The Ninth Circuit's recent ruling in United States v. Arnold allows border patrol agents to search your laptop or other digital device without limitation when you are entering the country. EFF and many civil liberties, travelers’ rights, immigration advocacy and professional organizations are concerned that unfettered laptop searches endanger trade secrets, attorney-client communications, and other private information.
A Dutch hacker activist and journalist has launched the Small Sister Project, which is designed to help consumers counter the privacy invasions of Big Brother.
Brenno de Winter launched his project on Saturday with the aim of making it easier for people to keep their online communications safe from the prying eyes of governments around the world. A case in point is the European Data Retention Directive that is being adopted by countries in the EU. It requires that ISPs and phone companies retain data for several years.
PERSONAL INFORMATION supplied by job applicants to online recruitment agency Jobs.ie has been illegally accessed by internet hackers, writes Olivia Kelly .
CVs submitted by the applicants were downloaded in bulk through a non-Irish web address last Thursday.
A CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield dental HMO accidentally exposed personal information, including Social Security numbers, of about 75,000 members on a public Web site last month and didn't notify them until about three weeks later.
The Dental Network, which is owned by CareFirst, informed the members - mostly Maryland and District of Columbia residents - that their names, addresses, dates of birth and Social Security numbers had been posted on its Web site for two weeks in February because of a technical error.
The unencrypted medical information of about 2,500 participants in a cardiac study conducted by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) may have been compromised by the theft of a laptop PC last month.
State employees who tried to hide their computer tracks by using a "proxy site" might have exposed their personal information to hackers in Germany.
The State Department, in an embarrassing revelation, said Friday that it was investigating several episodes in which an employee and several contract workers peered into the passport files of all three presidential contenders.
The online advertising network Phorm has been criticised by a leading internet think tank on the grounds that its data gathering system is illegal.
Phorm collects information on web users by examining the sites they visit and building up a profile of their interests, which advertisers use to target them with relevant promotions and banners. The network is already used by several UK internet service providers, including BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk.
The man dubbed the "father of the Web" says consumers need to be protected against systems that can track their activity on the Internet.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, said he would change his Internet provider if it introduced such a system.
In an interview with the BBC, Berners-Lee said he did not want his ISP to track which Web sites he visited.
In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, Siobhan Gorman pulled together the disparate threads of reporting on what's known of the NSA's secret domestic spy program, and combined them with some of her own reporting to confirm, once again, that the NSA's program is another incarnation of the Pentagon's erstwhile Total Information Awareness program.
