Privacy Panic: Facebook, Google and Apple Spy on Your Life

Privacy is always a concern while we spending our time on internet. The more products we use(such as Google, Facebook), the more data they collect about everything we do online—our search history, our emails, the blogs and news sites we read, which videos we watch on YouTube, our news alerts, tasks ,and even shopping lists. Facebook and Google are companies which have landed themselves in some hot water over privacy. Recently, Apple appears to be headed for a Google-Facebook size privacy snafu over its iOS location-tracking database.

Once dealing with privacy, Google often finds itself walking a tightrope. The search giant's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Google street view is a feature on Google's map service, unveiled in 2007, which has raised questions that Google street view is invading people's privacy. Google Street View could collect people’s activities, men leaving strip clubs, protesters at an abortion clinic, sunbathers in bikinis, cottagers at public parks, people picking up prostitutes and people engaging in activities visible from public property in which they do not wish to be photographed and published online. The collection of Google Street View may not be legal in all jurisdictions in Europe, and a number of European countries have laws blocking the filming without consent of an individual on public property for the purpose of public display. Google revealed Street View vehicles last May, which had been inadvertently gathering private information about websites people accessed on public Wi-Fi networks. It was pointed to "been the largest privacy breach in the history across western democracies".

Facebook’s real name policy made the company one of the fast growing technology powers, and brings the company big privacy challenge at the same time. Last year, Facebook has confronted one privacy issue after another. A number of Facebook's most popular applications have been sending users' personal information to dozens of advertising and Internet monitoring companies, and tens of millions of Facebook users are affected by this issue. According to a investigation from Wall Street Journal, 10 of Facebook's most popular applications are leaking the unique "Facebook ID" numbers of users to the third-party companies, and the highly popular Farmville app, which has some 59 million users, transmits information of users’ friends. And the other popular applications involved include Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille, etc.