The jury (or rather, congress) is still out on how Snowden's now-legendary leaks will effect the NSA, but it's certainly changed how companies handle user data. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's latest "Who Has Your Back?" transparency report, 2014 is a landmark year for user privacy -- Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Twitter all earned perfect scores in the report's six-point evaluation. The scoring metric awards stars for companies that require the government to get a warrant before collecting user data, or to firms that publish their own transparency reports. Overall, the report shows a marked improvement over last year, but the EFF still highlights other big companies that could do a lot more to protect and reassure their users.
"Transparency reports have become the industry standard for major tech companies," the report reads. "But Adobe, Amazon, Foursquare, Myspace, Wikimedia and Snapchat have yet to publish a report." The EFF specifically chews out Amazon for having "a tremendous amount of user data," but no clear way for users to evaluate its policies on how law enforcement can access that data. Even so, the EFF ends its conclusions on a high note, saying that most companies are "heading in the right direction." Check out the full report at the source link below.
[Image credit: Shutterstock / Galushko Sergey]
Via: CNET
Source: EFF
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