Privacy

Google Inc. is actively complying with requests for data about its Orkut social networking service ordered by Brazilian courts, the company said Thursday.

Google has provided Brazilian authorities with data about Orkut users in response to 30 court orders, and it plans to respond to eight more orders before their deadlines expire, said Debbie Frost, a Google spokeswoman.

Brazilian prosecutors investigating allegations of illegal activities on Orkut sued Google last month in a Brazil civil court, saying Google hadn't responded to their requests for information.

Can people really tell what I search for over the Internet? You may be searching from the privacy of your home, but when it comes to just about anything online, there's no guarantee of privacy.

Your Internet service provider may know about the controversial group you just researched. Your search engine may know about the divorce you're contemplating. And if you're surfing from work, your boss may know about the disease you just looked up.

Federal regulators say that 18 million computer users worldwide were affected by malicious spyware allegedly distributed by parties that agreed the day before to a $US2 million ($A2.6 million) settlement.

Analysts and government officials said huge hurdles remain in containing the problem.

The Federal Trade Commission's settlement against two California companies and three individuals was the second-biggest ever made by the agency, bringing the running total to about $US8 million ($A10.45 million) in settlements with more than a dozen companies over the past two years.

Once again a government agency is under the microscope thanks to personally identifiable information being mailed to incorrect addresses for former employees.

Ex-staffers with the Transportation Security Administration have been warned that Accenture may have mailed paperwork containing Social Security numbers and birth dates to addresses that are no longer valid for 1,195 people.

USA Today reported that the 55,000-member TSA had begun the process of notifying those people in late August about the misdirected mailings.

Nine out of ten mobile devices sold on eBay are loaded with sensitive personal and corporate information that could be easily retrieved by hackers, a security probe has found.

Out of the nine devices up for auction, which included PDAs and smartphones, engineers at Trust Digital recovered almost 27,000 pages of potentially damaging material.

Their haul included a corporate swag bag of sales information, tax details, client records, address books, computer passwords, product road maps, Web logs and business correspondence.

A security breach on MySpace that enabled users to view other users' private pictures and postings went unattended for several months, according to news reports.

UK-based Out-Law.com reported that the hack enabled MySpace users over 18 to view the personal profiles of users under 16.

MySpace had previously altered its service so that all profiles of users under 16 were private by default, requiring more steps for over-18 users to contact them.

A legislative watchdog agency says it found widespread security weaknesses in the state Department of Education's computer systems, including flaws that left Social Security numbers and other sensitive data on students and teachers potentially vulnerable.

The weaknesses could allow hackers to view sensitive information and to obtain access to users' accounts, the Auditor General's Office said in a performance audit on the department's information management systems.

A laptop containing home care information on 28,000 patients has been stolen from the car of a nurse who works for Royal Oak, Mich.-based Beaumont Hospitals, according to a statement from the hospital.

The laptop was in the nurse's car, which was stolen in Detroit on Aug. 5 after the nurse had finished seeing patients. The vehicle was later recovered, but the laptop was missing. The computer contained personal and health information of Home Care patients who had received care over the previous three years, the hospital said.

The Internal Revenue Service has pledged to step up monitoring of its e-mail servers in response to a recent review that found a high percentage of misuse among employees surveyed.

In response to the report from the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, IRS Chief Information Officer W. Todd Grams said his office will ensure that the agency's next annual security training sessions will include reminders that abuse of e-mail policies has resulted in, and will result in, disciplinary action.

Bill Kerridge is a pub owner who runs an award-winning pub in North Shields, northern England, and whose daughter is a talented gymnast.

Normally, Kerridge would be happy for the readers of a national newspaper to know those details, but this time he was not, because along with a wealth of other information relating to his family, the data was recovered from a computer hard drive bought over the Internet via eBay that the Kerridges knew nothing about.