Privacy

Questions posed by U.S. Supreme Court Justices to attorneys making oral arguments in United States v. Jones suggest the case could have significant implications for search-and-seizure law and police practices. The justices grilled both the U.S. attorney general and the defense attorney for Antoine...

RIM has agreed to let Indian officials conduct lawful surveillance of customers in that country using its BlackBerry services, according to a recent report. The decision is yet another step in RIM's long, drawn-out battle with New Delhi over the latter's demands to monitor users of BlackBerry servic...

The creators of a new social network are challenging users to ditch Facebook and other networks to "unthink" and de-clutter with their new, completely user-controlled and private network. Unthink.com, launched Tuesday in beta, hopes to capitalize on growing discontent among social network users for ...

Government authorities in the United States showed an increased interest in Google account holders in the first half of 2011, according to a report released Tuesday by the search giant. The report showed that 5,950 requests for information were made by U.S. government authorities during the first si...

The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner of Ireland will launch a "comprehensive audit" of Facebook Ireland before the end of the month, DPC spokesperson Ciara O'Sullivan told TechNewsWorld on Friday. The audit will assess Facebook's compliance with the requirements of the Irish Data Protectio...

The United States Department of Justice reportedly used a secret court order to get information from the email accounts of WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum. The DoJ reportedly put the squeeze on Google and Sonic.net, a small Internet service provider, to turn over the email addresses of the peopl...

Adolescents growing up in a digital, highly mobile world are increasingly coming to grips with questions of ethics and behavior, with mixed results. On the one hand, cyberpranking and cyberharrassment have increased. On the other, more kids are willing to intervene when they see cyberharrassment. Fo...

Facebook's Timeline feature has been a focus of controversy since it was announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company's f8 developers' conference last month in San Francisco. Privacy advocates immediately raised concerns. A coalition of 10 privacy and consumer groups has written to the Federal Tr...

A recently revealed U.S. Department of Justice document has provided details about what kind of usage information is retained by the nation's largest mobile phone providers, as well as how long they retain it. In some cases, information is stored for many years. The document, a single-paged memo, wa...

The Kindle Fire made its big debut this week as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos introduced the tablet along with other new members of the Kindle family on Wednesday. The Fire's been touted as a challenger to the Apple iPad, but the real threat to Apple's iconic tablet may come from the Silk browser that will ...

Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, co-chairmen of the Congressional Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, have sent a letter to Joe Leibowitz, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, addressing Facebook's use of cookies to gather information from members who surf the 905,000 sites that d...

The problem with hitching your wagon to a shooting star, as online music service Spotify is beginning to discover, is that sometimes you can get burned. Spotify is one of several online music services that have teamed up with Facebook recently and was singled out by the social networking giant at it...

Facebook's most recent API allows applications to post status updates to a user's wall without their intervention. This is part of Facebook Instant and is known as frictionless sharing. This means users no longer have to proactively decide to share an item, and there's a risk that something could be...

New developments announced by Facebook at its F8 Developer Conference in San Francisco on Thursday might give the social networking king new advantages over Google as the two battle for dominance. They may also create a world of hurt for Apple. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Timeline, which ...

Providers of apps for mobile devices are just as responsible as other electronic commerce vendors in terms of protecting the privacy of customers. In a recent enforcement action, the Federal Trade Commission signaled that mobile apps fall within the agency's jurisdiction, and that it will not hesita...

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