Searching for policy

The latest scams target cellphones and social networks. Here's how to protect yourself. Consider "grandparent scams," in which con artists call senior citizens, often late at night. One of them poses as the victim's grandchild, often sounding like they are sobbing or extremely upset and say they are in jail or in trouble and need cash right away. "All scams have an emotional hook," says Peter Ziverts, vice president of policy development at Western Union. He says to be suspicious of requests that insist you send money by wire without allowing a check or PayPal option.

It's pretty easy to get down on US renewable energy policy if you're just paying attention to the nonsense coming out of legislators bought and paid for by the polluting class, but there were some truly great milestones in 2011.

David Rusenky, co-founder of website hosting service Weebly.com, describes how GoDaddy wiped his domain name records, only restoring them after a phone call. All it took was a single complaint against a single user.

The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race...

Supporters of SOPA and PIPA, two bills that aim to deter piracy, claim that they will only affect foreign sites and businesses. However, this view is not shared by a wide range of opponents, including the people behind the popular Reddit community. But how exactly can SOPA and PIPA threaten sites like Reddit? Leading First Amendment lawyer and Internet policy expert Marvin Ammori explains.

With the Internet up in arms about the most recent tweaks to Google's fine print on privacy, it's helpful to remember: It could be much, much worse. Another search engine called Skipity, created last June and registered to one Andrew Corley, offers a refreshingly honest example of the privacy policy most [...]

Paying for Google services? Your contract may well give you greater privacy rights than the general public.

Can industry heavyweights Google, PayPal, Microsoft and AOL -- along with 11 others in high-tech such as Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as the financial world's Bank of America and Fidelity Investments -- succeed in stopping phishing attacks right in their tracks? In uniting behind an effort called DMARC.org unveiled today, the group says it can through policy-based steps filter out spoofed email that attackers use for phishing.

A senior Google executive issued new details and shared a letter sent to eight Congressmen, Jan. 30 -- in response to widespread concerns about Google's plans to revise its privacy policy March 1. Pablo Chavez, Google's director for public policy, outlined what was changing at Google -- "our privacy policies" -- and what was not --"our privacy controls"-- in a public policy blog posted Jan. 31.

It Shouldn't Take a Letter from Congress for Google to Give Straight Answers About Privacy Policy Changes