By Tim Sandle

The Internet of Things continues to grow at a rapid pace. Most applications deploy existing technology and combines this by connecting devices together so that business operations can be improved and so that costs can be lowered. Many IoT applications are concerned with collecting data, allowing devices to work in synchronicity and for boosting customer engagement.

The new standard has been written to provide a common framework that designers and developers can use and for the resultant systems to be “trustworthy”. Trust refers to creating IoT applications that are reliable, safe, secure, respect privacy and can better cope with disruptions like natural disasters and attacks.

Learn more about the IOT and read the full article here.

Here’s How To Make Sure You, Your Business and Website Are FTC & GDPR Compliant

By now it should be clear how important it is for you to be FTC compliant. But how can you do that without spending $7,500-$8,000 or more on Internet Attorneys?

Smart business owners around the world are doing it with the help of FTC Guardian.

FTC Guardian is a service that is 100% focused on helping to keep you get and stay FTC & GDPR compliant and fully protected. And right now, we are offering a free training to give you the knowledge, information, and guidance that you need to stay out of trouble with the Federal Trade Commission and the new GDPR guidelines.

Free Compliance Workshop: Join Chip Cooper, Esq., the #1 FTC Compliance & GDPR trainer in the World, for a one-of-kind, completely free online compliance workshop.

Workshops fill up quickly, so register now.

Here are some of the things you’ll discover on the training:

• Real-Life Examples of People Who Didn’t Think They Were At Risk, But Who Got Nailed By The FTC, And Why It Could Happen To You, Too

• The 3 Enormous Powers The FTC Has That Can Change Your Life – And Your Family’s Life – Forever!

• How to Avoid FTC Claims When Collecting Leads With Optin Forms

• 3 Privacy Policy Mistakes Every Digital Marketer Is Making, And Why You’re In The FTC Crosshairs.

• And Much More…

Remember: legal protection is a massively important part of your business, and it’s one you cannot afford to ignore any longer.

Go here to register for our next FREE training and make your business is FTC compliant today!

Disclaimer:  This article is provided for informational purposes only. It’s not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Neither the author nor FTC Guardian, Inc. is endorsed by the Federal Trade Commission.

By David Lumb

Privacy is paramount, but as we further approach an IoT future, the lines of privacy and integration are blurring.

Despite their page on data protection, Google repeatedly comes under fire every year for privacy breaches. Most recently, the issue involved emails and information housed in various Google Drive apps.

Is loss of privacy and control the price we pay for interconnectivity?

The Devil is in the Terms of Service Details

When accessing a new app or service, most of us just click and go when we come to the “Terms of Service” section. Many tech users are familiar with the basics of ToS agreements, so we figure most are standard. As the old adage goes, “The devil is in the details.”

With Google specifically, their ToS allows for many activities some would consider breaches of privacy. In 2014, Google claimed that it had a right to even sensitive data if it flows on an open network. But that’s not all.

Things like scanning emails to personalize the ads you receive which, to be fair, they did stop doing this summer. Now scrapped AI plans presented major privacy concerns, too. Google can track online spending activities, as well as real-world purchases. Most recently, Google mistakenly locked out Google Docs users for supposedly “violating ToS”.

Read full article and learn more about Terms of Service and IoT here.

Here’s How To Make Sure You, Your Business & Website Is FTC Compliant

By now it should be clear how important it is for you to be FTC compliant. But how can you do that without spending $7,500-$8,000 or more on Internet Attorneys?

Smart business owners around the world are doing it with the help of FTC Guardian.

FTC Guardian is a service that is 100% focused on helping to keep you get and stay FTC compliant and fully protected. And right now, we are offering a free training to give you the knowledge, information, and guidance that you need to stay out of trouble with the Federal Trade Commission.

Free Compliance Workshop: Join Chip Cooper, Esq., the #1 FTC Compliance trainer in the World, for a one-of-kind, completely free online compliance workshop. Workshops fill up quickly, so register now.

Here are some of the things you’ll discover on the training:

• Real-Life Examples of People Who Didn’t Think They Were At Risk, But Who Got Nailed By The FTC, And Why It Could Happen To You, Too

• The 3 Enormous Powers The FTC Has That Can Change Your Life – And Your Family’s Life – Forever!

• How to Avoid FTC Claims When Collecting Leads With Optin Forms

• 3 Privacy Policy Mistakes Every Digital Marketer Is Making, And Why You’re In The FTC Crosshairs.

• And Much More…

Remember: legal protection is a massively important part of your business, and it’s one you cannot afford to ignore any longer.

Go here to register for our next FREE training and make your business is FTC compliant today!

Disclaimer:  This article is provided for informational purposes only. It’s not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Neither the author nor FTC Guardian, Inc. is endorsed by the Federal Trade Commission.

By David Nield

The little pocket supercomputers we all constantly carry around with us aren’t just supplying us with useful information, they’re also collecting a host of data on us and our habits, all of the time. Here’s a guide to what gets collected by your smartphone and the apps running on it, and how you can take back some control.

