s going to make them stick around after the click if your content sucks? Nothing. Plus, the root motivation for those…
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Online passwords: keep it complicated
20 Accounts, 20 Passwords? By now, you probably have about 20 different passwords you’re struggling to remember. There must be an easier way. How do you stay one step ahead of the hackers and still stay sane? Let me hazard a wild guess: the system of passwords you use on the internet for accessing online banking, email, shopping sites, Twitter and Facebook accounts is a mess. You know perfectly well what you ought to be doing: for each site you visit, you should be choosing a different, complex sequence of letters, numbers and symbols, and then memorising it. (That’s rule number one of the conventional wisdom on passwords: never, ever…
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