Privacy

Changes in what's displayed in search results announced Tuesday by Google has one prominent privacy advocate ready to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, based in Washington, D.C., says his group is mulling filing a complaint with the FTC over Google's new Search Plus Your World feature, according to the Los Angeles Times. When pressed to elaborate on his comments to the Times, Rotenberg would only say that he will have more information on the complaint on Thursday.

Politicians associated with the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party are included on a list of “Polish neo-nazis” uploaded onto the internet by the Anonymous hacking group.

The data is part a trove of information, including emails, passwords and credit card details hacked by the Anonymous collective over the past few weeks, including data taken from the US-based Stratfor security analyst company over the Christmas period.

Trojans—they're not just for hackers anymore. German police, for instance, love them; a scandal erupted in Parliament last year after federal investigators were found to be using custom spyware that could potentially record far more information than allowed by law. The story made headlines, but it lacked a certain sense of the bizarre.

Monitoring technology used in shopping centres to track customers' movements via their mobile phones has come under fire from civil rights campaigners, who claim that it invades people's privacy.

FootPath technology, manufactured by UK company Path Intelligence, uses signals from a shopper's mobile phone to pinpoint their position to within two meters. The data collected is then fed back to a processing centre, where it is analysed in order to track the movement of consumers and establish shopping patterns.

The cyber bandits who nicked 45,000 Facebook user names and passwords with a computer worm Thursday got less than they bargained for.

A "majority" of the credentials stolen by the thieves were "out of date," according to a statement Facebook released to the media Friday. When pressed on the point by ZDNet blogger Emile Protalinski, a Facebook spokesperson acknowledged that "more than half" of the purloined data contained invalid logins or old or expired passwords.

On January 6th reports of Symantec (makers of Norton Anitvirus) being hacked surfaced. The group of hackers behind the attack behind the attack were from India. In a statement issued by a member from the Lords of Dharamraja group (badass name!), the guys said:

Think protecting customer privacy is only an issue for business giants like Facebook and Sony? Think again.

Many small companies have lost customer trust or even been sued over privacy mishaps in recent years. And they're likely to face more problems as digital data files grow in size and importance to modern business.

A "foreign intelligence service" may be exploiting data revealed by a computer hacking group on U.S. intelligence and military officials, a cyber analyst said.

AntiSec, part of the larger hacking organization Anonymous, disclosed information on officials and former officials who subscribe to Stratfor, which provides clients with analysis of national and international affairs. The data include e-mail addresses and other personal data, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has expressed concerns about recent changes to AOL's Instant Messenger service and recommends that "AIM users do not switch to the new version, as it introduces important privacy-unfriendly features". The EFF met with AOL to discuss its concerns, but says that the company has only in part responded positively.

The Anonymous hacktivist collective dropped its Operation Hiroshima bomb on New Year's Day, and despite its success in pulling off a large-scale, wide-reaching document dump, the event has received very little coverage by the mainstream media.

Known best by its Twitter hashtag #OpHiroshima, the dump was an organized attempt to "dox," or release as much incriminating and integral information as possible on one day about institutions, officials, corporations and other entities with which various sectors of the diverse Anon collective have grievances.