Kenneth Corbin

A Senate panel this morning considered updating a longstanding online privacy bill aimed at protecting children on the Internet. The concern is that the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA), enacted in 1998, has fallen out of step with the way the Internet has evolved. No one was talking about social networks then. Behavioral […]

Facebook officials met with staffers from Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) office on Wednesday to discuss the senator’s privacy concerns stemming from the set of changes the company implemented last week aimed at broadening the social connections across the Web. [Schumer and three other Democrats had sent Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg](http://blog.internetnews.com/kcorbin/2010/04/senators-call-on-facebook-to-t.html) a letter outlining some of […]

Earlier this month, all of the Cabinet departments and large federal agencies published their plans for bringing more data online and tapping the Web to engage with citizens. Now, the results are in. Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra and CIO Vivek Kundra provide an update on the implementation of the White House open government directive, singling […]

A group of four senators has called on Facebook to reverse a recent set of privacy changes over concerns that users’ personal information will be accessible to third parties unless they navigate through what they described as a “complicated and confusing opt-out process.” Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), Mark Begich (Alaska), Al Franken (Min.) and […]

Net neutrality, the effort to keep open and equal access to Internet Web sites, has faced a rocky road to legislative approval. Such legislation is opposed by carriers who want to maintain the right to manage and control the availability and pricing of bandwidth, while proponents see net neutrality as a free speech issue that […]

Amazon, the online e-tail colossus, posted another quarter of strong earnings that help reinforce the idea that for the e-commerce sector, things are looking up. That’s on the heels of similarly rosy reports from Google, eBay and Yahoo. For Amazon, key to its success was the Kindle, the popular e-book reader dominating the nascent market, […]

The Internet’s a dangerous place. Not just for John Q. Public and his credit card but for government agencies charged with safeguarding our national security and the critical infrastructure that’s been increasingly targeted by international hacking rings. With this reality in mind, the Obama administration is stepping up its efforts to modernize all government IT […]

As it begins work implementing the recommendations of the national broadband plan, the Federal Communications Commission has voted to begin the process of converting the federal telecom subsidy to fund high-speed Internet service. Meanwhile, across town, lawmakers sparred over what role, if any, the commission should take in shepherding the broadband Internet market, a controversial […]

Happy days are here again for eBay after the world’s largest online auction site reported first quarter sales and profits slightly above the consensus estimate of analysts tracking the stock. The $554 million profit, or $0.42 a share, and total sales of $2.2 billion outpaced the year-ago results by a modest margin and reinforced the […]

Google is a big target. When the dominant search firm introduces new services, privacy advocates and regulators take notice because Google’s servers collect data on millions of users. As Datamation reports, Google has joined the growing social networking craze with gusto, but hasn’t always made it obvious how much data it’s collecting along the way. […]

In the latest public move to position itself as a champion of Internet freedom amid the heavy-handed censorship policies of repressive governments, Google has shed some light into the requests it receives from state officials to remove content or turn over user data. The company today launched its government requests tool, an interactive map that […]

Google has said precious little about the scope and targets of the cyber attacks that struck the company and more than 20 other firms last year. But now, a fresh report citing a person familiar with the company’s investigation claims that hackers operating from China breached the company’s password service, the central hub that controls […]