Facebook, Google announce new security features

Some pivotal provisions of the controversial Patriot Act were allowed to expire at midnight Monday as lawmakers in Washington continued their contentious debate over the breadth of surveillance carried out on the American people.

While there are some workarounds in place allowing investigators to keep an eye on criminals and terrorists, the balancing act between security and privacy continues.

But it’s not just in Washington. Silicon Valley is grappling with a similar quandary: how to keep consumers information safe and their rights intact, while still making money off the information they share.

Last week Yahoo Finance’s Editor in Chief Andy Serwer sat down with Google (GOOGL) Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai who weighed in on the issue saying:

Consumer trust is the basis on which we do everything we do so privacy and security is something we talk about from the ground up for everything we do. To me it's actually a product issue and we think about it deeply.

Google, Facebook (FB) and even our own parent company, Yahoo (YHOO), make a large portion of their profits by selling ads. The people that buy those ads expect to reach a very targeted audience, thus making their investment worth it. These tech giants accomplish that by using the data you provide when interacting with their websites and software to assure that, say an ad for men’s shaving products doesn’t appear on the site when an 22-year-old woman is using it.

Today Google announced that it would make its privacy settings easier to find and use in order to help consumers decide just what information the search giant can use.

While a welcome development to some, Serwer says many people are willing to deal with the trade-off. “The ease of use that companies like Google afford us is pretty amazing and a lot of us are willing to put up with the fact that we have less privacy online because of it,” he says.

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For its part Facebook announced a new security feature today as well. It aims to stop hackers from reading messages sent between users on the platform by allowing them to encrypt those notes.

There are surely more security features to come from the Googles and Facebooks of the world, regardless of the outcome of the debate in Washington. While a problem for those who care, Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli thinks that number is a minority, likening it to the one-third of Americans who had unlisted phone numbers in the pre-cell phone era. “To me that’s about the proportion of people who really care about privacy and how their information is used,” he says.

One the other hand, citing a recent Pew Research study, Yahoo Finance’s Lauren Lyster notes “ 93% of adults do consider being in control of their personal info to be important and only 9% believe they have that control.”

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