This post also appeared in The Tennessean, where Concept Technology has a bi-weekly feature in the Business section.

More and more businesses are taking advantage of cloud applications such as Salesforce, Basecamp and ZenDesk to handle any number of business operations.

When your employees start using Basecamp, for example, to manage a complex project, they are essentially moving your company’s data out of the traditional enterprise system and into the public cloud. This move may leave business owners wondering: Is my data less secure?

Cloud applications that are favored by big enterprises exist in very carefully managed environments, and the companies that own these applications have a deeply vested interest in protecting them against attack.

Further, since these cloud applications are high-profile, they get attacked all the time, so their infrastructures are continually battle-tested. Take, for example, the customer service and support application ZenDesk, which was breached in February. Hackers stole email addresses and email subject lines from three of the company’s highest-profile clients: Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr.

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This post also appeared in The Tennessean, where Concept Technology has a bi-weekly feature in the Business section.

We all know that when we’re online, we’re being tracked. A Keynote Systems survey from last year found that 86 percent of the leading 269 websites in news, finance, travel and retail tracked users’ Web habits and gave that information to third parties.

Hand on keyboardInternet tracking is an issue that many of us don’t fully understand, and it’s an issue that more people should be concerned about.

For example, if you’re browsing your Facebook page and then close the page without logging out, most people don’t know that Facebook continues to track your Web-browsing history.

Facebook has publicly acknowledged that it keeps a 90-day running log of websites its more than 1 billion users have visited. It also tracks where nonmembers go who land on a Facebook page for any reason.

Facebook, and other businesses, advertisers and interested parties such as analytics companies use cookie-tracking technology to monitor your behavior as you move around the Web. Increasingly, companies are also using HTML5’s local storage feature, which stores cookies on your hard drive. These are harder to discover and block, and are not removed when you delete the cookies on your browser.

Even if you know that businesses such as Facebook follow your every virtual move, do you know what the company can do with the information that it gathers? Unless you read Facebook’s end-user license agreement (EULA), you likely don’t know what rights the company has with your information.

Individuals routinely accept EULAs without taking the time to read them. It’s such a widespread problem that the Comedy Central television show “South Park” devoted an entire episode in 2011 to what happens to the character Kyle when he accepts the latest iTunes EULA without reading it.

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Categories: Security