“Want to find a partner via a dating website? Feel tempted to share a complex work related issue with colleagues? Or even spontaneously spill about your hangover on social media? Any of these could cost you your reputation and even your career,” Bernadette John writes for The Telegraph.
“The explosive growth of personal technology, from smart phones and tablets to file sharing and social media, plus the adoption of the same technology for professional purposes has created a dangerous new world where privacy, reputations and even careers are increasingly at risk,” John writes. “Medical negligence lawyers in the US now routinely request the clinicians’s tablet and mobile phone records in all medical negligence cases because the potential for a clinician to be distracted during surgery by the digital communications, from social media to email, is a recognised risk.”
“As the Lead for Digital Professionalism and Social Media at King’s College London, I have yet to witness a clinician using their phone during surgery, but am aware of enough cases where things have gone wrong to believe that all companies need to introduce specific training and policies in digital professionalism to protect customers, staff and the business itself,” John writes. “The biggest issues I am coping with now are less to do with what people say and share consciously, but more to do with the consequences of private lives becoming public via lack of understanding of how apps and programmes can make public things that people believe are private. This is because additional information is invisibly embedded in almost everything we share.”
Read more in the full article here.
I won’t quote the Fourth Amendment again.
In other news, “Will your Samsung phone cost your job?”
I am pretty careful about what apps get what level of information. Unless needed I don’t give apps access to location or notifications.
I dare you to install LittleSnitch on a Mac. You’ll faint within 10 minutes from all of the activity you never knew was going on when you surf around or even when the thing just sits there. It makes me faint every week or so. Without things like this on for iOS we’re all (already) dead.
Have had Little Snitch for half a dozen years or more.
It is a bit unnerving to set up since it seems most applications want to “phone out” data and the new version of Little Snitch allows monitoring of incoming data too.
In using GoToMeeting from Citrix, I’ve been confronted with 40-50 requests to allow outgoing data in an hour’s conversation. I asked “Why so many” to GTM customer support and got no answer.
Anyone serious about controlling what applications cause you to receive or send in data in the background need LittleSnitch and you need to take the time to understand it.
Try using Little Snitch and playing World of Warcraft. I stopped playing the game a few months ago and half of the reason was Blizzard setting off Little Snitch alerts from their constant need to call home to Google for whatever ad tracking they’re whoring from each other.
Well, it’s usually not quite THAT bad.
But I’ve caught a number of applications nefariously phoning phoning out tracking cookie data, even when you’re not browsing on the Internet. Example: Installers that feed data to Google Analytics. Never welcome.
I’ve also watched a lot of websites attempt to get web browsers to phone out to gawd knows where using bizarro port numbers that are NOT 80 or 443.
Going into shock is watching Steam and Spotify call out to every freaking IP address and port you’ve never heard of. Stuff like that makes you wonder.
Log into Google WiFi at Starbucks and just watch the LittleSnitch alerts to places you never knew existed.
Takes almost 10 Okays in Little Snitch to get connected. I can dial back and cancel some connections, but if I deny too many, I can’t connect to the WiFi.
It doesn’t make me wonder at all. There are many valid reasons to route traffic from ports outside of their standard defaults.
It depends upon what the application is supposed to do versus nefarious stuff it’s not supposed to do. Obviously, Steam is well tested. Much as I don’t like it, the application is connecting you directly with piles and piles of other Steam users so you can all play together, etc., with better efficiency than if everything got bottlenecked within the Steam network connection.
However, you’d expect this EXACT same behavior if your computer had been botted/zombied. It would be calling out all over the Internet spreading spam, performing DDOS attacks, pinging around the net for other machines to bot, calling home to private IRC chat rooms for further instructions and downloads, ad nauseam.
Sadly, some of the worst offenders are Apple apps. Logic Pro comes to mind. I can understand a connection or two or three. But, when it seems to be contacting everybody and their mother, that is BS.
all those iPad being used in surgery, I thought they were there to help to review scans and medical data… now I know.. they are really watching Master Chef….
Never know when a good recipe for liver or kidneys might come in handy.
Fava Beans and a nice Chianti are often recommended…
SOYALENT GREEN, SOYALENT GREEN, IT’S PEOPLE !! ITS PEEEEEOPLE !!!!
Betteridge’s Law of Headlines wins again.
Thata what hit me.
If you’re not familiar, this the Daily Torygraph, an inbred cousin of the Tea Party News, where they are so fearful of the unregulated, unwashed masses that they have to conjure up scare stories to justify their “put ’em all in prison’ agenda.
Not anymore worse than the GUARDIAN, the cousin of the New York Times with their scare tactics of the uninformed masses.