The media, including your correspondent, reported last week that the Ninth Circuit decision in Quon v Arch clearly established an employee’s right of privacy in his text messages, even on an employer-issued pager.
The court said that a police department that looked through an officer’s text message transcripts in violation of its own informal policy and without the employee’s consent violated his Fourth Amendment rights against search and seizure.
HE gave up his worldly possessions more than 50 years ago to live quietly as a monk in a Lothian monastery.
But retired abbot Dom Donald McGlynn has become one of the most unlikely victims of identity fraud after being targeted by international criminals. Hackers stole the e-mail address belonging to the 74-year-old before sending messages to the near-1000 people in his address book. They also took over his blog on the abbey website.
The fraudsters sent out a desperate plea in his name claiming that he was in the Canadian city of Quebec and had been robbed.
Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable operator in the United States, announced yesterday that it has backed off a plan to monitor customers' Internet transmissions.
The company had been planning to harvest the stream of data from each Internet customer for clues to their interests and then make money from advertisers who would use the information to target online pitches.
The data-collection effort would have protected personal information, Charter officials said in describing the plan, but critics likened the practice to wiretapping.
More than 6,500 CNET Networks employees and relatives are being notified of a possible data breach after burglars stole computer systems from the offices of the company that administers the Internet publisher's benefit plans.
Encryption and file-sharing technology have a long history together. Usenet servers, LimeWire, uTorrent, and many other applications and protocols have taken advantage of encryption technology to help give the end user an additional layer of security. In response to Sweden's new wiretapping law, The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde has announced the tracker’s intention to offer encryption services to its users.
One in three IT administrators say they or one of their colleagues have used top-level admin passwords to pry into confidential or sensitive information at their workplace, according to a survey by a password-management vendor.
Nearly half also confessed that they have poked around systems for information not relevant to their jobs.
THE controversial OneSchool online student database is being watered down after a public backlash against its instigator, Education Queensland.
School principals are leading the erosion, with one northside Brisbane primary school principal writing to parents advising them that photos of students do not need to be posted on their profiles.
Two NHS trusts have lost unencrypted laptops containing 31,000 patient records.
A laptop containing 11,000 patient records was stolen from a GP's home in Wolverhampton. And St George’s Hospital in London has admitted that six laptops were stolen from its filing cabinets at the start of the month, containing the records of 20,000 patients.
Both data breaches break Department of Health policy that states NHS mobile devices must be protected by encryption. Neither trust has offered an explanation as to why the data was unencrypted.
Lawmakers expressed alarm Wednesday over a legislative report showing that confidential information was left on outdated state computers being released for sale to the public.
The Legislative Division of Post Audit found that several state agencies had failed to adequately remove sensitive data from some machines, including Social Security numbers and password files.
The computers had been turned over to a government office that disposes of excess state property for Topeka-based agencies, but they hadn't been sold.
Students in Australia may soon be forced to have their photos, interests, and aspirations profiled in a massive database meant to help educators keep track of their progress. The database, called OneSchool, is being pushed rather aggressively by the education system in Queensland, which hopes to profile all 480,000 public school students through year 12 in the state. Parents, on the other hand, have expressed concerns over security and privacy, sparking a heated debate between them and Queensland's Education Minister, Rod Welford.
