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Are You Happy with Facebook’s New and Simpler Privacy Controls?

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Here’s could probably be Facebook’s last ditch effort at convincing everyone of us that it minds user privacy. And this could possibly make or break Facebook, either retaining loyal users to driving them away to other “more secured” social networking sites.

So as Facebook is confronted with issues about its “complex” privacy policy, it now announces a simpler privacy control measures via a long post on the Official Facebook blog. But essentially, there are three major issues addressed by Facebook’s new privacy controls.

First thing which Facebook did was to build one simple control for setting who can see content that you post. You can now specify whether the content is viewable by everyone, friends of your friends or just by your friends. Which ever settings you choose will be applied to new products which Facebook will introduce in the future.  You don’t need to set them up once new products are introduced.

Then Facebook also reduced the amount of basic information that are visible to everyone. The connections privacy model was also removed. You now have the ability to control who can see your friends and pages and those information are no longer default to public. Of course, as these are basic information, it is but logical to have these for public viewing since its the only way for other people to find you. Otherwise, there’s no point in maintaining your Facebook account anymore.

Finally, Facebook also made it simpler to control how apps and websites access any of your information. Turning this off is now easier and can be easily done via a simple click. Turning off instant personalization is also easier now and gives you the facility to allow only partner sites to see things you’ve made visible to everyone.

With that, Facebook is proud to announced that its privacy model is now complete. And it hopes that issues concerning user privacy would be finally put to a rest.

These new privacy controls will be rolled out to everyone in the next few weeks. By then, we will know whether users are satisfied with the measures and make them stay with Facebook.

Browsers Leave “Fingerprints” as You Surf the Web

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Common now folks. Is it really possible that as web browse and leave a website, that we might be leaving “fingerprints” behind, enough for hackers to track us as we surf the web? Well, according to the latest research conducted by Electronic Frontiers Foundation, web browsers have digital signatures that create fingerprints that can be used your web browsing habit.

EFF conducted an experiment whereby volunteers were asked to visit the site http://panopticlick.eff.org. This site apparently logged users’ browser configurations and version information anonymously. Information were gathered by the site from user’s OS, browser and browser plug-ins.  EFF’s study revealed that 84% of the configuration combinations were unique and identifiable that leads to the creation of idenfiable browser “fingerprints.”

EFF also found out that there are some browsers which we less likely to contain unique configurations, especially those which blocks JavaScript. Likewise, some browser plug-ins can also be configured to limit the information that your browser shares to the websites you visit.  Unfortunately thought, in general it’s very hard to reconfigure your browser to make your identify less identifiable. EFF suggest that new privacy protections should be built into the browsers themselves.

EFF Senior Staff Technologist Peter Eckersley tells us:

“Browser fingerprinting is a powerful technique, and fingerprints must be considered alongside cookies and IP addresses when we discuss web privacy and user trackability,” said Eckersley. “We hope that browser developers will work to reduce these privacy risks in future versions of their code.”

So, there. Let this serves as a warning for us to be cautious of what browsers we are using and make sure that these offers really offer privacy protection, like what they claim they do.

Study: Consumers are Willing to Pay for Content on E-Readers, iPad, Tablets

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Call it a spark of genius from the part of Apple. But undoubtedly, the  iPad has certainly awaken an otherwise sleeping e-book and tablet market.According to a recent Boston Consulting Group Study which showed that more than half of surveyed consumers plan to buy an iPad, Kindle or similar device in the next three years. More important than that is the findings that these consumers appear willing to pay for content to be consumed on those devices.

The survey was conduced to nearly 13,000 consumers in 14 countries including India, China, Germany, United Kingdom and the United States. The study found out that 28% of these respondents and 51% of those familiar with this devices plan to purchase them within the next few year. In three years time, 49% of the respondents and 73% of those familiar with them are also planning on a purchase.

What do these figures tell us? Well, if these numbers are to push through, e-readers and tablets would soon established themselves as another category of consumer products in the likes of  TVs, PCs and mobile phones.

