Privacy

Anonymous and the group calling itself Backtrace Security seem to be engaged in a campaign of mutually-assured anonymity destruction.

It might not be long before airport security will let you keep your shoes on, even if they do grope you.

The University of York, England has published a vast quantity of private student data on its website, detailing the personal details of some 17,000 students, including mobile phone numbers, dates of birth, and qualification grades from earlier education.

The breach, which occurred last week, has been reported to the UK data protection registrar, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The university apologised for the breach of data and initiated a security review of the systems it has in place.

The Obama administration called Wednesday for the passage of a consumer privacy bill of rights that would allow individuals to prevent companies from tracking their online surfing or selling their data to the highest bidder.

Nothing on the web is ever private. If you thought you can control your privacy, you were wrong. Websites may give you security options to better hide your information from the world, but ultimately your privacy resides in the hands of the website itself.

We've seen how websites let ad companies track our private usage. We've seen how Facebook mucked up their privacy controls. We even saw how websites like Gawker are prone to hackers stealing user information. And now, Etsy has made what was once private, public.

Anonymous, a hacker group sympathetic to WikiLeaks, released on Monday emails that it obtained from someone who said he is a former Bank of America Corp employee.

In the emails dating from November 2010, people that appear to be employees of a Balboa Insurance, a Bank of America insurance unit, discuss removing documents from loan files for a group of insured properties. Neither the emails nor correspondence released by Anonymous indicate the reason behind the electronic record keeping discussion.

New Jersey state agencies left confidential information on computers set to be sold at auction, according to a report released this week by state Comptroller Matthew Boxer.

EC e-privacy laws could damage the UK's digital economy, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has warned.

Businesses will be required to obtain explicit consent from web users being tracked using cookie text files. The directive will come into force on 25 May 2011, comprising an amendment to the EC's Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive.

Nick Stringer, director at trade body the IAB, says the law will raise significant implementation challenges across Europe. "This new law is potentially detrimental to consumers, business and the UK digital economy," he said.

Soon websites in the European Union will need to get explicit permission from surfers before being allowed to track their online browsing habits. The new regulations come into force on 25 May as part of the European e-Privacy directive, which places tough new restrictions on the use of internet cookies.

An external auditor lost a CD with information on thousands of current and former McAfee employees, putting them at risk of identity fraud.

The disc was lost on Dec. 15 by Deloitte & Touche USA, McAfee spokeswoman Siobhan MacDermott said Thursday. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based security software company was first notified on Jan. 11, and on Jan. 30, it received particulars of the data that may have been on the CD, MacDermott said.