Privacy

Ben Jackson and Paul Vet know where you live. Or rather, if you geotag your tweets and photos as carelessly as the average microblogger, they know where you sleep, work, and potentially engage in far more private activities.

Both Jackson and Vet separately presented research at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York on Friday and Saturday aimed at demonstrating just how easy it is to track unwitting Twitterers using just a few pieces of metadata attached to their tweets or online photos.

Imagine that it is the year 2014. You have just gotten home from a long day of work when you get a knock at the front door. "Mr. Smith?" a youngish, neatly dressed man with a clipboard and plastic, government issued identification badge asks. "I'm from the CDC. According to your official electronic health records, you haven't been to a health check-up for a while. In compliance with section 3001 of the 2009 Economic Stimulus Bill that was signed into law, you are required to submit your weight so that we can monitor your BMI (Body Mass Index). Please step onto the scale."

Privacy shortcomings in Chatroulette expose users to security risks, according to a study by security researchers.

A recent study by Cyber-Ark has revealed that an increasing number of IT professionals are using their administrative powers to access information not relevant to their role.

During the recent Real ID catastrophe on the forums, many players decided to appeal to an industry source that might have been able to sway Blizzard to change its mind.

These players contacted the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) as a Better Business Bureau-type middleman in this situation with their concerns. The ESRB itself has championed such causes in the past with its Privacy Online program, which is designed to help companies meet various privacy laws like the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

The mission is affordable health care. But Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield is paying the price for a security slip up that exposed the name, social security number and credit card information of customers like Robert Byrd.

"They can do almost anything with that," Byrd said. "Which part of my back do I look over?"

Tech savvy stalkers can now easily figure out celebrities' home addresses, as the stars aren't taking care when they upload pictures containing geo-tags, letting thieves know their exact location, say US computer scientists.

The researchers have shown that address information can be gleaned from photo and video sharing sites, via geo-tags- latitude and longitude data. Often geo tags are added automatically to material captured by devices such as smartphones, reports New Scientist.

Most of the time, Stacey Schlittenhard finds facial recognition technology to be extremely useful. When she uploads her family photos to the website Picasa, for instance, the program automatically tags her friends and family members. This lets her share the photos easily and saves her hours of organization.

But every now and then, the computer gets things flat wrong. "Babies," she says. "That's the hardest thing. All babies kind of look alike -- they all have little round faces. If I label one baby as my [2-year-old] son, it will label almost every baby as my son."

Australia's widely criticized proposal to mandate a filter blocking child pornography and other objectionable Internet content has been delayed at least a year so the government can review what content should be restricted.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said Friday a 12-month review would begin this year into the filter, which would force all Australian ISPs to block a regularly updated list of websites.

About a year ago, Facebook had some 150 million total users and according to latest stats nearly 175 million users log in to Facebook daily now. The most popular social networking website in the world connects 400 million users worldwide with friends, acquaintances, and sometimes with complete strangers.