Over the last few months there has been a lot of pressure on International companies like Google and Apple to improve their privacy policies and protection of their customer's private information. Although privacy issues have been on congress's table for a while now, they have recently been brought back into the spotlights due to numerous privacy violations, including the hacking into Sony systems, the tracking of customer's locations by iPhones and Android phones and the Google Street View program - just to name a few. Following these events, congress is now focusing on means to improve customer's privacy. In line with these efforts, Senator Al Franken, who is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has sent a letter to the CEO's of Google and Apple requesting that their companies require application developers to include clear and understandable privacy policies. In his letter, Franken mentioned that this would be an important first step in giving users basic information about what the application does and what personal information it accesses and shares. Franken added that at the very least, location aware applications should specify what information they collect, how it is collected and with whom is it shared. It is unclear why Franken did not address the same questions to Facebook. law.co.il notes that although Facebook's terms of use require that applications include a privacy policy - on the actual application - very few have such policies and even fewer include them in a visible place. Source: Washington Post.