US citizens can register to vote within Snapchat application
In an appeal to its young audience, the popular and ephemeral video sharing application, Snapchat, is encouraging young people to vote by allowing them to register within the application. The campaign is in partnership with Democracy Works’ TurboVote, and its advertisements will automatically be displayed in Snapchat Stories for users who are 18 years old or older. Historically, the age group between 18 -34 has had a poor voter turn out (just 46% in 2012 according to Pew Centre research) and Snapchat is in a unique position to access this demographic (41% of all US 18-34 year olds use Snapchat on any given day, according to Nielsen data). The campaign uses 10 second videos that feature celebrities encouraging users to take 60 seconds and register to vote. It will be interesting to see if this campaign has an effect on voter turnout.
Yahoo announces largest ever data breach: 500 million users affected
Amidst an impending sale to Verizon, Yahoo announced that a “state-sponsored actor” had stolen data from 500 million of their users in 2014. Six US Senators have opened an official investigation as to what was the cause of the breach, what caused the substantial delay in discovering it, and what Yahoo will do to protect users’ privacy in the future. Two years is an unreasonable amount of time because it does not provide users with any amount of protection, the Senators claim, and argue that a window of 30-60 days within discovering the breach, is required to notify users that their data is at risk.
Americans growing more concerned about online privacy
New data out of the Pew Research Center indicates that Americans are becoming increasingly aware of the digital identities and concerned about the amount of information that exists about them online. In fact, 86% of internet users in the US have taken measures to conceal their identity online. Although they fear hackers and criminals most of all, advertisers are a very close second. Interestingly, 61% of these internet users want to do more to protect their identity online, but don’t know how. If you’re amongst this population, check out these tips from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading advocate for digital privacy.
Update: German regulators block Facebook from changing the way that WhatsApp works
Facebook announced they were changing WhatsApp’s privacy policy, which compromises a lot of the security features that users look to within the popular messaging application. When Facebook acquired WhatsApp two years ago, they promised that they would protect the privacy of the application’s millions of users. But then they released a new Terms of Service that changed all that. However, the Hamburg data protection commissioner has issued an administrative order that disallows WhatsApp from sharing information with Facebook. Good news for Germans, but what about the rest of the world?
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