Doctors' leaders are warning government ministers that the NHS is jeopardising its relationship of trust with patients by creating a vast atabase of personal medical records. GPs say they fear patients' rights are being overlooked, that "scaremongering" is being used to get people's agreement for the database, and that hackers could illegally access the central computer.
Homeland Security and the National Security Agency may be taking a closer look at Internet communications in the future. The Department of Homeland Security's top cybersecurity official told CNET on Wednesday that the department may eventually extend its Einstein technology, which is designed to detect and prevent electronic attacks, to networks operated by the private sector. The technology was created for federal networks.
The former senior tobacco official whose purported sex diary was posted on the Internet has asked local police to arrest whoever was responsible for the leak and charge the hackers with invasion of privacy.
Han Feng, a former official in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, claimed that someone with malicious motives hacked into his computer diary and changed the content to embarrass him.
The Dutch police and intelligence services tapped at least 3350 internet connections in 2009. An increase of 385 percent since 2006.
Consumer-advocate blog Consumerist is always looking to help you keep tabs on Big Brother and any of your personal information He's tracking. Toward that end, their comprehensive list of online background-checking tools is worth a look.
Why would you want to run a background check on yourself? We've offered reasons before, but as Consumerist puts it:
The dangers of security breaches has once again been highlighted after a critical server at the Valdosta State University in Georgia was hacked, compromising highly sensitive personal information of thousands of students and staff.
According to eSecurity Planet, the hacker managed to infiltrate the server and gained access to student grades as well as Social Security numbers. Valdosta officials have now confirmed that up to 170,000 people are thought to be affected.
Could a lack of privacy regulations in the U.S. and abusive practices lead to a backlash that negatively affects scientific research for the greater social good? That worries Tom Mitchell, a Carnegie Mellon professor and machine learning researcher, whose profile appears this week in the pages of Computerworld.
Simply joining a few groups at social networking sites may reveal enough information for hackers to personally identify you, according to some recent computer science research. In a paper that will be presented at a security conference later this year, an international team of academics describes how they were able to build membership sets using information that social networking sites make available to the public, and then leverage an existing attack on browsing history to check for personal identity.
In the grand carnival that is the Internet, Facebook and MySpace profiles are commonly understood to be fun-house mirrors -- exaggerating and distorting a person's features for effect. But the results of a new study suggest that social networks may actually provide a much more accurate reflection of people's personalities than previously thought.
While many internet users are fretting about preserving their online privacy in the age of social networking, a new breed of digital natives is actively stripping away the last vestiges of anonymity. They are broadcasting their thoughts, plans and even their locations and purchases to the web, using new services that post intimate personal information in real time.
