privacy

The New York Times recently reported a heartwarming story about a lost digital camera being returned after a kindhearted stranger analyzed the photos on the camera to find the owner.

The camera was left in the backseat of a New York taxi, and contained sightseeing photos of Manhattan, as well as Florida snapshots including people wearing name tags. Leads took the hunt to Ireland, back to New York, and finally to Syndey, Australia, where the rightful owner lives. He was "over the moon" with gratitude to get his camera back.

This story has a happy ending, and perhaps most of us would be glad to get our camera back in that situation, but it also made me uneasy to realize how much personally identifiable information was stored on one camera card. I would rather have a locked camera than could not be accessed if it was found, than have a stranger be able to peer into my photos.

The situation is even more crucial when it involves smartphones.… Read more

Face it, in November users found out that Facebook was tracking their purchasing history through vendors like Fandango and Travelocity. Plus, Beacon was sending lists of where we'd been and what we'd bought. Facebook admitted defeat and promised to behave. But the bottom line is that just about everything you do is tracked--and there's not much you can do about it.

Read the full Wired story: "How Facebook exposed us all as freaks"

A company claiming to have half of the unlisted phone numbers (and names and locations of their owners) in the U.S. will sell you the list for less than 15 bucks. To opt out of the list, you have to jump through time-eating hoops.

Read the full story at MSNBC: "Cell phone directory rings alarm bells"

Some people (not us, of course) might think that this is the best invention since the "StealthSwitch." That ingenius device, as you'll recall, has a foot-operated switch that instantly hides whatever is on your screen when your boss happens to walk by at the most inopportune times.

The "Phantom Mouse" improves that concept by doing the same thing with a red emergency button that sits directly above the scroll wheel, according to Newlaunches. That way you won't have to frantically stomp around under your desk looking for a switch.

It's being marketed in … Read more

Not everyone should let their co-workers see their full online social profile, as this guy would likely attest.

Moli.com, which already has a solution for individuals who want to control who sees their profile, is now expanding its service as a platform for enterprise users.

A single account can have public (anyone can see), private (it can be searched for, but not accessed), and hidden (only those with permission from the account holder can see it exists) versions. The aim is to increase privacy.

Moli offers white label, private label, and co-branded versions for businesses.

Companies that purchase the … Read more

Comedy troupe The Vacationeers has a new video parodying Google Maps and its Street View feature. Shortly after the introduction of Street View, privacy concerns were raised by several groups regarding the amount of zooming and the capturing of license plate numbers, but nobody's come close to comparing it to a formidable and mysterious opponent the likes of the smoke monster on J.J. Abrams' Lost.

I desperately hope this becomes a series.

[via Digg]

What's more worrisome than a public MySpace page? A page that the user only thinks is private. I was just alerted to several stories by Kevin Poulsen of Wired News that publicize recent security breaches on MySpace.

Poulsen reported on January 17 about a MySpace Bug that leaks "private" teen photos to voyeurs. He wrote, "A backdoor in MySpace's architecture allows anyone who's interested to see the photographs of some users with private profiles--including those under 16--despite assurances from MySpace that those pictures can only be seen by people on a user's friends list. Info about the backdoor has been circulating on message boards for months."

These message boards include self-described groups of "pedos" who hacked into underage-girls' private MySpace profiles. According to Poulsen, one poster reported successfully pilfering photos from a randomly chosen 14-year-old girl, "It worked and I was shown her pictures. Now lets see some naked sluts."

On January 18, Poulsen updated the story to say that the next day, MySpace quietly fixed that back-door bug, without publicly acknowledging the problem, even though users' profiles had been vulnerable for months. … Read more

Yet another brawl is brewing among congressional Democrats and the Bush administration over enacting a controversial spy law that would immunize telephone and Internet companies from lawsuits alleging wrongdoing.

With barely a week before the Protect America Act--a six-month-long expansion of electronic surveillance law--expires, the White House has been ratcheting up pressure to renew and further expand that law.

It started Tuesday with a new press release that warned: "The terrorist threat does not expire February 1, and neither should legislation critical to keeping our nation safe."

And it continued on Wednesday by sending Vice President Dick … Read more

Maybe they were pulled voluntarily due to embarrassing content, or involuntarily due to inappropriate material--either way, sometimes social-networking profiles get deleted. And a recent controversy in the U.K. has left some Web users wondering exactly what happens to them.

Here's how it started. A few Facebook members pointed out that the site keeps profile data intact after users delete their accounts so that they can be subsequently "un-deleted" if the addictiveness factor of Facebook proves to be too much. But what if they don't come back? We all know by now that Social Ads, the … Read more