Privacy

Your source for the latest privacy news and analysis.

Facebook, states agree to boost efforts to protect children
May. 10, 2008
Social networking site Facebook Thursday announced that it is boosting its privacy protections as part of an ongoing effort to work with 49 state attorneys general to protect children online.

Google takes Street View snaps in Paris; lawsuits may follow
May. 09, 2008
Google has begun scanning the streets of Paris, gathering data for its Street View service, which adds street-level photography to the satellite views offered by Google Maps. The search company will gather a wealth of ...

Facebook partners with AGs for kids' safety
May. 08, 2008
Facebook is following in the footsteps of its rival MySpace by reaching an online safety agreement with the attorneys general of 49 U.S. states and Washington, D.C.

Internet Archive challenges FBI's secret records demand
May. 07, 2008
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has withdrawn a secret demand that the Internet Archive, an online library, provide the agency with a user's personal information after the Web site challenged the records ...

Security ahead of risk at the border
May. 05, 2008
News continues to worsen for business travelers carrying sensitive information. In a troubling ruling by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) can continue its practice of ...

Privacy advocates: Court posting personal data in documents
May. 02, 2008
Privacy advocates claim that Social Security numbers, medical histories, tax records, bank account data and other sensitive types of personal data are freely available online via the Web site of the Superior Court in ...

U.K. agency disciplines staff over unauthorized data access
May. 01, 2008
Over 600 staff at HM Revenue and Customs have been disciplined or fired in a three year period after they accessed sensitive data without authorization.

Anonymizer acquired by risk-mitigation firm
May. 01, 2008
Herndon, Va.,-based risk-mitigation firm Abraxas Corp. announced it has acquired, for an undisclosed price, San Diego-based Anonymizer, which makes products that shield a user's identity online.

A look at identity-theft protection services
Apr. 30, 2008
You can't open a newspaper or a browser without reading about some data spill that has put consumers' personal information at risk. Over the past three years, more than 220 million private records have been lost or ...

Medical data breaches put patients at risk
Apr. 29, 2008
Doctors can't cure the common cold and health care IT managers apparently can't stop the common data breach.

MySpace user ad targeting will be optional
Apr. 29, 2008
MySpace will give users the option of whether they want to participate in a targeted advertising system that mines their profile's information, a senior company official said on Tuesday.

Hackers focus efforts on Firefox, Safari
Apr. 28, 2008
Many people are switching from Internet Explorer to alternative browsers such as Firefox and Safari. Though that might make them feel more secure, the shift has also opened new doors for bad guys.

UConn bookstore sells drive holding personal data
Apr. 27, 2008
University of Connecticut police are investigating how a hard drive containing personal documents and photos from about 10 students, faculty and non-university individuals was accidentally sold last week by the school's ...

Online privacy: railing against the accepted
Apr. 22, 2008
I frequently use this column to rail against threats to the privacy of Internet users, both from government and the private sector. I just found a survey published late last year by the Pew Internet & American Life ...

Privacy advocates: Consumer education isn't enough
Apr. 17, 2008
The efforts of e-commerce sites and online advertisers to educate U.S. consumers about privacy and targeted advertising aren't enough because many consumers won't take the time to understand the issues, privacy ...

Telling Google and others to do less evil
Apr. 15, 2008
Google, Yahoo and other search engine companies are in the data gathering business. The fact that they offer you and me the service of locating things on the Internet is a means to an end, and that end is data about ...

Don't forget privacy in a company social network
Apr. 12, 2008
Large corporations seem to be tripping over themselves in their rush to tap into the social networking phenomenon by deploying their own versions of online user communities. But by trying to shoehorn this generation's ...

Wireless Alert
May. 10, 2008
Free e-mail newsletter on wireless in the enterprise news and resources from Network World.

The FBI is running honeypot Web links that could give you all sorts of problems - Network ...
Apr. 24, 2008
In what appears to be an overzealous attempt to catch pedophiles the FBI has created “honeypot” links, but the consequences could be far reaching.

France 'suspends' creation of big-brother database
Apr. 24, 2008
The French government will

Bank of Ireland reports customer data theft
Apr. 23, 2008
Bank of Ireland has had four company laptops stolen, containing around 10,000 customer details.

Ruling: No suspicion needed to search laptops at U.S. borders
Apr. 23, 2008
In a ruling that's likely to come as a disappointment for privacy-rights advocates, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit this week held that Customs officers need no reasonable suspicion to search through the ...

Report: Google begins taking Street View pics in Milan, Rome
Apr. 23, 2008
Google has begun photographing streets in European cities in preparation for the launch of its Street View feature on Google Earth this side of the Atlantic.

Trampoline unveils “corporate Facebook” software
Apr. 22, 2008
With social networking sites becoming more and more popular for business users, British company Trampoline Systems has released a new program that it hopes will become the Facebook for the enterprise.

INFOSEC - Schneier: Lots of security software is 'snake oil'
Apr. 22, 2008
Bruce Schneier is one of the foremost experts on cryptography and is a well-known security author and commentator. He is the founder of the managed security services company Counterpane, which was acquired in October ...