privacy

Securities regulators balk at employee social-media privacy

Securities regulators are advocating for special exemptions to new and pending state laws that prevent employers from snooping on employee Twitter or Facebook accounts.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, an independent U.S. securities regulator that seeks to protect investors, is asking lawmakers in around 10 states to amend their legislation to allow financial firms to peak at social media accounts when employee misuse is suspected, a spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.

The fear seems to be that brokers could use their social media accounts to spread information that would influence stocks, and that misdeeds would go unchecked without … Read more

Germany fines Google $189K for Street View Wi-Fi data breach

Germany's privacy regulator has fined Google 145,000 euros ($189,000) after the search giant illegally collected private Wi-Fi network data, including usernames, passwords and Web site results.

It amounts to a minor bluff for Google, but an overall win, as the fine represents about 0.002 percent of its total net profit in 2012.

This is despite it being "one of the biggest data protection rules violations known," according to Hamburg data regulator Johannes Caspar in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg, claiming that Google's "internal control mechanisms must have severely failed."

It's … Read more

Apple hangs onto your Siri data for two years

All those curse words and other commands you yell at Siri hang around a bit longer than you may think.

In response to a Wired story expressing concern about Siri's privacy policy, Apple has revealed exactly what happens to your Siri chats. Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller told Wired on Thursday that Apple may keep your Siri data for up to two years, albeit in an untraceable state.

Here's how the process works, according to Wired.

Whenever you talk to Siri, your commands are uploaded to Apple for analysis. Apple then assigns you a random number, which it associates … Read more

Boston bombings: How facial recognition can cut investigation time to seconds

After the Boston Marathon bombings, police in the city made a plea for people with cell phone video and pictures to turn over their footage, adding to the hours of surveillance video from nearby businesses. But what would normally take investigators hundreds of hours to review can now take minutes or even seconds, thanks to technology like facial recognition. The software, which can help pick a person out of crowd, looks for differentiating features -- from the shape of a mouth to the ridge on a nose to the distance between a pair of eyes.

3VR in San Francisco has … Read more

Mozilla takes hard stance on protecting Web site certificates

It's happened to everyone -- you visit a Web site and instead of the browser taking you directly to it, you get a notice that says you're about to visit an untrusted site. The reason this happens is because the browser hasn't certified the site.

This type of action could mean a slow death for such a Web site, since messages like these tend to scare off users.

Mozilla, Firefox's parent company, is now contemplating whether to give international telecom giant TeliaSonera this type of punishment, according to the Register. Apparently Mozilla might refuse to include … Read more

CISPA plan to let feds receive confidential data wins big House vote

The U.S. House of Representatives has overwhelmingly approved a controversial data-sharing bill that would authorize e-mail and Internet providers to share confidential information with the federal government.

By a 288-127 vote today, the House adopted the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, better known as CISPA, which supporters say is necessary to protect American networks from electronic attacks and intrusions. The vote signals more support for the bill than it enjoyed last year, when it cleared the House by a narrower margin but died in the Senate. (See CNET's CISPA FAQ.)

CISPA is "so important to our … Read more

CISPA permits police to do warrantless database searches

A controversial data-sharing bill being debated today in the U.S. House of Representatives authorizes federal agencies to conduct warrantless searches of information they obtain from e-mail and Internet providers.

Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat, proposed a one-sentence amendment (PDF) that would have required the National Security Agency, the FBI, Homeland Security, and other agencies to secure a "warrant obtained in accordance with the Fourth Amendment" before searching a database for evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Grayson complained this morning on Twitter that House Republicans "wouldn't even allow debate on requiring a warrant before a search.&… Read more

Senators to IRS: Don't snoop on taxpayers' private messages

A dozen U.S. senators warned the IRS today against warrantless snooping on taxpayers' confidential e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter messages.

In a stiffly worded letter (PDF) to the tax collection agency, they asked the "IRS to confirm that it will immediately establish a warrant requirement when it wants to obtain e-mail and other electronic personal correspondence" from American companies.

The letter also asked the IRS to "provide a timeline" for updating its internal procedures to guarantee that the contents of electronic files would be accessed only after agents follow the privacy-protective traditional procedure of obtaining a … Read more

ACLU to FTC: Mobile carriers fail to provide good Android security

The America Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission today asking the agency to investigate the four major mobile carriers' security practices in regards to smartphones.

The civil liberties group claims that AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint are not doing enough to protect users' private and personal data -- specifically on Android devices. The gist of the complaint (PDF) is that these carriers aren't providing users with timely security updates, which the ACLU says is akin to "deceptive and unfair business practice."

"The major wireless carriers have sold millions of … Read more