IT Resource

This is a guest post contributed by Raja of MrFeedback

We have seen privacy introduced in Internet Explorer 8 (beta 2 version) & Google Chrome, and Firefox has recently announced that private browsing will be incorporated into their browser in version 3.1 – currently you can get private browsing mode by downloading the Stealther 1.06 plugin available through Download.com, and there are similar solutions available from Mozilla’s add on website.

The concept behind Privacy mode is simple – any record of your browsing history is discarded once you close the browser session in IE or Google Chrome. Firefox plan to take this feature a few steps further and will have:

• no autofill for passwords
• all cookies will be discarded after browsing
• all downloads in Download Manager will be discarded after browsing
• Unlike IE, you won’t even be able to tell if you’re surfing in Private Mode. IE has a neon indicator to announce the activation of private mode. Firefox will keep the fact that you’re surfing in private mode, well..private. Nice feature.

Private surfing is useful, despite the obvious concern that it will assist people to do things on the internet which are questionable. As internet shopping becomes the norm, it will enable people to keep gift purchases, for example, and other activities private. It’s good that browsers are installing this feature, despite it inevitably being misused by a percentage of people.

I’d love to hear any comments or feedback on Privacy mode and Browser security in general.

Raja Devanathan
Founder of MrFeedback.net

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The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom.

That data includes every YouTube username, the associated IP address and the videos that user has watched on YouTube. Google will also be required to hand over copies of every video removed from Youtube for any reason. Stanton dismissed Google’s argument that the order will violate user privacy, saying such privacy concerns are merely “speculative.”

Meanwhile, the judge denied Viacom’s request that Google turn over YouTube’s source code.

It seems that far more data is in danger of being transferred than is required to satisfy Viacom’s core stated concern, which is to understand the popularity of copyright infringing vs. non-infringing material. Viacom has asked for much more than that, opening up the possibility of their taking legal action to sue individual users (or at least use the threat of a lawsuit) who have watched ‘copyrighted’ material on YouTube.