Sensors, Android, and iOS

Your smartphone is packed with sensors, monitoring where you are in the world, how fast you’re moving through space, which way up you’re holding your phone, and more. All of this data is used by apps to improve the user experience—so making sure your phone apps switch between landscape and portrait modes, and keeping you on the right route for your commute—but how much of this data is logged and stored is largely up to the choices of the handset manufacturer.

Smartphone apps

On top of the basic information collected by your smartphone and beamed back (or not beamed back) to the company that made your handset, there’s all the information collected by the apps you run too—the data that gets recorded and saved is down to an individual app’s privacy policies and the permissions you give it.

Read full article and learn more about Data and Privacy Policy here.

Here’s How To Make Sure You, Your Business & Website Is FTC Compliant

By now it should be clear how important it is for you to be FTC compliant. But how can you do that without spending $7,500-$8,000 or more on Internet Attorneys?

Smart business owners around the world are doing it with the help of FTC Guardian.

FTC Guardian is a service that is 100% focused on helping to keep you get and stay FTC compliant and fully protected. And right now, we are offering a free training to give you the knowledge, information, and guidance that you need to stay out of trouble with the Federal Trade Commission.

Free Compliance Workshop: Join Chip Cooper, Esq., the #1 FTC Compliance trainer in the World, for a one-of-kind, completely free online compliance workshop. Workshops fill up quickly, so register now.

Here are some of the things you’ll discover on the training:

• Real-Life Examples of People Who Didn’t Think They Were At Risk, But Who Got Nailed By The FTC, And Why It Could Happen To You, Too

• The 3 Enormous Powers The FTC Has That Can Change Your Life – And Your Family’s Life – Forever!

• How to Avoid FTC Claims When Collecting Leads With Optin Forms

• 3 Privacy Policy Mistakes Every Digital Marketer Is Making, And Why You’re In The FTC Crosshairs.

• And Much More…

Remember: legal protection is a massively important part of your business, and it’s one you cannot afford to ignore any longer.

Go here to register for our next FREE training and make your business is FTC compliant today!

Disclaimer:  This article is provided for informational purposes only. It’s not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Neither the author nor FTC Guardian, Inc. is endorsed by the Federal Trade Commission.

By Janis Kestenbau

The FTC has announced that it has updated its COPPA compliance plan for businesses to make inescapably clear that internet-enabled toys and other “internet of things” (IoT) devices that collect personal information from children may be subject to COPPA. In agreement, the FBI issued a public service announcement warning parents that connected toys “could put the privacy and safety of children at risk due to the large amount of personal information that may be unwittingly disclosed.”

As the federal government addresses security issues from the broader realm of smart devices, these announcements suggest that connected toys will engender particular scrutiny given the sensitivity of children’s data. At one level, the FTC’s modified compliance plan broke no new ground. Although COPPA was adopted long before the proliferation of connected toys, it applies not only to websites but also to “online services.”

According to the FBI, the “exposure of such information could create opportunities for child identity fraud. Additionally, the potential misuse of sensitive data such as GPS location information, visual identifiers from pictures or videos, and known interests to garner trust from a child could present exploitation risks.” The FBI explained that data could be exposed if the toy manufacturer, the technology developer, a cloud service provider, or another third-party partner fails to properly protect it.

The FBI urges parents to research connected toys before purchasing them to learn of any known security issues, to closely monitor children’s use of such toys, and to follow good security practices, such as ensuring that the toys are running updated firmware and that they are turned off when not in use. As for legal protections, the FBI noted that smart toys must comply with COPPA and Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act.

Read full article and learn more about COPPA here.

Here’s How To Make Sure You, Your Business & Website Is FTC Compliant

By now it should be clear how important it is for you to be FTC compliant. But how can you do that without spending $7,500-$8,000 or more on Internet Attorneys?

Smart business owners around the world are doing it with the help of FTC Guardian.

FTC Guardian is a service that is 100% focused on helping to keep you get and stay FTC compliant and fully protected. And right now, we are offering a free training to give you the knowledge, information, and guidance that you need to stay out of trouble with the Federal Trade Commission.

Free Compliance Workshop: Join Chip Cooper, Esq., the #1 FTC Compliance trainer in the World, for a one-of-kind, completely free online compliance workshop. Workshops fill up quickly, so register now.

Here are some of the things you’ll discover on the training:

• Real-Life Examples of People Who Didn’t Think They Were At Risk, But Who Got Nailed By The FTC, And Why It Could Happen To You, Too

• The 3 Enormous Powers The FTC Has That Can Change Your Life – And Your Family’s Life – Forever!

• How to Avoid FTC Claims When Collecting Leads With Optin Forms

• 3 Privacy Policy Mistakes Every Digital Marketer Is Making, And Why You’re In The FTC Crosshairs.

• And Much More…

Remember: legal protection is a massively important part of your business, and it’s one you cannot afford to ignore any longer.

Go here to register for our next FREE training and make your business is FTC compliant today!

Disclaimer:  This article is provided for informational purposes only. It’s not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Neither the author nor FTC Guardian, Inc. is endorsed by the Federal Trade Commission.

