In purported efforts to help the public “understand the privacy risks of carrying a mobile phone,” the ACLU and the EFF are suing the Justice Dept. for “documents, memos, and guides” about procedures used to track individuals through cell phones.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation aren’t looking for money — except to cover their own costs — in their most recent lawsuit against the US Department of Justice. Instead, the two civil liberty advocacy groups want information about whether and how the government might be using the location capabilities in cell phones to find out where people are.
Posted in Cell Phones, Privacy, eLaw |
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Last month Ask.com added a direct link to its privacy policy via a “Privacy” linkconveniently placed on its homepage.
It was observed that even Google didn’t have the ‘Privacy Link’ and that this move might compel the search giant to do the same to their homepage too.
Well, now according to Official Google Blog, Google has finally introduced the ‘Privacy’ link on their home page.
According to Marissa Mayer at the Google Blog , “Larry and Sergey told me we could only add this to the homepage if we took a word away - keeping the “weight” of the homepage unchanged at 28. Given that the new Privacy link fit best with legal disclaimers on the page, I looked to the copyright line. There, we dropped the word “Google” (realizing it was implied, obviously) and added the new privacy link alongside it.”
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All the engineering acumen in the world, or at least in the Googleplex, can’t prevent an old-fashioned burglary of unencrypted employee data held by an outside firm.
A failing company also failed to adequately keep its assets protected from theft. Colt Express Outsourcing Services lost some data to a Memorial Day burglary, and it’s now come to light that the dominant search engine formerly used that company’s services.
Unfortunately for Google, and for CNET employees also affected by the theft, a report at CNET noted employees from both firms were in the same boat. “No credit card numbers were in the stolen data; just names, addresses, SSNs–all the information needed for a thief to open a credit card account under another’s name,” the report said.
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Sweden has adopted contentious legislation that will give officials sweeping powers to eavesdrop on all email and telephone traffic that crosses the nation’s borders.
After heated debate and last-minute changes, MPs approved the bill that has outraged some many politicians and prompted protesters to hand out copies of George Orwell’s novel 1984 outside the Stockholm parliament.
The bill was passed on a 143-138 vote on Wednesday and will become law in January.
Google and the Swedish telecoms company TeliaSonera have called it the most far-reaching eavesdropping plan in Europe, comparable to a US government surveillance programme.
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WASHINGTON — The government does not have adequate privacy protections for the personal information it collects, shares and stores as part of the effort to fight terrorism, according to a new report by a U.S. watchdog agency.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that new laws are needed to safeguard people’s personal information. Decades-old laws no longer cover the “increasingly sophisticated ways” that the government collects information, such as through biometric scans of fingerprints, the report said.
“In today’s highly interconnected environment, information can be gathered from many different sources, analyzed and redistributed in very dynamic, unstructured ways,” the GAO’s Linda Koontz says in testimony prepared for a hearing today by the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
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The Swedish parliament has delayed a vote on a bill that would allow local authorities to monitor e-mail and fax messages and telephone calls.
The bill, due to be voted Wednesday morning, now goes back to the Committee on Defense to be slightly reworked in order to appease critics within the majority coalition. The changes are meant to beef up protection of personal privacy.
Four members of the majority coalition would have to vote against the bill for it to fail, which seemed likely during a long debate in the parliament on Tuesday.
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Sweden’s “Big Brother” law, allowing the government to snoop on all outgoing cross-border emails, could be blocked tomorrow by a handful of rebel parliamentarians ready to defy their party whips.
If the dissenters derail the law - dubbed Lex Orwell by the Swedes - it will be a major blow to the centre-right government, which claims that it needs the restrictions, the tightest in Europe, to guard itself against terrorist plotting. But critics say it makes a nonsense of Sweden’s long modern tradition of respecting privacy and citizens rights and is part of a more disturbing trend across Europe to scratch away at civil liberties.
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Australia has the highest incidence of cyber crime in the world, according to a global survey of nine countries by software security vendor, AVG.
The study, which canvassed 1000 users each in Australia, the US, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Brazil, and the Czech Republic, found that more than 39 per cent of Australians had been the victim of cyber crime, compared to 32 per cent in Italy, 28 per cent of Americans, and just 14 per cent in Sweden and Spain.
The most common forms of cyber theft experienced by Australians were:
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A security feature which gave punters total privacy has been dumped from the final version of Firefox 3.
Private Browsing would have disabled all caching, cookie downloads, history records, and form data during the session.
If it worked it would have meant you could surf the Web and leave nothing sticky on your computer.
Mozzarella Fountain’s big cheese in security Johnathan Nightingale, said that Private Browsing was, in principle, pretty cool. It would mean that what you were about to do would not be logged anywhere.
Posted in Privacy, Software |
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Verizon has announced that they will be stopping access to tens of thousands of Usenet discussion areas including the very popular alt.* groups that have been around since the late 1980s.
Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said only a select few newsgroups/discussion groups would be offered to customers going into the future. It appears the decision is in response to political “strong-arming” from New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo who wants strong restrictions on all newsgroups.
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