NSA, FBI collecting content from Google, Facebook, other services
The U.S. National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation have access to servers at Google, Facebook, and other major Internet services, collecting audio, video, email, and other content for surveillance, the Washington Post and the Guardian reported on Thursday.
The surveillance is taking place in real time under a classified program called PRISM, which was begun in 2007 to investigate foreign threats to the U.S., the reports said. Most of the major Internet services, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Apple, and AOL as well as Google and Facebook, knowingly participate in PRISM, according to the Post and the Guardian. But all the companies denied the Post's claims that the NSA had "direct access" to their servers,ma Liam the Post dropped in later versions of its story. Read more...
Congress wants answers on Amazon Silk privacy
A Massachusetts congressman has asked Amazon.com to spell out whether and how its upcoming Silk browser will collect information from users when the retail giant launches its Kindle tablet next month.
U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the co-chairman of a congressional caucus focused on consumer privacy, last week asked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to answer four questions about Silk and data collection.
"Consumers may buy the new Kindle Fire to read 1984, but they may not realize that the tablet's 'Big Browser' may be watching their every keystroke when they are online," said Markey in a press release last Friday.
Markey cited a story in the New York Times earlier this month that stated Silk "may give Amazon unique insight into the Web clicks, buying patterns and media habits of Fire users." Read more...
Adobe revs online forms and survey creator
Hot on the heels of its acquisition of digital-signature firm EchoSign last week, Adobe's Acrobat Solutions team popped another piece into its online-documents puzzle with an upgrade to its fledgling web-form creator, FormsCentral.
The online tool was launched on Valentine's Day – that's February 14 to you readers living in romance-free zones – with the goal of making the creation and management of forms and surveys so easy that even overpaid corner-office execs could do it.
"We wanted to ... really simplify the way you could create, distribute, collect information, and analyze the results," Adobe marketeer Todd Gerber told The Reg when describing the purpose of FormsCentral. Read more...