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"gewg_" writes:

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.