Privacy

Google appears to have supplanted Facebook -- which had supplanted Apple -- as the likely candidate to acquire Israeli start-up Waze. Google is reportedly prepared to pony up $1.3 billion for the company. Last month, reports surfaced that Facebook was working on a $1 billion deal for Waze. And that ...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Cybersecurity Tops the Agenda in U.S.-China Weekend Talks

Among the issues on the agenda for the talks over the weekend between China's President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Obama were cybersecurity and attacks on U.S. targets by hackers based in China. Even if China had the will to act against hackers within its territory, doing so wouldn't be easy. "Th...

Technology firms in the United States might be impacted adversely by the National Security Agency's controversial PRISM program. Classified documents about the program leaked to The Washington Post and The Guardian indicate that major U.S. high-tech companies provide it data. This data is the major ...

President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet this weekend to talk cybersecurity, among other things, but there are plenty of people on either side talking already. A day after China's claim that it has "mountains of data" proving U.S.-based hackers have been attacking the Middle Kingdo...

The National Security Agency reportedly has been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon users in the United States under a secret court order. Specifically, Verizon has been required to provide an ongoing account of all telephone calls on its systems, including those inside the U.S. and...

Google will not add facial recognition capabilities to Google Glass until it can add appropriate privacy protections to the new technology, the company said in a post on Google+ late Friday. "As Google has said for several years, we won't add facial recognition features to our products without havin...

Eight members of Congress have sent a letter to Google asking about the privacy implications of Google Glass. The letter was sent from Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) and seven other lawmakers from the bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus. It asks Google whether users will be able to opt in to various ...

The New Yorker has launched Strongbox, an anonymous system for providing the publication with information, based on the open source DeadDrop program developed by the late Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen. Strongbox can be thought of as an extension of the mailing address printed in small type on the m...

A federal court in Germany has told Google that it must remove offensive or defamatory suggestions from its autocomplete function when it receives a complaint. The case that prompted the ruling started with a German businessman who, upon culling through Google.de, found that he was associated with s...

The Obama administration appears to be sending a message to privacy advocates that it's taking their issue seriously by creating a new position devoted to it -- and choosing a high-profile tech lawyer to occupy it. The White House reportedly is tagging Nicole Wong, Twitter's legal director for produ...

There's plenty to lust after in Google Glass -- if you're a tech aficionado, that is. A beta version of Google's widely hyped, Web-connected eyewear has been out for a few weeks, and rave reviews have been the rule rather than the exception. Developers are building Google Glass apps to tempt and tit...

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which faces a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday, may end up vetoed by President Obama. CISPA encourages private companies to share security information among themselves and with the government. The House Rules Committee on Tuesda...

Google on Tuesday released the tech specifications for Google Glass, which will sport 720p resolution for the eyeware's video camera and 16 GB of onboard flash storage. The forthcoming availability of the Web-connected glasses, however, is also raising questions about health, safety and privacy. The...

The ACLU has raised a disturbing possibility after reading 247 pages of records it obtained from the Internal Revenue Service via a Freedom of Information Act request: The agency may be reading taxpayers' emails without a warrant. The IRS was told not to do this after a 2010 appellate court ruling i...

I've been meeting with a number of companies that build video-editing software, and I've been becoming increasingly concerned that we aren't at all ready for a world in which nearly every car and every head has a streaming camera attached to it. Regardless of whether we are prepared or not, I think ...

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