Privacy: The Worst Quotes of the Year

From massive data breaches to insidious new ways to deliver ads online, we found plenty of privacy lowlights in 2007. So many, in fact, that we’re introducing a new award. Ladies and gentlemen, the 2007 Privvy Awards for outstanding quotability regarding privacy.

also noted that "Federal authorities said computer users...could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail" they receive. But the arrest actually had no effect on spam distribution. Since then, there have been many not very good days. Spam has reached all-time high volumes and bandwidth consumption. (Source: MSNBC.)

The Privvy for Excellence in Grovelling goes to...Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg
"We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it."
Zuckerberg’s slobbering was over Beacon, an insidious ad feature that broadcast Facebook users’ habits to friends and to the company and its ad partners. The program was difficult to find and built to be opt-out on a case-by-case basis, making it impracticable to turn it off wholesale. Social networkers raised a stink. Facebook eventually created a way to turn Beacon off altogether. (Source: Facebook.)

The Privvy for Outstanding Clarity in Data Breach Disclosure goes to...Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’ Shadow Chancellor George Osborne
"Let us be clear about the scale of this catastrophic mistake—the names, the addresses and the dates of birth of every child in the country are sitting on two computer discs that are apparently lost in the post, and the bank account details and National Insurance numbers of 10 million parents, guardians and carers have gone missing."
Yeah, but was your security comparable to many other major government offices? (Source: BBC.)

The Privvy for Most Brazen Corporate Bad-Assness goes to...AT&T and Apple
"Social Security #: ___-___-____. Confirm Social Security #: ___-___-____"
With the masses salivating over the iPhone, the two companies turned into monsters. They teamed up to charge $500 for the device, demanded two-year contracts on high-end calling plans, and "bricked" phones of users who hacked their way past restrictions by getting those users to download an "upgrade" that disabled the phone. But nothing was as brassy as AT&T demanding SSNs before the iPhone was activated, right when the company was entangled in a class-action lawsuit over allegedly giving the NSA backdoor access to its record databases in violation of its customers’ privacy. (Source: News.com.)

And finally, the Privvy for Worst Karma goes to...Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg...his second of the year!
"I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland facebook is open on my computer desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive. It’s not such a great idea and probably not even funny, but Billy comes up with the idea of comparing two people from the facebook, and only sometimes putting a farm animal in there. Good call Mr. Olson! I think he’s onto something."
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