Another positive impact would be injecting fresh hope to the otherwise dying publishing industry.

John Rose, the global leader of BCG’s Media Practice said:

“The survey suggests that e-readers and tablets are not a niche product for early adopters but could become the MP3 players of this decade. Grandmothers will soon be carrying them around.”

There is one catch though. For e-readers and tablets, such as the Kindle and iPad to succeed in infiltrating the consumer market, a significant price drop should happen. Right now,  the Kindle, iPad and other tablets and e-readers are relatively priced similar to other established consumer electronics products. Considering that their features are limited as compared to a traditional computing machine, price should naturally be cheaper.

Hopefully, both the Amazon and Apple folks are reading this or would get hold of the BCG Report.

Google Redesigns its Image Search for Android and iPhone

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How often do you search for images on Google mobile? Well, if you do this a lot, you would have been annoyed by how hard it is to scroll through image thumbnails on your Android 2.1 phones or iPhone. Well, say goodbye to the old ways and welcome the newly refurbished Google Image Search for mobile which was just rolled by Google.

So now when you see the thumbnail images, you’d noticed that these were squared to maximize the number of images that can be displayed on the small screen of the iPhone or any Android 2.1 devices. In addition, you can also now do the swipe gesture to scroll through the next or previous pages of search results. Or even tap the large, stationary “next” and “previous” page buttons. Finally, the speed at which images appear were also enhanced display them as quickly as you browse.

Meanwhile, as you view the images on the mobile search results pages, this is now made larger through a special image viewing page wherein a black background image emphasizes the image and the buttons fade after a few seconds. This allows you to see images with little distractions. And you can also easily browse through the images by swiping from picture to picture, just like how you normally do it when browsing for photos on your iPhone Camera library or Android photo gallery.

To try Google’s new image search for mobile, simply point your phone’s browser to google.com and tap on the “images” link. This feature is available in 38 languages worldwide.

BloggingPro Launches Free Blogger Job Board

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After many years of existence BloggingPro has become one of the major blogs in the blogging and blog software scene. Of course we plan to continue expanding our horizons and deliver you more blogging news and tips, but that is not all and we here at BP want to deliver our users even more.

In our continuing effort to offer more to our readers, I am happy to announce the addition of the BloggingPro Job Board to the site.

Free Blogger Job Listings

Jobs can be added in three different categories: blogger jobs, blog designers needed and developers needed.

Free as in Beer

Jobs can be added in three different ways:

  1. Free Listing: Your job will be listed for 15 days after approval. Free
  2. 30 Days Listing: For those who want their job listed longer, without needing to refresh their listing. $10 [Read more…] about BloggingPro Launches Free Blogger Job Board

iPad and iBooks Will Eventually Kill the Kindle

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You don’t need to get your hands-on the iPad to realize that it has the potential to kill the Kindle unless Amazon does something drastic to make its  boring gray, e-ink display into something colorful. The iPad supports full color display and the iBooks app for the iPad will transform your  e-ebook reading experience into something colorful albeit a fun one.

I mean, just take a look at the sample screenshots of an e-book being rendered on the iPad using the iBooks apps. Rich, colorful graphics that accompanies e-books, be it children’s books, fiction, sci-fi or business-related, it will surely be more pleasant and appealing to read e-books on the iPad than it is on the Kindle.  And don’t even get me started on the issue of readability and eye strain due to prolong use. You can always shut off your iPad and rest your eyes a bit if you think that your eyes are already strained. So, it’s not really a negative point of the iPad that it’s display was said to be not mean for prolong reading pleasures.

And for the iBookstore, I’m pretty sure electronic publishers will dive into the iPad wave pretty soon if they haven’t started doing so, yet.  You don’t even have to worry if not too many publishers will not support the iPad.  The Project Guttenberg with its thousands of public domain books will provide you with your e-book fix.

What Apple needs to do to complete its e-book market domination and successfully steal the thunder from Amazon is to make the iBookstore available outside the U.S. Especially as soon as Apple starts marketing the iPad to the international markets.