Privacy

A LAPTOP containing the personal details of 600,000 new and prospective military recruits has been stolen, the Ministry of Defense said Friday, the latest in a series of government blunders over data.

The laptop was stolen from a Royal Navy officer in the central city of Birmingham last week, a statement said.

The amount of information held on each individual varied from just a name to full background details including passport numbers, insurance numbers and family background information.

The personally identifiable information of about 650,000 customers of JCPenney and other retailers is at risk after a data tape went missing from storage vendor Iron Mountain.

The Social Security numbers of 150,000 people were on the backup tape, which vanished last October, according to representatives from GE Money, which handles retail credit card operations.

The backup tape was being stored at an Iron Mountain warehouse when it went missing. The tape was not checked out of the facility, a GE Money spokesman said.

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence has confirmed that a laptop stolen from a Royal Navy officer contained personal details of 600,000 people.

The MoD said the laptop was stolen from a Royal Navy officer in Birmingham on January 9.

It contained personal information relating to some 600,000 people who have either expressed an interest in, or have joined, the Royal Navy, Royal Marines and the Royal Air Force.

In some cases, said the MoD, the information was no more than a name.

Here's the one thing I hate about using the web - all the passwords I have to remember to access various internet services. From Facebook, Gmail and Flickr to Amazon, ASB online and my Inland Revenue account, I need to enter a password and user name to log on. I have a different one for each and they are just a handful of the websites I visit. That's a long list of passwords and I change them regularly which complicates things further.

Privacy concerns stemming from online shopping rose in 2007, a new study finds, as the loss or theft of credit card information and other personal data soared to unprecedented levels.

Sixty-one percent of adult Americans said they were very or extremely concerned about the privacy of personal information when buying online, an increase from 47 percent in 2006. Before last year, that figure had largely been dropping since 2001.

Recent reports about incidents of data loss in the British healthcare system have alarmed medical doctors in other European countries.

In Germany, the national association of doctors in private practice (NAV Virchow Bund) has adopted a stance advocating the complete abandonment of all concepts of central data storage in the German national health IT project.

As soon as you walk into the airport, the machines are watching. Are you a tourist -- or a terrorist posing as one?

As you answer a few questions at the security checkpoint, the systems begin sizing you up. An array of sensors -- video, audio, laser, infrared -- feeds a stream of real-time data about you to a computer that uses specially developed algorithms to spot suspicious people.

In wake of the recent spotlight on online privacy regulations -- stemming from an incident earlier this month where Facebook Inc. banned a user for trying to export his data from the social networking giant onto a rival site -- a Canadian tech blogger has created a new set of guidelines which aims to bring established privacy principles to online companies.

A high-tech tool that makes lunch lines move faster is raising concerns about student privacy rights.

Fingerprint scans are popping up in schools across the country, prompting one Mesa lawmaker to seek to limit their use in Arizona.

More and more the United States and other parts of the world are introducing changes in technology both on and offline that invade the privacy of citizens. Whether it is the telecom companies looking for a monopoly on the Internet and bandwidth or selling your information to the Government, or the Government itself perpetrating these privacy violations, the world is changing and people need to be more vigilant.