Privacy

While everyone is concerned about privacy violations from Facebook Places, government agencies may be using powerful new technology to violate 4th-Ammendment protection against unreasonable searches.

Here's what the 4th Amendment says: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

If your gym wants to use your fingerprints as a biometric identifier to save you the trouble of carrying a membership card, is this a good thing? It's a topic of some debate in the Golden State and beyond.

A laptop computer containing personal information on about 7,000 patients of the Cook County health system was stolen from a locked office, officials said today.
The computer was stolen June 1 from a building at 1900 W. Polk St., but officials did not disclose the theft until today after an internal investigation, said Lucio Guererro, spokesman for the hospital system.

Are you in a relationship? What are your political views? And where did you go for breakfast this morning? What would once have been details of our lives known only by those we know and trust, many of us now willingly display online.

An acquaintance of yours – someone you're only ‘friends’ with on Facebook – asks what you’re doing this weekend. You’d rather not hang out with him, so you lie (to be avoid any hurt feelings). You’ll be out of town, you explain. "Maybe next time." All clear, right?

Before yesterday, only an awkward run-in or a blabbing friend could give you away. Now, there's a new potential snitch: Facebook Places.

The massively popular social network rolled out a new feature this week that shares your location with Facebook friends and alerts you if a buddy is nearby.

Facebook's new "Places" have been a long time coming, and privacy groups were ready to pounce when the company finally announced the location-based feature. Several privacy advocates say that the settings are unnecessarily complex and that users could have certain personal info exposed without their consent.

With anti-piracy outfits and dubious law-firms policing BitTorrent swarms at an increasing rate, many Bittorrent users are looking for ways to hide their identities from the outside world. To accommodate this demand we’ll give an overview of 5 widely used privacy services.

With an increasing number of BitTorrent users seeking solutions to hide their identities from the outside world, privacy services have seen a spike in customers recently. Below we’ve listed some of the most-used services that allow BitTorrent users to hide their IP-addresses from the public.

The world has less than a decade to make the protection of personal information and online privacy a priority before the concepts are lost forever, warns Ontario's information and privacy commissioner.

Ann Cavoukian says legislation meant to safeguard privacy already can't keep pace with the flow of information and advances in technology. "We have a large job to do," she told about 100 people Tuesday at a conference at the University of Ottawa.

Eric Schmidt suggested that young people should be entitled to change their identity to escape their misspent youth, which is now recorded in excruciating detail on social networking sites such as Facebook.

"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," Mr Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal.

Researchers from anti-virus provider Symantec have outted a gaming application in Google's Android Market that tracks users' whereabouts so they can be secretly monitored in real-time.

The free app is known as Tapsnake, which bills itself as an Android variation of a video game that has been around for three decades. What the description doesn't say is that every 15 minutes, the app uploads the user's GPS coordinates to a server that can be monitored by people running a separate $4.99 app known as GPS Spy, which is made by the same developer shop.