Archive for the 'privacy' Category
Indicted Cop Tests Facebook’s Privacy Rights
February 18th, 2010Courthouse News – “A judge is weighing whether Facebook’s right to privacy trumps a man’s rights to discovery for his defense in a criminal trial. At issue is a motion from the attorney for former St. Louis City police Officer Bryan Pour, who authorities say used his department-issued pistol to shoot Jeffrey Bladdick in a [...]
Big Brother Is Here: Families Say Schools Snoop in Their Homes With District-Issued Laptops & Webcams
February 18th, 2010Courthouse News – “A federal class action claims a suburban school district has been spying on students and families through the “indiscriminant use of and ability to remotely activate the webcams incorporated into each laptop issued to students,” without the knowledge or consent of students or parents.”
Read the complaint
Police push for warrantless searches of cell phones
February 18th, 2010CNET – “When Christian Taylor stopped by the Sprint store in Daly City, Calif., last November, he was planning to buy around 30 BlackBerry handhelds. But a Sprint employee on the lookout for fraud grew suspicious about the address and other details relating to Taylor’s company, “Hype Univercity,” and called the police. Taylor was arrested [...]
Privacy commissioner probing Google Buzz
February 16th, 2010CBC – “Concerns around Google’s recently unveiled Buzz feature are deepening with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada looking into the social-networking tool. Valerie Lawton, a spokesperson for the office, said on Tuesday that Buzz is being investigated to see whether it violates Canadian privacy laws.”
See also, this article from AP
Tweeting a book by its cover
February 9th, 2010Cnet – “a new project from non-profit biannual magazine Slice, based in Brooklyn, tries to show us that something is lost on a Kindle commute. Meet CoverSpy, a Twitter feed run by Slice, which peeks at the books that people are reading on the New York City subway (as well as on park benches and [...]
Controversial App Provides Background Checks On the Go
January 21st, 2010PC World – “Online privacy is a constant and growing concern as the evolving landscape of Web sites and services erode the traditional expectations of privacy. A new app from BeenVerified is adding even more controversy to the privacy dilemma by enabling users to conduct background checks on anyone in a matter of seconds from [...]
Security Breach…
December 22nd, 2009…at NC Community College libraries
Facebook Privacy in Transition – But Where is it Heading?
December 10th, 2009Daily Kos – “The next time you log onto Facebook, you’ll be thinking about privacy: how private are your photos, friends, status updates, and personal details, and how public do you actually want them to be?”
ACLU Report Calls For Stronger U.S. Privacy Oversight Institutions
November 12th, 2009ACLU – “The American Civil Liberties Union today released a new report recommending steps Congress should take to create the vigorous privacy oversight institutions that are desperately needed in the United States to counterbalance the rush of new technologies and expanding government powers, and called for the Obama administration to move quickly to fill the [...]
FTC to Hold Privacy Roundtables
September 17th, 2009WSJ – “The Federal Trade Commission is planning three public discussions, starting in December, devoted to technology and consumer privacy. According to the FTC, the roundtables will address topics such as social networking, cloud computing, online advertising and mobile marketing, the goal being “to determine how best to protect consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses [...]
Congress weighs landmark change in Web ad privacy
September 7th, 2009AP – “The Web sites we visit, the online links we click, the search queries we conduct, the products we put in virtual shopping carts, the personal details we reveal on social networking pages – all of this can give companies insight into what Internet ads we might be interested in seeing. But privacy watchdogs [...]
Obama Web-Tracking Proposal Raises Privacy Concerns
August 11th, 2009Washington Post – “The Obama administration is proposing to scale back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with “cookies” and other technologies, raising alarms among privacy groups. A two-week public comment period ended Monday on a proposal by the White House Office of Management and Budget to end a [...]
Google Is Top Tracker of Surfers in Study
June 2nd, 2009Bits Blog – “When asked about online privacy, most people say they want more information about how they are being tracked and more control over how their personal information is used. Those consumer expectations are rarely in line with the data collection practices of Internet companies, which often collect information about their users not only [...]
