Privacy

An Australian magistrate has ruled that an iPad owner acted lawfully when he used Apple's Find my iPad app to locate his stolen fondleslab in a private home.

ABC News and the Canberra Times report that when a Canberra man's iPad mysteriously disappeared he fired up the Find my iPad App. Doing so revealed, thanks to the fondleslab's built-in GPS, that it was located in a nearby suburb. The newly iPad-less man went to the location indicated by the app and heard his iPad making noises within a home.

As customer data is spread evenly across the cloud, even if a server is brought down, customer data cannot easily be retrieved.

The company is a new player to the tech field, launching earlier this year. The cloud-based VPN service offers "true" anonymity and protection of the user's data through strong encryption protocols, according to the firm -- and may be of particular interest to those trying to circumvent location-based restrictions online.

Microsoft's controversial Do Not Track privacy feature for the upcoming Internet Explorer 10 web browser will be ignored by the world's most popular web server, the Apache Foundation's open source httpd.

Do Not Track or DNT was developed by W3C's Tracking Protection Group with the intention of allowing users to express their preferences when it came to who can follow them around the web.

PRIVACY advocates say a government proposal to keep all of Australia's internet and telephone information for two years would create a ''honey pot'' for hackers and criminals.

Victoria's Privacy Commissioner warned a joint parliamentary committee yesterday that civil rights and privacy would never have a chance if governments always put national security above all other rights.

Apple US says it didn't hand over the 12 million unique device identifiers or UDIDs that the Antisec hackers claim to have lifted off an FBI agent's laptop.

Hackers claimed to have compomised the laptop of agent Christopher Stangl, who had a history of involvement with Anonymous and Lulzsec, the predecessor to Antisec.

Twenty-two U.S. privacy and consumer groups have voiced support for a tough online privacy proposal being considered by the European Union, even though some U.S. businesses and government officials have described the proposal as too regulatory.

The FBI on Tuesday disputed a computer hacker group's claim that it stole personal identification data on millions of Apple device owners from an FBI agent's laptop.

FBI officials said the bureau never asked for and never possessed the database that the group, which calls itself AntiSec, is posting on a website.

The wars on privacy between search engines and web browsers continue despite Google's $22.5 million fine after the company was caught placing cookies on users' computers. Google took advantage of an Apple Safari bug that allowed the search engine engineers to bypass settings and place a cookie on the user's computer even if browser settings disallowed cookie placement. A lawsuit was filed, and the FTC ruled that Google must pay a fine for infringing on end-user's rights.

Arcticsid asked the Answer Line forum if his ISP can "sit back…watch a screen, and see everything you are doing at any given time?"

Not quite, but it's frightening close. Your Internet service provider tracks what IP addresses you contact, which effectively means they know the web sites you're visiting. They can also read anything you send over the Internet that isn't encrypted. Whether they actually do that is an open question.

Hacker group AntiSec released a set of over 1 million Apple Unique Device Identifiers (UDIDs), which the group claimed to have obtained from a file found on an FBI laptop it allegedly breached in March.

AntiSec claimed that the file found on the FBI laptop contained more than 12 million IDs that included personal information such as user names, push notification tokens, device names, cellphone numbers, addresses and zip codes. The hacker group issued a statement via Pastebin and gave a description on how it managed to obtain the data: