Al Franken's Blog, page 102

TechCrunch: The Mobile Privacy Hearings: Senators Prod, Apple And Google Defend

When researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden announced at the Where 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara a few weeks ago that iPhones and 3G iPads are storing records of where their users are and where they've been, the news created quite a stir. Google also stores a similar list on Android devices, so naturally questions have swirled in the last few weeks around how both Apple and Google are collecting and using this location data and to what extent it encroaches on user privacy.

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© Al Franken - U.S. Senator, Minnesota, 2011. |
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Care2.com: Guest Post by Sen. Al Franken: Protecting Your Privacy

In recent years, large corporations have started obtaining and storing increasingly large amounts of our personal information. We've seen the growth of a whole sphere of private entities whose entire purpose is to collect and aggregate information about each of us when we use the Internet.

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Fox9: Franken Wary of AT&T, T-Mobile Merger

U.S. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) continued his battle for consumer rights amid a proposed big-league wireless carrier merger in a Senate hearing Wednesday.

After hearing testimony from representatives of wireless communications giants AT&T and T-Mobile regarding their pending merger, Franken expressed growing concern that the merger will hurt mobile consumers and would approach a Ma Bell-level monopoly.

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Star Tribune: Franken grills tech companies on mobile privacy location data

Sen. Al Franken began a hearing on mobile privacy with Apple and Google by calling the companies "brilliant." At its conclusion, however, he sounded unconvinced the two tech giants are taking customer privacy seriously enough.

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St. Cloud Times: Safety advocates back Franken

When Sen. Al Franken recently questioned Apple Inc. about location information collected on the company's iPhones, the Minnesota Coalition for Battered Women found a champion.

The group was the first to contact the senator, Franken said at a hearing Tuesday, to express its gratitude and share its concerns about women being stalked using cellphones or other devices.

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Politico: Al Franken's privacy panel dials up heat over smartphones

Apple, Google and other tech industry stalwarts might want to get used to sitting in the congressional hot seat — as they did Tuesday — when it comes to mobile phone privacy.

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© Al Franken - U.S. Senator, Minnesota, 2011. |
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ARS Technica: Senate probes "unfixable" AT&T/T-Mobile deal

When a Senate antitrust committee hearing is called "The AT&T/T-Mobile Merger: Is Humpty Dumpty Being Put Back Together Again?", you know that the back-and-forth will be contentious, and today's hearing certainly was.

"When I was a kid," said Senator Al Franken (D-MN), " every Sunday at exactly 9am in Minnesota, my grandmother would call from New York and talk to my father for precisely three minutes." It was the only time the two had to talk, but fortunately "the breakup of Ma Bell forever changed the cost of long-distance service." Now, Franken sees AT&T's $39 billion bid for T-Mobile as an attempt to put Ma Bell back together again.

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MinnPost.com: Franken holds hearing on mobile privacy

A northern Minnesota woman seeking refuge from her abuser walked into a domestic violence shelter inside a county building in northern St. Louis County. Within five minutes, she got a text message from her abuser, asking why she was there.

Terrified, she filed for an order of protection against him, and with the help of a victim's advocate went to a local courthouse to do it.

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NYTimes: Congress Hears From Apple and Google on Privacy

Saying there has been a fundamental shift for cellphone users in determining "who has their information and what they're doing with it," Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, called a Congressional hearing today to question executives from both Google and Apple on data location and mobile devices. The hearing was the first for the newly formed Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law, led by Senator Franken.

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Pioneer Press: Senate panel hearing today on data tracking

Most people do not expect their smartphone to tattle on them.

But the same technology that can tell 911 operators the location of an emergency call made from a cellphone could, under limited circumstances, give away the location of a battered woman who is hiding from an abusive spouse.

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