Privacy

The Social Security numbers of roughly 18,000 California physicians and health-care providers were inadvertently made public after a slip-up at health insurance provider Blue Shield of California, the organization said Monday.

The numbers were included in monthly filings on medical providers that Blue Shield is required to make to the state's Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC). The provider rosters for February, March and April 2013 included the data and were available under the state's public records law.

We already knew that the dragnet style of data collection employed by the NSA resulted in a huge level of collateral damage. As revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden the agency had been intercepting huge amounts of web traffic -- often with the assistance of web firms -- on an almost unbelievable scale.

There is concern over the pond that former top spook General Keith Alexander might be making a fortune selling state secrets to private companies.

If the allegations are true, then it throws into question why it is appropriate for an American to sell state secrets to private enterprise, but lock up those who reveal them as a whistleblower.

Alexander was the number one enemy of Edward Snowden who blew the whistle on his organisations spying efforts. After he quit as the head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, Alexander has launched the consulting firm IronNet Cybersecurity.

EFF recently kicked off its second Tor Challenge, an initiative to strengthen the Tor network for online anonymity and improve one of the best free privacy tools in existence. The campaign—which launched with partners at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Tor Project, and the Free Software Foundation—is already off to a great start. In just the first few days, it's seen over 600 new or expanded Tor nodes—more than during the entire first Tor Challenge.

When Apple releases iOS 8 in the fall, corporate employees who use their iPhones and iPads for work will have better privacy protection when walking in places with Wi-Fi networks.

The next major version of Apple's mobile operating system will hide the device's unique identifier called a media access control (MAC) address, which is sometimes used to track people in retail stores and other locations.

Facebook could be used against you. Privacy is something that should concern everyone, yet social networking blurs the line between right and wrong.

No matter how much personal information you put online, more can be gleaned from you. Just think of advertising. Very little is coincidence. However, we can’t go into conspiracy theory territory. The world probably isn’t out to get you.

Nonetheless, Facebook can be utilised in some very interesting ways.

The U.S. Congress would endanger the nation's security by passing even watered-down legislation to limit the National Security Agency's bulk collection of domestic phone records, several U.S. senators said Thursday.

Several members of the Senate Intelligence Committee voiced opposition to the USA Freedom Act, a bill aimed at reining in NSA bulk collection of telephone and other records, even though many civil liberties groups and technology companies have questioned whether the bill would work as its sponsors originally envisioned.

The GPRS Roaming Exchange (GRX) network, which carries roaming traffic among hundreds of mobile operators worldwide, contains Internet-reachable hosts that run vulnerable and unnecessary services, recent security scans reveal.

The scans were performed over a period of several months by Stephen Kho and Rob Kuiters, a penetration tester and an incident response handler from KPN, the largest telecommunications provider in the Netherlands.

The head of Facebook's US-based Security Infrastructure team has defended a recent app update that uses a smartphone's microphone for Shazam-like audio recognition.

The feature was announced at the end of May, and was expected to roll out within weeks. Allowing Android and iOS users to "identify TV and music instantly," the app is capable of recording ambient sounds in the user's environment to recognise what show is on the TV or what song is playing.

A tech industry group that has Facebook and Google as participants has rejected the latest draft of a U.S. legislation that aims to put curbs on surveillance by the National Security Agency.

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday said it supported swift passage of the USA Freedom Act by the U.S. House of Representatives, and urged the Senate to follow suit.