Data Privacy Report Is Out By EFF and Has Lauded Dropbox and Apple, Slammed Verizon

The EFF has called out on AT&T and Verizon for their poor performance pertaining to data privacy of users while asking Facebook, LinkedIn and etc. to improve.

There has been a data privacy report published by Electronic Frontier Foundation that is the organization for digital rights. This is the 5^th annual report being published and titles Who has your back?  This report has been made in regard to the transparency and privacy practices of the online service providers pertaining to government requests for data access.

It has been noted by the organization that there is a general transformation among the big Internet players in order to become more transparent with the data requests about the users over these past years. However, for the latest report that it has released, the evaluation criteria had been tightened and argued that “it’s time to expect more from Silicon Valley”.

The companies are being awarded by the report up to the five stars for performance in multiple sectors, being the highest. For instance one of them, as per EFF, evaluates as “industry-accepted best practices”. This practice tells the users regarding the government demands pertaining to data, data retention’s policies being disclosed, content removal requests by the government being disclosed and also taking the “pro-user” position for public policy and specially differing the backdoors mandated by the government in these digital services.

There have been nine companies being awarded the full stars by EFF. Those nine companies are Wikimedia, Wickr, CREDO, Sonic, Wordpress.com, Adobe and Apple, Yahoo and Dropbox. This points out to the improvement needed in the tech industries for the data privacy standards. These nine companies have been commended for completely complementing the transparency and pro-privacy positions, including the public stance being taken for encryption.

Facebook news reports that the companies that are doing well, however need some improvement are LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. These all companies have been given four stars.

There have been two companies that are signaled out with the tag “especially poor results” are Verizon and AT&T. Verizon news reports that it is in process to buy AOL, the parent company of TechCrunch. The EFF expresses that there has been a trend that has been discovered by the previous researches on large providers of telecom to fail to keep up the pace with the fellow tech sector giants.

AT&T has not integrated the 2015 standards in parallel to the EFF and therefore has a poor performance. For Verizon, the verdict stated that it should do better. It is suggested by the EFF that the company should have a better and firmer policy of informing the users regarding the government requests. These might be strong suggestions that could possibly work for all the tech companies.