Privacy

Hackers released personal information about the head of Citigroup today in retaliation for the arrest of protesters during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations this weekend.

The data on Vikram Pandit, Citigroup's chief executive officer, includes phone numbers, address, e-mail address, family information, and some legal and financial information. It was released by CabinCr3w, which is affiliated with the Anonymous online activist group that has been involved in the monthlong protests.

At the same time that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was preparing corporate guidelines for cybersecurity risk disclosure, the securities market watchdog was informing its employees that their personal brokerage account information may have been compromised by a contractor.

Despite the fact that Facebook has apparently reworked its security and privacy controls several times, 51% of users are reportedly unhappy with the current privacy controls on the social networking site.

That's just one of the messages from Barracuda Networks' 2011 Social Networking Security & Privacy Study, which also reveals that 20% of respondents have been negatively affected by information that was exposed on a social network, and 95% think that social networking sites need to do a better job protecting against account hacking.

Technology has changed a lot since 1986, when the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) became law. Cell phones no longer look like bricks. Thirteen-pound laptops, such as the IBM PC Convertible with a processor running at 4.77 MHz and 256KB of memory, aren't considered svelte. We even have something called the World Wide Web, an unknown to cybernauts in that year.

A Facebook user has filed a federal lawsuit against the social networking giant, claiming it violated wiretap laws with a tracking cookie that records web browsing history after logging off of Facebook.

John Graham, a 42-year-old lawyer, is the named plaintiff in the lawsuit filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Kansas. His suit seeks class action status for the 150 million users of Facebook in the United States. Graham referred all comment to his attorneys, who declined to comment on the filing.

Stanford Hospital & Clinics this week blamed a third party billing contractor for a data breach that exposed the personal data of some 20,000 patients.

Stanford release a statement blaming the contractor just a week after it was hit with a $20 million lawsuit related to the breach, which the Palo Alto, Calif. health care provider disclosed in September.

The fact that one can find out a lot about a person's interests, movements and opinions from their Facebook and Twitter accounts, Google searches and messages exchanged via messaging platforms has not been lost on law enforcement agencies worldwide.

Indeed, it would be surprising if these agencies chose not to try and access the information that can considerably speed up their investigation. So, the question is not whether they are doing it or not but whether they should be able to.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, ACLU and several other civil rights and privacy groups are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Facebook for its tracking of users on websites after they have logged out of the social networking site.

Facebook says it has stopped the practice, but that is not stopping the uproar about it. Reps. Edward Markey and Joe Barton, co-chairs of Congress's Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, also want the FTC to look into the issue.

If you care to keep your past in the past, Facebook's new version of the profile, called Timeline, makes that a little more difficult.

With Timeline, every status update, wall post and photo ever posted since the day you joined Facebook becomes easily searchable to you and your friends. For many--early adopters especially--dredging up the past for all to see can be a privacy nightmare.

Backup tapes containing the personal information of nearly five million current and former U.S. soldiers, who received treatment at military clinics and hospitals, has gone missing.

Data on the backup tapes belonged to Tricare, a health benefits provider for military personnel, retirees and their dependents, but the information had been entrusted to Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), a high-tech defense contractor, which reported the breach.