Privacy

Law enforcement agencies may be able to freely track cellphone users without first getting a probable-cause warrant thanks to a ruling handed down by the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Jose on Tuesday. The 2-1 ruling in the case of convicted drug trafficker and money launderer M...

German data protection regulators reopened an investigation into Facebook's facial recognition technology Wednesday, claiming the social network failed to comply with official requests to alter its policies to match European regulations. The Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of In...

The makers of a video surveillance program developed by former United States Central Intelligence Agency staffers attempted to sell their system to several big-name tech firms, according to leaked memos. One of several internal emails written by executives at intelligence firm Stratfor has been pub...

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday overturned a ruling by a lower court judge who had awarded $40,800 in damages and $2.5 million in attorney fees to the now-defunct Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. This is the latest chapter in what has been a five-year challenge to the Bush administra...

The Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that it was considering new rules to protect children's privacy online. Regulators called for tougher privacy protections to make it harder for advertisers and social networks to collect information about children without permission from the parents.

Google has not deleted the sensitive data it collected from private wireless networks in 2010, according to a recent report. Earlier, the company had promised regulators it would dispose of the information. The search engine giant originally collected the data while it was mapping areas for its Stre...

Fears have surfaced that Skype may be eavesdropping on communications over its service. The concern is that supernodes Microsoft is introducing to Skype could make it easier to monitor calls, because they route the voice data in addition to initiating communications between parties. "As was true bef...

A senate committee met on Wednesday to discuss the promise and pitfalls of facial recognition technology. Led by its chair, U.S. Sen. Al Franken, the committee questioned privacy advocates as well as representatives of the FBI, the FTC and Facebook, about how the technology is being used and what pr...

Twitter indicated Thursday that it will appeal a decision by New York County Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. that the microblogging site must hand over a user's posts. The case stems from an investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney regarding the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011...

I've never taken that much notice of my privacy, or lack of, as I've been surfing the Web. However, after recent, obviously targeted advertising directed at me, where the ads blatantly reflected some product research I had just performed, I decided to investigate. Innocuous focused advertising, whic...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

DNSChanger: Just a Dress Rehearsal

Despite dire warnings, the Internet didn't break last week when the FBI pulled the plug on the server controlling the DNSChanger botnet. An estimated 300,000 computers are still infected by the malware that ties them to the botnet, which was designed for large-scale click fraud. Those machines' conn...

The passwords and usernames of more than 400,000 contributors to the Yahoo Voices website have been stolen and posted on the Internet. The hack was carried out by an organization calling itself "D33Ds Company," which posted the data on the Web. The D33Ds Web page containing the data was down when ch...

A congressional inquiry conducted at the behest of Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., found that law enforcement agencies made 1.3 million requests to cellphone carriers in 2011. They sought such information as individuals' text messages, their locations, and even lists of phone numbers they called when i...

Facebook's email drama continues to unfold a week after it was revealed that the social network unilaterally switched its users' publicly posted email listings to their "@facebook.com" addresses. More recently, users have begun complaining that Facebook's mobile app seems to be swapping out informat...

When Microsoft announced recently that Internet Explorer 10 will have its Do Not Track feature turned on by default, it seemed those concerned about online privacy would hail the move as a step in the right direction. Consumer advocates and other groups had been agitating for such a feature for some...

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