Privacy

Personal information on about a third of Massachusetts residents has been compromised, according to the state's attorney general, citing statistics gleaned from the tough data breach reporting law there.

About 2.1 million of the state's roughly 6.6 million residents had some form of personal data put at risk in 1,166 reported theft incidents, says Attorney General Martha Coakley, according to a report in the Boston Globe. She was citing numbers gathered from the start of 2010 through this August.

The Federal Trade Commission the week said it will hold a workshop that examines how burgeoning use of facial recognition technology impacts privacy and security.

Not content to let Google+ hog the spotlight the day of its grand opening, Facebook caught many users off-guard last night as it rolled out a host of changes without much in the way or warning or direction. What's evident is that Facebook and Google+ are pulling out all stops to win over social networkers of the world, though at least one of the changes to Facebook may have users scrambling to alter their privacy settings and friends lists.

Are you using the Skype for iOS app on your iPhone or iPod Touch? Then you need to be aware of how easily your information — particularly your entire address book — could be stolen without your knowledge. All it takes is a single chat message.

According to TechCrunch, the issue was first discovered by AppSec Consulting security researcher Phil Purviance — who claims that he pointed out the vulnerability to Skype about a month ago. You can see a rather technical demonstration of how information is stolen in the video below, but here's the simplified version:

South Korea's national spy agency has admitted that it monitored a Google Inc.'s Gmail account of a citizen accused of violating the national security law, a local newspaper reported Friday.

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) received a court approval to monitor the Gmail account of Kim Hyung-geun, 52, to collect email evidences regarding his allegedly pro-North Korean activities, the Hankyoreh daily reported, citing a document filed with the Constitutional Court.

The names and email addresses of hundreds of U.S. intelligence officials — including some senior officials in the Obama Administration — have been posted on an anti-secrecy website after computer hackers allegedly swiped them from the internal membership list of a prestigious national security organization.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has proposed amendments to online privacy rules for children that aim to give parents control over what personal information websites may collect from children under 13.

The proposed amendments to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) rule updates the definition of "personal information" to include geolocation information and certain types of persistent identifiers used for functions other than the website's internal operations, such as tracking cookies used for behavioral advertising, FTC said on Thursday.

When I returned from my honeymoon at the end of August, I read that Facebook had finally taken a long-overdue step toward regaining the trust of its users by simplifying its privacy settings.

According to its blog post, Facebook added inline profile controls; a new feature that lets you approve tags before they appear on your profile; changed some of its jargon; and extended a few features to both mobile and Web versions of its site.

A probe into mobile phone-tapping by German police during a demonstration in February has led to condemnation, after data protection authorities labelled the widespread interception of mobile traffic “disproportionate” and “illegal”.

Saxon Data Protection Officer Andreas Schurig reached his damning conclusions in a report (PDF file in German) published on Friday into police surveillance tactics at an anti-Nazi protest that took place on 19th February in the German city of Dresden.

Samsung Card Co., South Korea's leading card firm, is suspected of having come under an online security breach that could have leaked about 800,000 customers' personal data, sources said Thursday.

Samsung Card has asked the police to investigate an employee regarding the suspected leakage of customer data, including their names and mobile phone numbers. Sources said Samsung Card submitted to the police a document in which an employee of the card firm confessed that about 800,000 customers' data might have been leaked.