In his speech regarding changes to the NSA’s Section 215 phone metadata collection and surveillance program, President Barack Obama stated outright, “I am ordering a transition that will end the section 215 bulk metadata program as it currently exists.” During his speech (full transcript below), President Obama also announced that the federal government will need to go to the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) every time that they want to search data, rather than relying on previous orders.

Customers at some Wendy’s Drive-Thru locations are getting an easy pass: they can use their EZ Pass toll payment technology to pay for their fast food meal as they drive through some of the chain’s locations in New York.

We were stunned to discover that Facebook is monitoring your self-censorship! When you type something but don’t send it (this is what is meant by self-censoring on Facebook), Facebook takes note of that self-censorship! And Facebook is analyzing that self-censoring behaviour. And remember that the NSA has its fingers in Facebook’s data.

The newest reveal about the NSA’s surveillance activities is the existance of the NSA Co-Traveler program, through which the NSA is tracking the location and movements of the majority of cell phones on the planet, relationship-mapping every cell phone with every other cell phone.

An app that monitors your teen driver is nothing new. In fact, teen driving monitor apps have been around for nearly ten years. What is new about the Drive Pulse app is everything that it does, because it also taps into your car’s on-board diagnostics (OBD).

LG Smart televisions have spyware that is spying on their owners, and the LG spyware is sending data back to LG, including the filenames of unrelated files that are stored on the users’ drives! That is the stunning discovery made by a developer and self-professed Linux enthusiast going by the name of Doctor Beet.

Newly released documents relating to the massive collection of the email data and metadata of regular non- “person of interest” citizens by the NSA, following Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have revealed, among other things, that the NSA was collecting (overcollecting, say some) the cc: and bcc: information (metadata) in emails being sent by millions of U.S. citizens.

It’s time to worry about your phone number reputation and mobile identity. The company that provides two-factor authentication for the users of sites such as Google and Facebook has been quietly amassing the phone numbers of those users, and is now assigning a phone number reputation, which it calls a PhoneID Score – or your Mobile Identity – to all of those phone numbers being used for two-factor authentication and, it seems, any other phone numbers the data for which they have access.

Google updated their Terms of Service today sothat you allow them to use your reviews, posts, Plus Ones (“+1”), and other recommendations and ratings you provide through any Google service, along with your name and profile picture, as an “endorsement” in advertisements. Here’s how to remove yourself and opt out of Google’s “shared endorsements” advertising.

Amazon just announced its newest Kindle Fire, the Kindle Fire HDX tablet, which is 7-inches of awesome. However, it’s not different enough from the previous generation of Kindle Fire to warrant covering it – except for this one new feature: the Mayday Button. “What is the Kindle Mayday Button?”, you may ask? It is a controversial new feature that allows you to connect directly to an “Amazon expert” for tech support, 24/7/365.

It’s amazing to us that even with the public knowing that agencies such as the NSA are accessing cell phone records, and with cautions against using location-based services or revealing your location on Twitter, people seem to choose to ignore the cautions. Well, perhaps this will convince you. Even before all of this came to light, way back in 2009, a German politician named Malte Spitz, in an effort to demonsrate just how much we have given up our privacy – just how insidious it is – decided to make public six-months’ worth of his cell phone records. And the German newspaper Die Zeit created an animation – really an animated visualization – of where Spitz went, and what he was doing, every day of that six months, with stunning accuracy.

If former California Senator Steve Peace and attorney Michael Thorsnes get their way, there could be a new California privacy law. The new California ballot initiative filed this month by Peace and Thorsnes would require opt-in for many things, unlike most of the U.S. which generally lets your information be scraped by marketers and then requires you to opt-out. The United States trails behind most of the European Union in this regard – the EU generally requires opt-in versus opt-out, and has much stricter rules on the use and protection of user privacy and information.

AT&T has updated their polices to allow them to collect and sell data from your phones (this most especially applies to smartphones such as the iPhone and Android phones). This includes your location, and what ‘groups’ you may belong to based on geolocation. Here is how to mostly opt out from AT&T collecting and selling your data.

Microsoft has disclosed that it has sought permission from the U.S. government to disclose to the public how it handles requests from the Federal government for user data. Microsoft says “We believe the U.S. Constitution guarantees our freedom to share more information with the public, yet the Government is stopping us.”

Documents newly released by the British newspaper The Guardian, obtained along with others via Edward Snowden, indicate that under both the Obama and Bush administrations, the U.S. has been collecting, data mining, and analyzing email metadata, under an NSA program known as “Steller Wind”. The data collected under Stellar Wind included the “To” and “From” email addresses of an email conversation, along with the originating IP addresses sending the email, and was used, among other things, for a practice known as “contact chaining”.