Stealing your Contacts < There's an App for that.

     How much do you care about privacy? What you may not consider private now, may come back to haunt you later.

It has been recently discovered that several social, productivity, convenience, and even game apps have been guilty of uploading address book data. Most of the time users aren't even aware of the share. This information may be safe at a particular company that has good "consumer privacy" thoughts and practices in place. But what about when that company is hacked? Well, for example, when the VA got hacked, thousands of highly sensitive social security numbers were exposed and an unknown amount of digital damage was done.

Say for example, you partake in a multitude of digital software markets and different minor private information is released in each separate activity... If there was private information sharing legal or illegally, all those pieces may fit firmly together to amount to a private bundle of information you may not be comfortable with sharing.

There have been several posts, articles, and even a law in California that go into more detail. The cali law doesn't quite stop the upload of personal information, it just makes the app developers let users know about it in a privacy policy that is specifically released to the user before downloading/installing the app.

So, next time you skim pass a privacy policy... keep in mind, nobody cares about your personal information more than you yourself.

Care to read on...
Seattle Article Stating Specific Apps and what they do

Appolicious Article - Focus on Apple, Google, and Blackberry

Focus on CA's Law

CNN - Mobile Privacy and Kids

LTE beats Competition

     Long Term Evolution, more commonly known as LTE, has been featured in one of my past posts. I had been comparing it to Sprint's Wimax, which had far more test locations than VZW's LTE. But now, the tortoise has beat the hair. Now... LTE takes all the headlines and is the clear winner of cellular wireless technology. So what do providers say about their own technology? AT&T and Sprint stick by their identical phrase of "Speeds up to 10x faster than 3G". Verizon boasts about 5-12 Mbps download and 2-5 Mbps upload.

Above: AT&T's coverage as of Jan. 12, 2012

Above: Sprint's coverage as of Jan. 12, 2012

Above: Verizon's coverage as of Jan. 12, 2012

Above: Verizon's northeastern coverage as of Jan. 12, 2012
     Just a quick overview of the move into 4G LTE for some of the top cellular providers. If you're due for an upgrade... Now is the time to strongly consider upgrading to a LTE capable phone, as you may find yourself regretting the decision when your friends are cruising the web in the fast lane, and you're just merging into the slow lane.