Data Privacy Day Video Highlights "Shocking" Permissions We Give Apps

Jan 28, 2015

To mark International Data Privacy Day, Silent Circle and Blackphone have created a video highlighting the extent to which we give apps permissions on our phones that are actually quite shocking.

75 per cent of businesses today are being run on the personal phones of their employees and the video demonstrates how little we all know about the permissions we are giving away.

Blackphone co-founder Phil Zimmerman has also written an open-letter to global CEO’s urging them to focus on privacy, rather than merely looking at it as a “security” issue.

He says: “…when I see what happened to Sony recently – the data stored on their servers leaked to the world – my mind goes to that difference between privacy and security.

“I’m sure Sony had firewalls and VPNs, intrusion detection and antivirus, policies and procedures – all the usual artifacts of corporate information security. Those things securely delivered a mountain of information to Sony’s servers, where it was lost all at once.

“When it was lost, the privacy of Sony’s partners and employees went with it. That’s what corporate privacy is – the privacy of the people in and around the corporation. If we focus on their privacy rather than the corporation’s security maybe we can make better choices.

“Many kinds of information don’t need to be stored for long, or at all. If only participants keep a copy of their correspondence the company can’t lose it. Imagine how much worse the damage of a security breach would be if companies routinely kept years of recordings of all employees’ phone calls.”At Silent Circle we’ve come to realise that protecting individuals at work may be the strongest form of corporate security possible.

“That’s what we’re working on, and we hope that you’ll join us.”

Author: Sam Pudwell
View the original article here.
Published under license from ITProPortal.com