The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters. A public interest group has filed a lawsuit to learn more about this monitoring, in the hope of starting a national discussion and modifying privacy laws as necessary for the online era.
In a not-uncommon development for the social-networking leader, Facebook's recently released privacy controls are leaving the company a bit red-faced. As a result of a new policy that by default makes users' profiles, photos and friends lists available on the web, almost 300 personal photos of founder Mark Zuckerberg became publicly available, a development that had gossip sites like Gawker yukking it up.
Oh, how things change.
The news that a Mozilla executive is exhorting computer users to adopt Microsoft's Bing search engine instead of Google would have caused hurricanes a few years ago. At the height of the DoJ anttrust action against Microsoft and subsequent case in the European Union, Microsoft was set up as the pantomime villain. It seems especially strange that is open source adherent Mozilla who has adopted this line. Quite honestly, if the answer is Microsoft, then it must have been a bloody stupid question.
PUPILS fighting a plan to digitally fingerprint them for cashless canteen payments have discovered the company employed by the school to store the data is the same one used by the American security services.
The secondary school students are worried that the biometric data could fall into the hands of identity thieves and compromise them for life.
Facebook is great for maintaining relationships of all kinds, but letting them overlap can be a recipe for disaster. Fortunately, it has started to roll out its much-anticipated update to its privacy settings to let users determine on a post-by-post basis exactly who they're sharing with. Here's how you can use the new functions to avoid a Facebook meltdown without spending all day micromanaging your privacy preferences.
Police can in some cases track cell phone location by merely telling a court that the information is relevant to an investigation, a legal expert tells TPM -- a fact that may partly explain how law enforcement racked up 8 million requests for GPS data from a single wireless carrier in a year.
Important personal information, such as social security numbers, names and zip codes, of many Notre Dame employees was exposed to the Internet after the University accidentally placed the information in a publicly accessible location.
The data breach affected about 24,000 employees, including some students who work for the University, Gordon Wishon, associate vice president of information technology and the University’s chief information officer, said.
Officials at Aurora St. Luke's Medical Center in Milwaukee this week said they are in the process of notifying more than 6,400 patients that their names, Social Security numbers, and other personal information may have been exposed after a laptop computer was stolen.
A St. Luke's spokesman said the laptop was snagged from a locked office in a "secure physician office" located adjacent to the hospital. Patients' names, Social Security numbers, date of birth, diagnosis codes, and medical record numbers--not the actual medical records themselves--were housed on the purloined laptop.
Debra Guenterberg doesn't have to go to a horror movie to get spooked. She says she's been living a nightmare for the past 13 years.
The Wisconsin woman says she's been stalked by two phantoms. Two men stole her name and her husband's Social Security number. They used the information to obtain credit cards, buy cars and three homes.
HSBC Bank says a bug in its imaging software inadvertently exposed sensitive data about some of its customers going through bankruptcy proceedings.
In notification letters made public Thursday, the bank said it had redacted sensitive information in Chapter 13 bankruptcy proof-of-claim forms that were filed electronically, but that the information turned out to be viewable "as a result of the deficiency in the software used to save imaged documents."
