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posted by janrinok on Monday June 22 2015, @05:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the your-method-needs-an-upgrade dept.

El Reg reports

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has pushed out its fifth annual "Who Has Your Back" report, claiming to chart tech companies' commitment to "the next frontier of user privacy".

The EFF's categorisation of what constitutes effective privacy standards for data controllers has seen it award full marks to Apple, Yahoo, and Dropbox, among others, in its 2015 report, telling netizens who has or does not have their back, or backs.

The "digital rights" lobbying group evaluated 24 companies--not on whether they shared data with commercial partners, or whether they snooped on users' devices and trafficked that data back to their own labs--but instead on the five categories we have included below.

  • Follows industry-accepted best practices
  • Tells users about government data demands
  • Discloses policies on data retention
  • Discloses government content removal requests
  • Pro-user public policy opposes backdoors

Responding to The Register's questions regarding the widespread criticism of many of these companies true commitment to customers' privacy, Nate Cardozo, an EFF Staff Attorney, told us that "with this report, we ask specifically how well companies stand up to the government, not what kind of business they run. In fact, there's likely room for an entirely different report that looks at how much data companies collect, retain, and share. We may produce such a report in the future, but it wouldn't be a part of Who Has Your Back."

[...]Particularly interesting are the full marks for Dropbox, a PRISM target "partner" according to Snowden documents released earlier this month.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by edIII on Monday June 22 2015, @06:41PM

    by edIII (791) on Monday June 22 2015, @06:41PM (#199538)

    Responding to The Register's questions regarding the widespread criticism of many of these companies true commitment to customers' privacy, Nate Cardozo, an EFF Staff Attorney, told us that "with this report, we ask specifically how well companies stand up to the government, not what kind of business they run. In fact, there's likely room for an entirely different report that looks at how much data companies collect, retain, and share. We may produce such a report in the future, but it wouldn't be a part of Who Has Your Back."

    In this case, "Having your back", is synonymous with, "We only release data like that if you pay, not for free, or because of ethical or national considerations". Just because Apple stands up to government, does not mean they are pro-privacy WRT their own consumers, only that the information is part of Apple's empire, and nobody else's.

    The only definition I can come up with for "Who Has Your Back", means that Apple directly fights for my rights to privacy, and the rights over my property. I don't know the EFF expects people to take them seriously at all when they are pushing reports that fly in the face of common sense.

    Apple is not even in the remotest sense, concerned with their consumer's privacy, or anything regarding civil rights .

    I'm disappointed in the EFF today. Are they going to start writing anti-Climate change propaganda next?

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