Coalition urges better laws for e-mail and cell phone privacy
November 22nd, 2008BetaNews – “Information stored on remote computers should be given the same legal protections as data stored on a user’s desktop PC, according to report produced by more than 20 activist and human rights groups.”
Online Age Verification for Children Brings Privacy Worries
November 15th, 2008NYTimes.com – “WHEN it comes to protecting children on the Internet and keeping them safe from predators, law enforcement officials have vocally advocated one approach in particular. They want popular sites, like the social network MySpace, to confirm the identities and ages of minors and then allow the young Web surfers to talk only with [...]
ISPs: We Swear, We Won’t Watch Your Every Move
September 28th, 2008Channel Web – “Responding to increasing Internet privacy concerns, AT&T (NYSE:T), Verizon (NYSE:VZ) and Time Warner (NYSE:TWX), the country’s largest ISPs, told a Senate committee during a hearing Thursday that they don’t engage in online consumer tracking and want to self-regulate such practices in the future.”
Read the prepared statements here.
Google Being Sued Over Blogger’s Identity
August 14th, 2008Inquisitr – “An Indian construction company is trying to force Google to divulge the name of a blogger who wrote negative things about its business.”
Web Firms Tell Congress They Track Behavior Without Consent
August 11th, 2008washingtonpost.com: – “Several Internet and broadband companies have acknowledged using targeted-advertising technology without explicitly informing customers, according to letters released yesterday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.”
Web Privacy on the Radar in Congress -
August 10th, 2008NYT – “I’m pretty aware of the fact that anything you do on the Internet pretty much should just be considered public,†Mr. Martinez said. While he knows that companies are collecting his data and often tracking his online habits so they can show him more relevant ads, he said, he would like to see [...]
Reporting live from a cellphone near you…
March 22nd, 2008Los Angeles Times – “The startup allows video from cellphones to be streamed live on the Web. In the future, will any bad behavior may go unnoticed?”
5,000 MTV Networks’ employees potential affected by breach
March 7th, 2008CNET – “Someone apparently hacked into a computer belong to an employee of MTV Networks and possibly gained access to names, birth dates, social security numbers and compensation data of 5,000 employees.”
Bankrupt lenders throwing away your privacy
March 7th, 2008MSNBC – “Some mortgage companies tossing customers’ personal data in the trash”
Internet forum headed for Boston
February 23rd, 2008AP – “Internet users should be free to surf where they want and download what they please. But shouldn’t the owners of the networks that make the Internet possible also have rights?”
Court Rejects ACLU Challenge to Wiretaps
February 19th, 2008AP – “The Supreme Court dealt a setback Tuesday to civil rights and privacy advocates who oppose the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. The justices, without comment, turned down an appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union to let it pursue a lawsuit against the program that began shortly after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.”
Oy! [...]
The Anonymity Experiment
February 10th, 2008Catharine Price – “In 2006, David Holtzman decided to do an experiment. Holtzman, a security consultant and former intelligence analyst, was working on a book about privacy, and he wanted to see how much he could find out about himself from sources available to any tenacious stalker.” (via)
More on Shared Items
December 25th, 2007Felipe Hoffa thinks that sharing items aspect of Google Reader invades his privacy.
I tend to disagree. When I share content, I know that it’s going to any who wants to read it. That’s what “Shared Items” means. Don’t want to read it, then don’t read it.
More on Big Brother
December 22nd, 2007From the Washington Post – “The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world’s largest computer database of peoples’ physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.”
More on Amazon.com
December 9th, 2007Mike Adams – “Is the U.S. government trying to profile the psychology of its citizens by secretly data mining their book purchasing habits?”
Learning From Amazon.com
November 28th, 2007Nice!! A Q&A with an Amazon lawyer on how they fought for privacy and user records.
Amazon Does Not Have to Reveal Names of Used Book Buyers
November 27th, 2007Maybe when the feds go after library patron data, they will remember this.
