EFF 2017 privacy report: The “Electronic Frontier Foundation” is a no-profit association. It serves of a valid group of lawyers, who annually draw up privacy reports concerning the most popular web services.
Who has your back?
As time passes, the web giants like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Amazon and so on, gather more and more information about us on their servers.
Who can assure us which information they have access to?
The EFF with its Who has Your Back program, just analyzes their behaviour and how they manage our private information.
In particular, they focus their attention on five different parameters:
- Follows Industry-Wide Best Practices: The company has shared a policy by which the government can have the access to private data only with a regular mandate. The interested society has to show a document with all the procedures to follow.
- Tells Users About Government Data Requests: The society has to alarm their users in order to allow them to save the data, whenever the government has the access to them, even in an emergency state.
- Promises Not to Sell Out Users: The interested company has to show detailed papers about their willing to keep private data locked. That’s not all, they have to state that they won’t sell any information to the goverments agencies, which often give them to the intelligence. Perhaps, in some particular emergency state this is not followed.
- Stands Up to NSL Gag Orders: With the USA Freedom Act, published in 2015, societies can oppose themselves to the so-called NSL Gag orders. They are advanced request by the NSA. If the society expressly admit to react whenever they receive a National Security Letter, they will obtain this star.
- Pro-User Public Policy: In the States there was another big debate about the Reform 702 by which the NSA can operate in a way larger field, far away from its legal possibilities. If the society has applied some restrictions about this reform, they will get the star.
What did they do this year?
In the EFF 2017 privacy report have been taken into consideration 26 companies like Adobe, T-Mobile, Wickr, Uber, Lyft, WhatsApp, Facebook.
If you missed: WikiLeaks release HighRise, another CIA spying tool
At the top of the chart we have: Adobe, Uber, Lyft, Credo Mobile, WordPress, Dropbox, Sonic and Pinterest. At the bottom we can find WhatsApp and Amazon, just above of T-Mobile with a single star.
About WhatsApp, the EFF liked the END-TO-END encription, but they bothered about the lack of documentation which explicitly denies national security requests.
They do not even expose how much data they sell to the national agencies.
Conclusions about EFF 2017 privacy report
It’s interesting that some foundations, perhaps no-profit, want to keep people updated about how bigs manage our data, showing which are their weaknesses probably harmful to our beloved privacy.
The official results by EFF
