Tech giants improving in online privacy

An Electronic Frontier Foundation report has highlighted a marked improvement in large firms with regards to surveillance transparency. However, it was critical of certain other tech companies for lagging behind – most notably AT&T and  Amazon.

The Foundation’s fourth report, titled ‘Who has your back’, evaluates 26 large tech businesses on their response methods to government requests for data in six categories. The categories include informing their users of data requests from the government, and fighting for the privacy rights of users both in court and US Congress.

Yahoo, Twitter, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Dropbox and Apple all received good grades in each category, and there was a huge turnaround for Apple, which had scored only a single star – for fighting for users’ rights in Congress – in each of the past three years. The firm was described as having achieved significant progress in all categories.

However, not all companies received positive grades. Snapchat, AT&T and Amazon each received poor marks. Snapchat only managed to score in a single category – it features guidelines on its response methods to law enforcement – but fails in the other five categories, such as by not asking for a warrant before revealing data.

Businesses outside of the realm of ‘tech giant’ may not be under such levels of scrutiny, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be vigilant with online security when it comes to customer data.

By making IT security jobs available, company bosses are showing that they take such matters seriously, which will only serve them well in the future, in the event of any cyber attacks.