Privacy

Worried your Android apps are spying on you? You should be, according to a recent study that found several popular Android Apps regularly share your location and critical phone data such as your phone number with advertisers and others. Researchers from Intel Labs, Penn State, and Duke University randomly selected 30 out of 358 popular apps from the Android Market for this study. The computer scientists were able to track each application's behavior using a special monitoring program called TaintDroid developed by the researchers.

Here's a breakdown of the researcher's findings:

A law firm – ACS:Law – that has been criticised from several quarters for the mass issue of letters to alleged copyright infringers on the internet, has seen the details of 13 000 alleged filesharing users leaked on to the internet.

And it appears that BT may be to blame for some of the leaks, as it seems that BT has admitted sending the details of around 500 of its subscribers who were suspected of filesharing, but failed to encrypt the Excel-based file data.

Even the most cautious of privacy-conscious Android users may be unwittingly sharing more sensitive data with more third parties than they realized -- or even intended to authorize.

In a recent joint study by Duke University, Penn State, and Intel Labs, researchers found that 15 of 30 popular Android applications sent users' geographic location to remote advertisement servers -- even though users may have only granted the app permission to access that data for the sake of unlocking location-based features.

A New York state judge has ruled that a woman's deleted postings on Facebook and MySpace must be turned over to a company fighting allegations she suffered “permanent injuries” that have prevented her from living an active lifestyle.

The "war on privacy" reached a new level as the EFF proclaimed it's time for all of us who care about privacy to stand up and defend it. The disturbing news today is that the government intends to expand its ability to surveill us by putting government-mandated back doors in all communications systems and in all encryption software.

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. says it has no way of providing government officials with the text of encrypted corporate e-mails its devices serve up. But if the companies that employ BlackBerry phones want to hand over the encryption keys to their e-mail, it won't object.

In a recent interview, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said he could envision countries that want access to BlackBerry e-mails setting up a kind of national registry where companies doing business within their borders would have to provide government officials with the ability to peek at encrypted messages.

They say privacy doesn't exist on the Web -- but that doesn't mean you can't try to safeguard your personal information. Our computers are loaded with details about our personal and business lives, and it's definitely not acceptable to reveal them haphazardly. With hackers becoming ever more sophisticated, you have to take precautions.

The Czech Republic's privacy watchdog says Google has not been granted permission to expand its mapping feature "Street View" because it invades peoples' privacy.

The Office for Personal Data Protection last week refused Google Inc. the necessary registration for "Street View" in the eastern European country but did not explain why. Google then considered it a temporary decision.

Only days after Interpol secretary-general Ronald K. Noble admitted hackers had tapped into his Fa$ebook account to collect sensitive data about some of the world’s most wanted criminals, Richard Allan, Facebook’s head of European public policy, has admitted fraud has become a “major issue” with the site.

The chief of law enforcement organisation Interpol has warned that cyber crime could be the world’s “most dangerous criminal threat”.

Ronald K Noble sounded the warning at the first Interpol Information Security Conference in Hong Kong last week, adding the embarrassing revelation that cyber criminals had recently stolen his identity on Facebook in order to obtain sensitive information on Interpol cases.