Privacy

Facebook is updating its policies to explicitly allow a handful of third-party search engines to crawl public content.

Before, Facebook banned robots, spiders, scrapers or harvesting bots from automatically collecting data across the social network’s pages, unless their creators had written permission. This raised the criticism that the social network was trying to have it both ways — it could juice up search engine optimization and be discovered on Google, and crack down on emerging threats from smaller companies that might use the data in innovative ways.

New York-based Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center has become one of the latest medical providers to expose highly sensitive patient data after CDs containing unencrypted data sent by FedEx never made it to their destination.

Identity theft is a common problem in today’s world. Rather than getting a real job, some people get a thrill out of destroying other people’s lives through identity theft. If you don’t want to be a victim of identity theft, you have to learn ways to keep yourself protected. Much of keeping yourself protected from identity theft is using common sense. It is far too easy for someone to get hold of your information and using it for their own purposes.

Sophisticated hackers aren't the only ones gaining access to sensitive data on the Internet. A large amount of personal information is being left exposed or poorly protected by companies and governments.

The number of identity-theft victims in the U.S. jumped 12% to 11.1 million in 2009, according to research company Javelin Strategy & Research. Fraud cases reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, which is partly run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, climbed 23% to 336,655 last year.

Not surprisingly, Facebook's half-hearted attempts to kick its data-sharing addiction have not exactly wowed the privacy cognoscenti. Last week a consortium of groups -- including the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse -- wrote an open letter to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg [PDF] saying essentially what I (and many others) also said after FB's nominal response to the recent privacy uproar: Nice start, but... not enough by half, at least.

Google apparently “saved passwords for access to mailboxes” and obtained “content of electronic messages” when collecting data for its Street View service, according to a French agency’s preliminary investigation into the practices of the U.S. company.

The French National Commission on Computing and Liberty said it is examining data that Google gave the agency as it continues its review of how Google collected data carried on unencrypted Wi-Fi networks in France.

Ex-hacker and alleged "war crimes collaborator" Adrian Lamo has garnered a great deal of attention lately from his role in outing Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning, a young U.S. Military official who was leaking sensitive documents, including some which Lamo believed endangered national security.

The issue of privacy has been nagging Facebook for quite awhile now, and it looks like advocacy groups are still not happy with the company’s progress in the space. In an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and eight other groups are asking the site to do more.

Privacy could be enhanced if data was allowed to fade, suggests research. Dutch researcher Dr Harold van Heerde is looking into ways to gradually "degrade" the information that sites gather about visitors.

Slowly swapping details for more general information can help guard against accidental disclosure, he said. "There are so many weak points in security that you can never be sure that your data is safe," said Dr van Heerde.

I called my brother last week, and we had a 30-minute phone conversation. Over the next four days, and unbeknownst to him, his cell phone called me back five additional times.

Once I could hear him talking work with a coworker. Another time he was talking with our mother. Two other times, it sounded like his wife and young kids were chatting. The most recent time was notable in that he was having a private interaction that I am pretty certain neither he nor his wife meant to be public.