Tag: PERSONALINFORMATION

Looking for another reason to feel paranoid about your privacy? German politician Malte Spitz may have found one. Spitz recently sued his mobile provider, Deutsche Telekom, in order to obtain data that the company had collected on his own whereabouts. Deutsche Telekom complied, and handed over all the geographic information it had gathered over a six-month period. As it turns out, the provider ...

In a recent piece for the Huffington Post, filmmaker Bob Bowdon accused Google of harvesting social security numbers and other personal information from children "under the guise of an art contest." The annual contest, called 'Doodle-4-Google,' was launched as a campaign to celebrate "the creativity of young people," and asked students to send in illustrations adhering to a simple theme: ...

Share Have you ever wondered how much of your personal information is out there on the Internet for all the world to read? Head over to a site called Spokeo, and find out for yourself. The site, which launched in 2007, markets itself as an online white pages, but warns that it's definitely "not your grandma's phonebook." And that much, at least, is true. Spokeo stores information on your age, ...

You may not know a lot about RapLeaf, but RapLeaf probably knows a lot about you. That's because RapLeaf is an online tracking company, and, like most other Internet profilers, it collects data on what individual consumers do online. According to a recent investigation from the Wall Street Journal, though, RapLeaf also collects and distributes the kind of highly personal information that other ...

Everyone knows that Facebook, like many other sites, uses our personal information to help companies target their online advertisements to various demographic groups. Unlike other sites, though, Facebook knows a lot about us -- including, in some cases, our sexuality. And, according to a recent study, it's not afraid to share that information with third-party companies. To test Facebook's ...

In an effort to exert greater control over militant groups in Afghanistan, several governmental ministries, in conjunction with NATO forces, are now hoping to issue biometric ID cards to over 1.65 million Afghan citizens by May. Local and foreign forces have already begun compiling biometric files on policemen, criminals, insurgents and normal citizens, and are currently collecting information ...

If you've ever wondered exactly how much information a single website can gather from your computer, a site called TRASIR can tell you everything you need to know in black-and-white starkness. Once you open the page, the site will automatically display your IP address (which reveals your geographic location), the name of your browser, your computer's language and even your screen resolution. ...

The same, privacy-conscious German government that threatened Google with legal action over its "invasive" Street View feature is now facing its very own security crisis, after a group of hackers recently demonstrated how to easily extract private information from government-issued ID cards. The hackers, who are part of the so-called 'Chaos Computer Club,' recently appeared on the German TV show ...

What's the next frontier of investigative crime fighting? If you ask Michael Nesbitt, it may be sitting right in your living room. Nesbitt, a security consultant at Trustwave, is scheduled to give a presentation at the upcoming DEFCON security conference, where he'll explain how any unassuming video game system can, when examined closely, help investigators solve crimes. As Security Watch reports, ...

As we all know, deleting your Facebook account can involve some pretty intensive leg work. Disgruntled users often find themselves trapped in the social network's labyrinth of procedures, and, in the event that they actually find a way out, must then wait a full 14 days before their accounts completely disappear from this Earth. Facebook euthanasia is certainly an arduous ordeal, but that may ...

If you're using Apple's Safari browser, your personal information may be at risk. According to security researcher Jeremiah Grossman, Safari users could be unknowingly revealing personal data to third party sites, thanks to a flaw in the browser's security framework. As the New York Times reports, the bug exploits Safari's auto-fill function, and can allow sites to access a user's name, address, ...

Much of the recent news surrounding online privacy rights has focused on Facebook, which has come under fire for its controversial approach to automatically spreading user information across the Web. According to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal, though, Facebook's not the only social network surreptitiously sharing information with third-party sites and corporations. As the Journal ...

If you worry about the Federal Aviation Administration's aging computer systems and their inability to effectively deal with the constant flood of air traffic, perhaps you should spare a thought for the internal systems that keep track of the Administration's thousands of employees. Apparently, they're in need of some attention, too, with the FAA announcing that the names and social security ...

It was about 18 months ago that Monster.com's databases were hacked, compromising the personal information of roughly 1.2 million registrants (most of whom had signed up looking for a job, not for a new way to have their phone numbers stolen0. The job-seeker's site, of course, pledged to fix the hole right away, but, sadly, didn't do a particularly good job of it, as we're hearing that the ...