Here you can read the Letter ( Google-Letter-Re-Privacy-Policy ) that has been sent to the Congress where Google is defending its privacy policy changes yet again, this time to the United States Congress.

In my opinion the Google has been doing a good approach (a massive communication)!

This change and process are the “most extensive user notification effort in Google’s history….to ensure that our users have many opportunities to learn about these changes.”

“There are two reasons why we’re updating our privacy policies: to make them simpler and more understandable, and to improve the user experience across Google.” “For example, Ann Cavoukian, the Information and Privacy Commissioner for Ontario, Canada, who is credited with the concept of ―Privacy by Design,‖ recently said about our new Privacy Policy, ―By pulling it all together into one central location and simplifying it, it makes it much more accessible and user friendly. So I think this is a positive development.

 Transparency and Communication is a great approach, but the most important is what has been doing to awareness and protect ours Internet’s users.

5 tips for staying safe on the web (from Google)

More news:

• http://www.google.com/goodtoknow/online-safety/
• http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/31/google-privacy-policy-congress/?source=business-insider

CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on Privacy and Security in Online Social Media (PSOSM) http://precog.iiitd.edu.in/psosm_www2012/
Co-located with 21st International World Wide Web Conference Lyon, France April 16 – 20, 2012

With increase in usage of the Internet, there has been an exponential increase in the use of online social media on the Internet. Websites like Facebook, YouTube, Orkut, Twitter and Flickr have changed the way Internet is being used. There is a dire need to investigate, study and characterize privacy and security of online social media from various perspectives (computational, cultural, psychological). Real world scalable systems need to be built to detect and defend security and privacy issues on online social media. The main goals of the workshop are: (1) To create a platform to discuss latest issues, trends, and cutting-edge research approaches in security and privacy in online social media; (2) to bring researchers who are working on issues related to security and privacy on the Internet, and those studying online social media, to discuss the problems that overlap and bring these two areas together.

Topics / themes include, but not limited to the following:
- Information privacy disclosure, revelation and its effects in online social networks
- Collateral damage due to information leakage (e.g. through photo tagging) on OSM
- Privacy issues related to location based services on OSM
- Effective and usable privacy setting and policies on OSM
- Anonymization of social network datasets
- Detection and characterization of spam, phishing, frauds, hate crime, abuse, extremism via online social media
- Cyber-bullying, abuse and harassment detection, and prevention strategies
- Identifying and curbing malware, phishing, and botnets on OSM
- Filtering of pornography, viruses, and human trafficking related content or entities on OSM
- Studying the social and economic impact of security and privacy issues on OSM
- Usability (including design flaws) of secure systems on online social media
- Data modeling of human behavior in context of security and privacy threats
- Privacy and security issues in social gaming applications
- Trust systems based on social networks
- Legal and ethical issues for researchers studying security and privacy on OSM
- Information credibility on online social media
- Security and privacy challenges in new entrants in OSM (e.g. Google Plus)
- Effect of OSM on conventional crime (robberies and theft)

Important dates
Abstract submission: February 20th, 2012 Manuscripts due: February 23rd, 2012 Notification of acceptance: March 8th, 2012 Final revised manuscript: April 5th, 2012
Workshop: April 17th, 2012 (Full day)

Workshop chairs
- Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, pk [at] iiitd [dot] ac [dot] in
- Prof. Virgilo Almeida