US Govt is Watching Your Emails, Images, Videos, Search History, Skype Calls, Files, Chats

There are chances that you might have thought of being watched by US government through Gmail, Facebook and other internet giants who are holding your sensitive and most private data.

The news is that all your fears were real, as a new secret document has proven the existence of a US government program that grants NSA (National Security Agency) and FBI the direct access to the servers of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype, Yahoo, Apple and other internet companies, from where they can extract any user information at their will.

Named as PRISM, the program was sanctioned by President Bush in 2007, which is now renewed again by President Obama in December 2012.

Under this program, tech giants gave the direct access to its servers to US government agencies, through which they can grab any information they want, without any hurdle.

The information that NSA can access may include your emails, chats, search history, images, videos, skype calls (even the content of skype calls), YouTube videos (even those which are private), files that are stored in your computer, call records of your smartphones, SMS, MMS, places you visit and much more.

Microsoft joined this program before anyone, followed by Yahoo and Google. Facebook, Skype, Youtube, AOL and Apple are also the program partners who have given the direct access and they can obtain information of any kind for any user who uses these services.

Dropbox is likely to be added in the list of partner companies soon.

PRISM enables US government agencies to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users.

Interestingly, US agencies call PRISM “one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses for NSA”.

Another fact, which may worry our local “Privacy and Internet Freedom Activists” to a greater level is that Pakistan is second largest spying target of NSA, after Iran. Over 13.5 billion reports were gathered from Pakistan in March 2013 only.

Given the amount of data we share with these companies, including our personal and private information, this revelation is alarming and raise countless serious questions, concerning the morality of tech companies and US government.

Via Guardian

Google Buzz Is Going To Shut Down

In October 2011 google announced that Google Buzz was shutting down. On or after 17 July 2013, Google will take the last step in the shut-down and will save a copy of your Buzz posts to your Google Drive, a service for storing files online. Google will store two (2) types of files to your Google Drive and the newly-created files will not count against your storage limits.

1. The first type of file will be private, only accessible to you, containing a snapshot of the Google Buzz public and private posts that you authored.
2. The second type of file will contain a copy of only your Google Buzz public posts. By default it will be viewable by anyone with the link and may appear in search results and on your Google Profile (if you've linked to your Buzz posts). Note, any existing links to your Google Buzz content will redirect users to thisfile.
3. Any comments that you made on other users' posts will only be saved to those users' files and not to yours. Once the change described in this email is final, only that user will be able to change the sharing settings of those files. This means that if you have commented on another author's private post, that author could choose to make that post and its comments public. If you would like to avoid that possibility, delete all your Buzz content now.
4. The new Google Drive files will only contain comments from users who previously enabled Google Buzz, and the files will not contain comments that were deleted prior to moving the data to your Google Drive.

Once the files have been created, they will be treated the same as any other Drive file. They are yours to do with as you please. This includes downloading them, updating who can access them or deleting them.

Before these files are created, you can view the Google Buzz posts that you have authored here. If you do not want any of your Buzz posts or comments to be saved to Google Drive files, you can immediately delete your Google Buzz account and data.