privacy

Passwords are like the common cold: they induce headaches, no one is immune, and there is no cure in sight.

But they are necessary in this era of digital data, where everything from paying bills to passing notes to sharing photos is done online through user accounts that require some proof that you really are who you say you are. The need for passwords to be both easy to remember and difficult to guess poses what we all know as the password problem.

"This is a horrible problem," said Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of BT Counterpane, who … Read more

Photobucket on Monday fixed a security hole that allowed people to view private photos of strangers.

All that was needed was the user ID of someone with a private album on Photobucket and the file name of one photo in their album, said Byron Ng, a Vancouver, B.C.-based computer technician who exposes security flaws in social networks and other sites.

Many MySpace users use Photobucket to post material on their MySpace pages, he said in an e-mail, adding, "This is a way to find 'some' private Photobucket albums."

MySpace and Photobucket are both owned by News … Read more

Loopt has an appealing application that allows you to track your friends and allows them to track you on a graphic map. It's kind of like a GPS-sonar radar that I've just discovered on the iPhone 3G. But, is this application really more like an electronic leash? Will your significant other track you? Will moms and dads track their children this year? Yes, Loopt has an extensive privacy policy that discourages/prohibits kids under 14 years old from using the service, but even one of my most 'public' friends (both online and in off-line) was actually hesitant about … Read more

Gmail users now have some extra ways to make sure no one can snoop around in their e-mail accounts, a post Monday afternoon on the Official Gmail Blog explained. The Google e-mail service provider is introducing a feature so that members can see where they're logged in and then opt to log out if they want.

The feature is currently rolling out to Gmail members using the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers.

At the bottom of your Gmail window, you will now see if you're logged on in any other locations, the post by engineer Erwin D'Souza … Read more

Updated at 12:35 p.m. and 3:50 p.m.: Comments from privacy advocates have been added.

Google apparently decided to keep it clean, in more ways than one.

The company has made a minor change to its home page, adding a link to its copyright line that leads to its Privacy Center. Google's decision, noted Thursday afternoon in a corporate blog and a public policy blog, was an attempt to quell a controversy over the posting of its privacy policy.

The attempt succeeded.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Saturday that his … Read more

A day before the United States celebrates its independence, we continue to question our individual freedoms online. In Thursday's Daily Debrief, CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber and I discuss a federal judge's recent ruling in the ongoing Google-Viacom lawsuit that orders Google to turn over YouTube user activity. This will include videos watched, IP addresses, and usernames as part of an ongoing copyright infringement case.

Understandably, this news is disconcerting for YouTube users. Sources tell CNET News.com, however, that if Viacom uses this information for anything other than investigating piracy issues, it will be … Read more

In the latest turn in Viacom's copyright infringement suit against YouTube and parent company Google, a federal judge ruled that Google must hand over YouTube users' IP addresses and user names, plus a history of videos they've viewed. The court order stipulates that data turned over to Viacom by Google must be used solely to prove Viacom's claim that YouTube is a hotbed of pirated video content. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation stills sees the ruling as a blow to user privacy. CNET News.com reporter Caroline McCarthy tells News.com's Leslie Katz why.

Plus, we … Read more

Google has been ordered to turn over YouTube user data to Viacom. But Viacom will be guilty of contempt of court if it uses that data for anything other than specifically proving the prevalence of piracy on YouTube, a source close to Viacom told CNET News.com on Thursday.

That's serious business. Contempt of court is the sort of thing that can get a lawyer's license taken away.

On Wednesday night, a federal judge ruled that Google must turn over YouTube user activity--videos watched, IP addresses, usernames--to legal foe Viacom as part of a long-running copyright infringement … Read more

Vancouver-based computer technician Byron Ng, who likes to prod social networks for holes and other errors, stumbled across a way to learn more about Facebook users than you're supposed to be able to--prompting Facebook to suspend the Top Friends application late on Wednesday.

Until Facebook suspended the Top Friends app, created by Slide, anyone could browse partial profiles of anyone else on Facebook who had added Top Friends to their page. CNET News.com confirmed that the security hole exposed the birthdays, gender, and relationship status of strangers, including Facebook executives, the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, and … Read more