Privacy

IBM Corp., one of the world's leading providers of encryption and other data-management technologies, is in the uncomfortable position of trying to solve its own mystery involving missing computer tapes with sensitive information about employees and records of customer transactions.

An outside vendor was transporting the tapes from one IBM facility to another on Feb. 23 when the tapes fell out of a contractor's vehicle in Westchester County, N.Y., not far from IBM headquarters in Armonk.

A computer hacker accessed the Social Security numbers of more than 22,000 current or former students at the University of Missouri, the second such attack this year, school officials said Tuesday. The FBI is investigating.

University officials said campus computer technicians confirmed a breach of a database last week by a user or users whose Internet accounts were traced to China and Australia.

Be careful of what you post on MySpace or anywhere else on the Internet because Big Brother is watching and will punish you. That's the message made loud and clear by two educational institutions in the US state of Pennsylvania, one of which is being sued by their victim a former student teacher.

Shortly after joining the social networking site Facebook, I received an e-mail telling me a friend had "written on my wall". Within two clicks I was logged-in and had full access to her account.

At first I was very confused -- I had only used the site for a day or two and thought I may have done something wrong but when I managed to change her status message to "is being hacked", I knew something was wrong.

Even the presiding genius of the Jimmy Choo empire could, when she heard the claims, have been forgiven for wanting to swap one of her company's elegantly crafted items of footwear in favour of a strategically placed steel-toed boot.

The Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of people who received loans or other financial assistance from two Agriculture Department programs were disclosed for years in a publicly available database, raising concerns about identity theft and other privacy violations.

Officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau, which maintains the database, were evidently unaware that the Social Security numbers were accessible in the database until they were notified last week by a farmer from Illinois, who stumbled across the database on the Internet.

About 100,000 customers of broadband provider Bulldog appear to have had private details stolen, it emerged yesterday. Cable & Wireless, which sold the Bulldog customer base to Pipex last year, said it had emerged that Bulldog customer contact details had been "illegally obtained" by an unnamed third party in 2005.

Two separate incidents ? both resulting in data breaches ? have left the personal information of 17,500 Ohio State University students, faculty members and staff compromised.

On 31 March or 1 April, a hacker using a foreign web address cracked a university firewall and accessed the names, Social Security numbers, employee ID numbers and birth dates of more than 14,000 current and former staff members, according to a university statement.

The university sent letters to affected personnel, who were offered a year of free credit protection.

There is growing unease among consumer privacy advocates over Google's proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick.

Dating used to be largely a matter of spending time with a love interest, discovering the good, the bad and the ugly in person. If you were lucky, friends helped fill in some of the blanks.

These days, the Internet -- and the ability to check people out before they ever meet up -- has forever changed the rules.

For better or worse, "googling" your date has become standard practice.