Privacy

Any time a person crosses the US border, the Department of Homeland Security assigns travelers with a "risk assessment" score to divine their likelihood of any involvement with a terrorist cell or criminal activity.

That score is calculated by feeding a large volume of personal information into an automated system (rather imposingly) called the "Automated Targeting System," or ATS. But what sensitive dirt the DHS stores about the average person isn't generally known.

Programming errors on a website that helps commuters carpool to work are exposing sensitive information of workers for hundreds of employers in Southern California, including at least one military installation.

ccording to the Wall Street Journal, searches of laptops and other electronic devices belonging to travelers that are entering the United States will continue with just a few small changes.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said that they'll be monitoring the searches more closely and that they'll strive to return the devices faster (the limit will be 5 days, except for Immigration and Custom searches that are limited to 30 days).

Facebook first burst onto the social networking scene in 2007 as the underdog to category behemoth MySpace. In the years since its launch, Facebook has gone on to become larger than MySpace in the number of users it boasts.

Social networking services like Facebook and Twitter foster a false sense of security and lead users to share information which can be used by cybercriminals and social engineers. The very concept of social networking is based on connecting and sharing, but with who?

A recent study found that many users simply accept requests to connect even if they do not know the person they are connecting with. The actual numbers found that 13% of Facebook users and a whopping 92% of Twitter users simply connect with anyone who asks.

Individuals would share their notes with private hospitals and patient support groups, under the plans which would also involve the scrapping of the centralised database system currently being introduced in the health service, which has been dogged by problems and delays.

Under the Conservative scheme, patients would be able to annotate their official records, alerting family doctors and hospitals to side-effects they had suffered as a result of taking medication, or medical symptoms which had gone undetected.

Nine U.K. government workers have lost their jobs after misusing their access privileges to view personal information on public citizens stored in the government's national identity database.

In total, 34 U.K. local council employees were found to have illegally accessed the Customer Information System (CIS) database, according to a news report. The CIS is one of three systems that will constitute the U.K. government's national identity database, which is currently under development.

In a story just dripping with irony, e-mail security vendor, McAfee, has accidentally sent the contact details of more than 1400 conference attendees in a spreadsheet attached to a thank you message.

On July 17, McAfee held a security conference at the Sydney Convention Centre. The event was well attended by about 800 guests. But in e-mail a week later thanking people for attending, McAfee added a spreadsheet containing names, numbers, e-mail addresses, employment details and even dietary requirements of 1408 people.

Don't look now, but no matter where you go, you're connected. We—or most of us, at least—have opened our front doors to large corporations, hardware manufacturers, software firms and search engines. We have allowed them to rifle through our jacket pockets and handbags. And now they can do as they wish with us, or do the bidding of the powers-that-be—in the form of a totalitarian government, for example.

Bank account numbers. Home addresses. Phone numbers. Most people probably wouldn't volunteer this information to a stranger, yet millions use the Internet every day to send and store sensitive information - not to mention the countless secrets and embarrassing stories people share online.

Everything communicated on the web has a long shelf life - a really, really long shelf life - making it virtually impossible to leave the past . . . in the past.