Privacy

Despite causing a minor political scandal in Germany last year, the government-created “state trojan” program appears to be going strong.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris has begun warning mobile application developers, and companies that have apps available for download, that failing to  "conspicuously" post privacy policies within 30 days could mean fines.

A federal judge has ruled that police officers in Wisconsin did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they secretly installed cameras on private property without judicial approval.

The officers installed the cameras in an open field where they suspected the defendants, Manuel Mendoza and Marco Magana, were growing marijuana. The police eventually obtained a search warrant, but not until after some potentially incriminating images were captured by the cameras. The defendants have asked the judge to suppress all images collected prior to the issuance of the search warrant.

The state of South Carolina is engaged in an "unprecedented response" following a massive breach in which hackers stole 3.6 million Social Security numbers and 387,000 credit and debit card numbers, officials said Friday.

The incident affected the state's Department of Revenue, and any person who filed a South Carolina tax return since 1998 is being asked to monitor their credit reports for potential fraud. The state is providing them with one year of free identity theft protection.

Barnes & Noble, the country's largest bookseller, said data thieves hacked into payment devices and may have stolen customer credit and debit card information at 63 of its stores nationwide, including 20 in California.

Hackers planted bugs in a single card reader at each of the stores, the company said. Customers swipe their payment cards through the machines and, if using a debit card, enter their personal identification number.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued a staff report on best practices for companies using facial recognition technology in their businesses.

"Fortunately, the commercial use of facial recognition technologies is still young," the report states. "This creates a unique opportunity to ensure that as this industry grows, it does so in a way that respects the privacy interests of consumers while preserving the beneficial uses the technology has to offer.”

The group of Turkish hackers that claimed responsibility for breaching Pepsi Hungary a few weeks ago, Turkish Agent Hacker Group, now claims to have penetrated the website of McDonald’s Thailand (mcthai.co.th).

As a result of the hack, the names, physical addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, registration dates and other details of around 2,000 individuals have been dumped online.

More than 1,000 out of a sample of 13,000 Android applications analysed by German researchers contained serious flaws in their SSL implementations.

In this paper (PDF), the researchers from Leibniz University in Hannover and Philipps University of Marburg found that 17 percent of the SSL-using apps in their sample suffered from implementations that potentially made them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle MITM attacks.

L33tdawg: We already covered this and the steps needed to turn it off in Want Better Battery Life in iOS 6? Turn off tracking!

Apple has enabled user tracking of its customers once again, with the recently released iOS 6 enabling advertisers to see which apps users have run, and which adverts they've seen – all for the benefit of the users, of course.

Credit card companies make money by taking a cut every time you swipe your plastic at the checkout counter. Now MasterCard has found a way to make those swipes pay over and over again.

As the Financial Times first reported, MasterCard is packaging its transaction data — your transaction data — and selling it to advertisers. The story was based on an apparently confidential pitch MasterCard made to potential clients. Not too confidential, because we found a copy by googling it.