The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a new report on internet privacy praising LinkedIn, Facebook and DropBox, while criticising MySpace.
The EFF’s 2012 Who has your back? report evaluated online services on five criteria, including informing users when data is sought by governments, transparency about the circumstances in which it hands user information to governments, and willingness to defend users’ privacy rights in court.
The report states: “LinkedIn and SpiderOak, like Dropbox, have each earned recognition in three categories: Promising to inform users about government access requests, transparency about how and when data goes to the government, and standing up for user privacy in Congress.”
“Facebook, Dropbox and Twitter have each upgraded their practices in the past year and earned additional stars.”
However, the report criticises the privacy policies of social media services FourSquare and MySpace, as well as major US internet service providers AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
