By Katherine Audet
From social networking to security awareness to mobile tracking, companies continue to offer a range of privacy-focused products. Here are a few examples of a few of the products to cross our radar in the past month.
Healthcare Organizations: HIPAA Security Risk Analysis
Redspin provides penetration testing, IT security assessments and guidance to improve security awareness, safeguard confidential data and protect critical infrastructure. Redspin is offering a new service to healthcare providers to address both HIPAA and PCI-DSS security compliance requirements. The new assessment results in a single report of problems and possible security risks along with the best solutions found for each, allowing covered entities to meet and maintain HIPAA compliance and gain understanding of any gaps before PCI DSS 3.0 comes into effect next year.
New App to Ease Snooping Fears
Researchers from Rutgers University are developing a new app to show users if other mobile apps are tracking their locations. Although all apps are required to request user permission prior to accessing location, these requests are often skipped over by the user. This product, which is still in development, was tested on Android phones and the results showed that apps accessed users’ locations more often than expected. The product, currently known as the Rutgers PrivacyApp, makes a notification pop up on the screen informing the user of what app is accessing location data with a map that pins the location where the app had accessed the information.
Take Control of Your Online Privacy
AVG’s PrivacyFix app provides users with an easy way to understand and control the collection of personal data. The app checks privacy settings on Facebook, Linkedin, Google and other social networking websites and shows users which information is accessible by certain sites, allowing them to fix privacy settings with one click and to block trackers from over 1,200 websites. The app boasts that it’s user-friendly and makes adjusting personal privacy settings simple.
Master Lock Vault's "One Password" Access To Prevent Personal Data Breaches
According to a study from Microsoft Research, the average person has more than 25 online accounts and more than six passwords to remember for those accounts. Master Lock Vault is a website and mobile app that can be used for password storage, lock combination storage, user name directory and document storage. Master Lock Vault promises it provides the highest level of website browsing security available on the market in the form of a 256-bit SSL encrypted connection for the storage of sensitive information. Each user’s vault is constantly monitored for intrusions and breaches.
Having trouble understanding your Facebook privacy settings? You’re not alone. Facebook has over 50 different privacy settings in four separate categories. One Consumer Reports study found that millions of Facebook users are unaware of or unsure how to use Facebook’s privacy controls. MyFacePrivacy is an easy solution to secure your Facebook account. The app helps users choose a set of privacy settings based on their specific needs and then automatically implements all Facebook privacy settings to protect them from unwanted and unintentional exposure.
EDRM has announced the reintroduction of its Privacy & Security Risk Reduction Model (PSRRM). As headlines about breaches from across the globe show, companies involved in the possession and transfer of sensitive data are at risk for significant breaches and negative exposure. PSRRM aims to help these companies by providing a process that reduces the volume of private data in a series of steps—define risk, identify available data, create filters, run filters, verify output and quarantine—to reduce risk and establish an easy process for handling private and protected personal information.
New Program To Mask Online Behavior
The tracking of Internet searches and websites visited is a multibillion dollar industry, with the information gleaned from such tracking being sold to businesses, politicians, the government and many others. Factious Mind Corporation has recently released the Privacy Hose program to mask online behavior. Privacy Hose works by sending search engines and advertisers deceptive, misleading and useless information that prevents them from creating complete, accurate online profiles of users.
ShazzleMail is a free smartphone app that allows users to send private e-mails to anyone in a phone’s contact list. The app turns the phone into a mail server by creating a direct e-connection between the two parties. As soon as ShazzleMail identifies the Internet location of the recipient, the private network connection is instantly created and the communications are guaranteed to be secure. Additionally, the e-mails sent through ShazzleMail are stored on the local storage device, never in a cloud service.
Cookiebot , Cyberbot’s cloud-powered service that allows website owners to comply with EU cookie laws, offers a user-friendly mechanism that is fully automated and constantly monitors websites to discover, identify and declare all types of cookies. It produces a cookie report with descriptions for website owners and users.
Comments
If you want to comment on this post, you need to login.