Privacy

Israeli hackers attacked computers belonging to Anonymous and allied hacker groups, taking pictures with exploited webcams and posting the photos online, during the organization’s OpIsrael hacking attack last week

A hacker called Buddhax, a member of the Israeli Elite Force hacking group, posted the information on the IEF’s Facebook page Wednesday, two days after anti-Israel hackers attempted to repeat last year’s mass attacks on Israeli sites.

A restaurant with three Michelin stars is now trying to up its customer service game by Googling its customers before they arrive. According to a report from Grub Street, an Eleven Madison Park maitre d' performs Internet recon on every guest in the interest of customizing their experiences.

With Singapore's new Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) coming into force this July, local companies could be slapped with fines of up to a million dollars for breaches of privacy. So it is not surprising CIOs in Singapore are turning their attention to an obvious area of vulnerability: personal data stored in the "cloud", said Stella Tang, Director of Robert Half Singapore.

Google recently trumpeted that it now encrypts Gmail messages while shuffling them among its data centers, an extra security layer aimed at thwarting government and criminal snoops, but didn't say if it applies this protection to its other applications.

Asked for clarification, the company declined to comment. "We don't have more details to share beyond the Gmail news, but we're always working in strengthening and encrypting across more services and links," a spokeswoman said via email.

The Obama Administration has secured a 90-day extension of the National Security Agency's (NSA's) controversial authority to collect phone metadata records on U.S. customers under Section 215 of the U.S.A Patriot Act.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which oversees the data collection program, granted a reauthorization request filed by the U.S. Justice Department last week.

Hewlett Packard has unveiled a new mobile app that retailers can use to stalk people as they shop in order to send them targeted adverts and promotions.

The iOS app, dubbed SmartShopper and unveiled at the Interop conference in Las Vegas today, has the ability to send location-based smartphone offers to customer’s iPhones in real time.

In January 2014, documents provided by Edward Snowden showed that a Canadian spy agency used a unique identifier to follow thousands of Canadians as they moved about the country. The tracking all originated from an unnamed airport.

It got us thinking: how hard would it be to replicate this little experiment, writ small? Could I use one of my own online identifiers as a way to track my own movements through time and space? The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is: yes. It’s easy to do, and it’s revealing about what I do, when I do it, and where I go.

For years now, Internet users have gotten used to the risk of having files and content they share through various online services be subject to takedown requests based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and/or content-matching algorithms. But users have also gotten used to using services like Dropbox as their own private, cloud-based file storage and sharing systems, facilitating direct person-to-person file transfer without having to worry about such issues.

Freedom of speech is not free and it is not a right in every country. The blocking of Twitter and YouTube in Turkey is well-documented, but the question of right and wrong is more up in the air. After all, not all countries have to follow the lead of the USA, although it is hard to argue with giving citizens the right to express themselves. However, that is an argument and a fight of which the Turkish people must take ownership.

President Barack Obama's plan to stop the National Security Agency's bulk collection and storage of telephone records is a good first step that needs to go much further to protect Americans' privacy rights, advocates say.

Obama unveiled his plans Thursday, saying in a statement, "I have decided that the best path forward is that the government should not collect or hold this data in bulk."