A security survey conducted by wired.com is put together by golden-locksmith-tx.com to display the 2014' biggest winners and losers in privacy and security.

1. The Year 2014’s Biggest
Winners and Losers in
Privacy and Security
PRESENTED BY: GOLDEN LOCKSMITHSURVEY BY: WIRED

2. Apple
Florida Supreme Court
Yahoo
WhatsApp
U.S. Supreme Court
Google’s Project Zero

3. Apple
If the NSA can be thanked for anything it’s for the
competitive race the spy agency helped spur among
tech companies scrambling to outdo one another in the
privacy realm. Apple took the lead when it announced
that the operating system, iOS8, would encrypt nearly all
data on iPhones and iPads by default—including text
messages, photos and contacts—and that Apple itself
would not be able to decrypt it without the user’s
passcode.

4. WhatsApp
The mobile messaging app outdid even Apple’s own messaging
protections when it announced it was implementing end-to-end
encryption for its hundreds of millions of users. WhatsApp
communication is now encrypted with a key that only the user
possesses and stores on his or her mobile phone or tablet, which
means that even WhatsApp cannot read the user’s
communication or be compelled by spy agencies and law
enforcement to decrypt it.

5. Florida Supreme Court
In an important case closely watched by civil liberties groups,
Florida’s top court ruled that cops need a warrant to obtain cell
tower data. The court ruled that obtaining cell phone location
data to track a person’s location or movement in real time
constitutes a Fourth Amendment search and therefore requires a
court-ordered warrant. But the ruling would also cover law
enforcement’s use of so-called “stingrays”—–devices that simulate
a legitimate cell tower and force mobile devices in the vicinity to
connect to them so that law enforcement agencies can locate
and track people in the field without assistance from telecoms.

6. U.S. Supreme Court
In another important case, the nation’s top court ruled that cops
can’t search the cell phones of arrestees without a warrant. U.S.
prosecutors had argued that an arrestee’s cell phone was
“materially indistinguishable” from any other storage device, such
as a bag or wallet, found on an arrestee. But the justices weren’t
buying that claim. “Modern cell phones, as a category,” they
wrote in their decision, “implicate privacy concerns far beyond
those implicated by a cigarette pack, a wallet or a purse.”

7. Yahoo!
The company launched the fight after receiving a warrantless
request for data in 2007. It’s not clear the extent of the data the
government sought, but Yahoo fought back on Fourth
Amendment grounds, asserting that the request required a
probable-cause warrant and that the request was too broad and
unreasonable and, therefore, violated the Constitution. The battle
came to an end in 2008 after the Feds threatened the company
with a massive $250,000 a day fine if it didn’t comply, and a court
ruled that Yahoo’s arguments for resisting had no merit

8. Google’s Project Zero
Vendor bug bounty programs have been around for at least a
decade, with software makers and web sites increasingly upping
the amount they’re willing to pay to anyone who finds and reports
a security vulnerability in their program or system. This year Google
upended the tradition by announcing it had built an in-house
hacking team to hunt for vulnerabilities not only in its own software,
but in the software of other vendors as well. Project Zero aims to
make the internet more secure for everyone by focusing on
uncovering the high-value vulnerabilities, like Heartbleed and
Shellshock, that put everyone at risk.

9. Sony
US Marshals
Gamma International
President Obama
Verizon

10. Sony
Plenty of companies over the years have suffered sensational
hacks, but Sony’s breach may turn out to be the hack of the
decade—not only because of the nature of the breach and
the information stolen, but the way the pilfered data is being
rolled out in batches, prolonging the agony and suspense for
workers and executives. Some of the disclosures have been
lame and mundane—for example, the pseudonyms
celebrities use to check into hotels. Others have been
embarrassing, such as the tasteless and racist exchange
about President Obama between Sony Co-Chairman Amy
Pascal and producer Scott Rudin.

11. President Obama
This year the U.S. government finally acknowledged that it
withholds information about security vulnerabilities to exploit
them, rather than passing the information on to software vendors
and others to fix them. In making this revelation, the White House
announced it was “reinvigorating” a so-called equities process
designed to determine when to withhold and when to disclose—
overseen by the president’s National Security Council. Going
forward, the NSA must disclose any vulnerabilities it discovers—
unless the hole would be useful for intelligence agencies or law
enforcement to exploit.

12. US Marshals
In a move so stunning that civil liberties groups are still shaking
their heads over it, the U.S. Marshals Service in Florida made a
Hail Mary to seize public records about a surveillance tool
before the ACLU could obtain them. The civil liberties group
had filed a public records request with the Sarasota, Florida,
police department for information detailing its use of stingrays
and had made an appointment to visit the facility where the
documents were being held. But before they could get there,
marshals swooped in to grab the records and abscond with
them, claiming the police department didn’t own them

13. Verizon
Consider it the digital cookie monster that gobbles all your
footprints. Verizon Wireless ran into trouble when a technologist
with the Electronic Frontier Foundation noticed that the telecom
had been tracking its wireless users online activity by subtly
slipping a “permacookie”—a string of about 50 letters, numbers,
and characters—into data flowing between users and the
websites they visited. Users got the cookie whether they wanted
to be tracked or not, since Verizon revealed there was no way
to “turn it off.” AT&T was testing a similar system with its
customers until the backlash prompted the telecom to stop the
practice.

14. Gamma International
In October, the UK civil liberties group Privacy International filed a
criminal complaint against with the National Cyber Crime Unit of
the National Crime Agency alleging that the company was
criminally complicit in helping the Bahrain government engage in
unlawful interception of communications—a violation of UK’s
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000—and that Gamma
was not only aware of the surveillance but actively assisted it. By
selling and assisting Bahraini authorities in their surveillance, the
complaint asserts, Gamma is liable as an accessory under the
Accessories and Abettors Act 1861 and is also guilty of
encouraging and assisting the unlawful activity, a crime under the
Serious Crime Act 2007.

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