Tag: PRIVACYISSUES

The London law firm ACS:Law has made a concerted effort to fight online piracy and punish illegal file-sharers. Andrew Crossley, the U.K. firm's manager, learned an agonizing lesson in humility this week, though, after agitating the Web's most infamous and dangerous group of pirate guerrillas. After his company's website endured an attack by 4chan renegades, a dismissive Crossley reportedly ...

During his tenure as an employee at Google, 27-year-old David Barksdale belonged to an elite group of Site Reliability Engineers, or SREs, giving him total access to some of the company's most closely guarded personal data -- including private Gmail accounts. Instead of using this access to respond to technical difficulties, however, Barksdale reportedly spent a lot of his time stalking ...

As part of a cracked-out crackdown on mobile privacy, China now requires all of its citizens to register their personal information before buying cell phones. As Reuters reports, the country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will now require anyone buying a cell phone to show ID cards, with foreign purchasers having to show their passports. According to the China Daily newspaper, ...

Like something out of a futuristic Roberto Bolaño novel, city officials in Leon, Mexico are currently putting together a citywide database of its citizens' irises. They plan on using the system to keep track of known criminal offenders -- and, presumably, every other person in the city. Biometrics R&D firm Global Rainmakers has already begun shipping iris scanners to the city of more ...

In response to protests from privacy advocates in Europe's most populous country, Google is now allowing Germans to completely erase their homes from the company's Street View feature -- but only for a limited time. In an unprecedented move, Google has decided to give Germans until September 15th to fully "opt-out" of Street View. Should a German user choose to nix the service, which is ...

A couple of years ago, Google began blurring any pedestrian faces or vehicle license plates captured by any of its Street View cameras in response to outcries from privacy advocates around the globe. UC San Diego grad student Arturo Flores, however, thought the company could do better. So, as part of a project for one of his courses, Flores decided to create a computer vision system capable of ...

Multi-billionaires in Dubai and Abu Dhabi may soon have more trouble doing business on the go, as officials in the United Arab Emirates have announced that, as of October, BlackBerry users will no longer be able to send e-mails or instant messages within the country. As the New York Times reports, Sunday's announcement comes after a lengthy standoff between the Middle East nation and Research in ...

At last week's D8: All Things Digital conference, Facebook CEO found himself sweating bullets while being grilled onstage by the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. It got so bad, in fact, that Swisher felt compelled to ask him if he was OK, and suggested that he perhaps take off his trademark hoodie. "I never take it off," Zuckerberg reportedly replied. When he realized how ...

Facebook's been on the receiving end of a lot of bad press lately, thanks in large part to its morally nebulous privacy policy. But apparently, the site has become so universally hated that politicians are now using it as a weapon to attack their electoral opponents. Two weeks ago, we reported on Kamala Harris, a popular Democrat running for the office of California's attorney general and her ...

If your Web site's privacy policy is longer than the entire U.S. Constitution, it's probably a sign that you need to streamline things just a bit. Fortunately for Facebook users, Mark Zuckerberg seems to have finally gotten the hint. After facing a deluge of consumer complaints and confusion surrounding its newly convoluted approach to privacy, Facebook has apparently decided to unveil a set of ...

If you're an open tweeter, you know that whatever you tweet is available for general, public consumption. Facebook, by contrast, is a less intrinsically public forum, meaning that even if you update a status on a completely public profile, you can usually rest assured that it won't pop up on some random person's news feed, or in some random person's keyword search. Not anymore, though, thanks to ...

It's official. Facebook's Instant Personalization sucks, and here's why. Last night, security consultant George Deglin discovered a hole in Facebook's new framework that, if correctly manipulated by a savvy hacker, could share a user's name, e-mail and personal data with everyone else on the social network -- without any action from the targeted user. As TechCrunch explains, this specific scheme ...

In December, we told you about a group of police officers in Ontario, California, who had taken their Chief to court after discovering that he'd been reading sexually explicit text messages they had sent on pagers provided by the police department. After a lower court ruled in favor of Sergeant Jeff Quon and the three other plaintiffs (two of whom were Quon's wife and mistress, both policewomen), ...