The metadata to be collected by the companies was said to help fight criminal activity.
The Australian government has temporarily abandoned plans that would have forced Internet and telephone data to be stored for up to two years, following an enquiry by the parliament which did not wish to go ahead with it.
Everybody's talking about PRISM, the U.S. government's electronic surveillance program.
We don't know all the details about PRISM (also called US-984XN). But we learned enough from a badly designed PowerPoint presentation leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden to feel outraged by its reach and audacity. In a nutshell, PRISM (and related telephone surveillance programs) take a big data approach to spying on foreign terrorists using American servers.
A bug on Facebook leaked email addresses and phone numbers provided by some 6 million people on the site to certain other users, the company revealed Friday.
What sparked the problem is a bit complicated. The bug caused some of the information that the social network stores to make friend recommendations to be inadvertently stored in association with people's contact information as part of their Facebook account, the company said Friday on its website.
Recent disclosures of U.S. government surveillance of our phone and Internet activity have heightened interest in services that promise not to collect or share our personal information.
A lot of people have been worried about their privacy since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on American government spying. A list of companies has been made public that allegedly store your data in such a way that allows for the USA’s NSA branch to easily access it.
As a reaction to this the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has put together a website with software and service alternatives to help increase your privacy, with a focus on FOSS and Linux.
Yahoo is releasing inactive Yahoo IDs so that users can score a better email address. This means you can finally have albert@yahoo.com instead of albert9330399@yahoo.com, for example. Sounds great, right? It’s actually a spectacularly bad idea.
In a Tumblr post, the company announced that on July 15, it will be “freeing up” Yahoo email addresses that have been inactive for a year or more. But it’s not just deactivating these accounts, it’s going to offer them to other people.
Google has asked the court overseeing terrorism-related surveillance programs at the U.S. National Security Agency to allow the company to publish information on the number of surveillance requests it receives.
Yahoo has received between 12,000 to 13,000 requests for user data from law enforcement agencies in the U.S. between Dec. 1 and May 31 this year, the company said Monday.
The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and General Counsel Ron Bell wrote in a blog post.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has signed a bill giving Texans more privacy over their inboxes than anywhere else in the United States.
On Friday, Perry signed HB 2268, effective immediately. The law shields residents of the Lone Star State from snooping by state and local law enforcement without a warrant. The bill's e-mail amendment was written by Jonathan Stickland, a 29-year-old Republican who represents an area between Dallas and Ft. Worth.
Since The Guardian began leaking top-secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents just 11 days ago, several tech companies responded to the revelations about the PRISM program. The likes of Google, Facebook, and Apple objected to the tone of the press coverage, saying that any suggestion they've ever given a government agency direct access to their servers is false.
Over the weekend, tech companies started responding with additional transparency too. Facebook and Microsoft revealed ranges of how many government information requests they're getting about how many accounts.