By Brian Barrett 

The new Amazon Echo Look seems like a logical enough extension of Alexa, the company’s AI-powered digital assistant. Previously, Alexa lived inside speakers. Now, it’s in a camera. That progression belies just how much more the Echo Look could know about you than other Alexa hardware does—especially if Amazon ever unleashes the full power of its machine learnings smarts.

Amazon envisions the Echo Look as a way to get fashion advice. Command it to take a photo of you, repeat across various clothing options, and get a recommendation of what you should wear. Along the way, Amazon will also suggest clothing you might want to buy. From Amazon. Including, one imagines, from one of Amazon’s in-house lines of clothing.

In other words, the Echo Look feels like the culmination of a process that started with the words CAMERA and COMMERCE scrawled on a dry-erase board. That alone shouldn’t surprise. Amazon exists, after all, to sell things. But the Look also marries Amazon’s powerful machine learning technology with a camera designed to take regular pictures of you and your surroundings—with no guarantees that in the future, it’ll stick to just your clothes.

Got the Look

As a consumer product, the $200 Echo Look surely makes sense for some people. Maybe a lot of people! Alexa makes for a great digital assistant, and we could all use a little sartorial wisdom now and then. It’s important, though, that those people know exactly what they’re getting.

“A lot of consumers see the convenience and don’t think about the long-term records that are being kept,” says Peter Swire, who specializes in privacy law at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business.

In the case of Look, those records include not just audio taken from your Alexa requests, but however many photographs taken in, presumably, your bedroom, as well as what you’re wearing in those photos. It compares different outfits for you as well, and knows which outfits you buy or don’t based on its recommendations. That’s already a ton of data—and before you get to the fact that it also sees your body and face, and whatever objects happen to be in the background. That matters in particular because Echo Look uses machine learning, technology that knows not only identify what an object is, but also what it’s like.

“In a simplistic way, we’re going from being able to give things names or nouns to being able to give them adjectives,” says Louis-Philippe Morency, a machine learning expert at Carnegie Mellon University. “We can describe not just that it’s a shoe, but it’s a red shoe.”

Or in a human’s case, not just a face, but one that’s smiling.

There are a few small comforts here. First, Amazon explicitly does not provide “interest-based ads”—the kind that your interactions with an Echo or Look might generate—to third parties. You can also opt out of Amazon itself serving up personalized ads here. You can also delete the photos the Look takes of you at any time. Last, Amazon confirmed to WIRED that Echo Look will only use its machine learning smarts to identify outfits, not expressions or your bed frame or the slightly torn KISS poster on your wall.

That’s right now, though. The future’s not as clear. And unless Amazon explicitly narrows its scope, the Look could someday know so much more.

Fine Print

There does not appear to be a separate privacy policy for Echo Look. When asked for one, Amazon directed WIRED to an FAQ page that focuses more on the process of taking, storing, and deleting photos than it does on how it plans to use its machine learning capabilities now or in the future.

“Amazon doesn’t say anywhere in any kind of clear language what the risks are,” says Susan Liautaud, an ethicist at Stanford University. “Risks more generally about what it might accidentally pick up, and the privacy risk.”

As machine learning advances, those questions will apply to more and more facets of our lives. They’re not limited to Amazon by any means. But they’re still worth asking every time we invite AI into our lives.

“If people don’t know what is recorded, or when it is recorded, and what information is recorded, then it brings more anxiety and more questions,” says Morency of machine learning generally. “The challenge for us moving forward is to be more transparent, to be able to explain better what data is recorded.”

For Echo Look buyers, the answer today is simple: your clothes. They should know also, though, that it’s just a software update away from potentially becoming much more complex.

Read full article and learn more about Privacy Policy here.

Here’s How To Make Sure You, Your Business & Website Is FTC Compliant

By now it should be clear how important it is for you to be FTC compliant. But how can you do that without spending $7,500-$8,000 or more on Internet Attorneys?

Smart business owners around the world are doing it with the help ofFTC Guardian.

FTC Guardian is a service that is 100% focused on helping to keep you get and stay FTC compliant and fully protected. And right now, we are offering a free training to give you the knowledge, information, and guidance that you need to stay out of trouble with the Federal Trade Commission.

The training is titled: 3 Tragic (Legal) Privacy Policy List Building Mistakes That Can Get You In Hot Water With The FTC Today – Resulting In Your Business Being Shut Down… And How To Solve It!

Here are some of the things you’ll discover on the training:

• Real-Life Examples of People Who Didn’t Think They Were At Risk, But Who Got Nailed By The FTC, And Why It Could Happen To You, Too

• The 3 Enormous Powers The FTC Has That Can Change Your Life – And Your Family’s Life – Forever!

• How to Avoid FTC Claims When Collecting Leads With Optin Forms

• 3 Privacy Policy Mistakes Every Digital Marketer Is Making, And Why You’re In The FTC Crosshairs.

• And Much More…

Remember: legal protection is a massively important part of your business, and it’s one you cannot afford to ignore any longer.

Go here to register for our next FREE training and make your business is FTC compliant today!

Disclaimer:  This article is provided for informational purposes only. It’s not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Neither the author nor FTC Guardian, Inc. is endorsed by the Federal Trade Commission.