Tag Archives: Privacy

How Apple Ended Up In The Government’s Encryption Crosshairs

by Brandon Bailey and Michael Liedtke, The Associated Press

[The Center for Democracy and Technology, which has criticized government surveillance,] warned that other companies could face similar orders in the future. Others said a government victory could encourage regimes in China and other countries to make similar requests for access to smartphone data. … “This case is going to affect everyone’s privacy and security around the world,” said Lee Tien, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group in San Francisco. Read More ›

CNIL Gives Facebook Three Months To Comply With Privacy Order

by Jedidiah Bracy, International Association of Privacy Professionals

French data protection authority CNIL sent a formal notice to the social networking giant that it was violating the nation’s privacy law and now has three months to get into compliance. Read More ›

Something New to Worry About: Connected Toy Security

by Bree Fowler, Associated Press

boy with stuffed toys reading

Rapid7 researchers examined the Fisher Price Smart Toy, an interactive stuffed animal for children aged 3 to 8 that connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi. They also took a look at HereO, a GPS smartwatch that allows parents to track their child’s location. In both cases, they found that the toys failed to safeguard children’s information such as their names and in the case of the watch, their location, storing it on remote servers in such a way that unauthorized people could access it by masquerading as legitimate users. … Toy-related security problems began to grab headlines late last year. Read More ›

At Berkeley, A New Digital Privacy Protest

by Steve Lohr, New York Times

UC Berkeley tower

Under a program initiated by [UC President Janet] Napolitano, the former secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, the university system began installing hardware and software in its data centers that would monitor patterns of digital traffic, like what websites are being visited by faculty and students, or telltale signs of cyber intruders. … The roots of the dispute stretch back to the attack disclosed last July at the UCLA Health System, which potentially put the private information of 4.5 million patients at risk. Read More ›

Cyberthieves Have A New Target: Children

by Priya Anand, Wall Street Journal

[The Identity Theft Resource Center] says it received 298 calls related to child identity theft in 2015, or about 5.4% of the cases it heard. Because child-identity theft tends to be detected long after the fact, such numbers may vastly underestimate the scope of the problem. Credit-reporting companies add that thefts of minors’ identities are hard to uncover because children can have legitimate credit records if parents add them to a credit card as an authorized user. Meanwhile, data breaches exposing children’s personal information online are becoming more common. … Parents can protect their children a number of ways. Read More ›

Hard Drives Holding Health Data Missing At Medical Insurer

by Chris Rauber, San Francisco Business Times

The latest in a series of huge data losses in the health care realm — health insurer Centene’s loss of six hard drives containing personal information on 950,000 enrollees — raises more questions about the security of health data that consumers entrust to insurance companies, hospital systems, Medicare, Medicaid and other big players. … Confidential health care data can sell in murky portions of the Internet for $10 to $50 per record — far more than the roughly $1 a simple credit-card number is worth. Medicare records are even more valuable, … and can sell for as much as $470 per record. Read More ›

Why Procrastinating With Your Tax Return Could Cost You

by Jonnelle Marte, Washington Post

“It’s even more important this year to file early,” says Melissa Labant director of tax advocacy for the American Institute of CPAs. “The later [people] wait, the more they increase the chances of having a criminal file on their behalf.” Take a look at what happened last year. On Feb. 5, Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, temporarily stopped processing state tax returns after noticing a surge in suspicious filings. Some states later reported that fraudulent activity had multiplied by nearly 40 times — and it was only a little more than two weeks into the filing season. Read More ›

Internet Providers Want To Know More About You Than Google Does, Privacy Groups Say

by Brian Fung, Washington Post

“An [Internet service provider] has access to your full pipe and can see everything you do” online if you aren’t taking extra steps to shield your activities, said Chris Hoofnagle, a law professor at the University of California Berkeley. … Privacy and consumer groups are now calling on federal regulators to fast-track rules … governing when and how an Internet provider may gather and share personal information. Read More ›

FTC Is Falling Short In Protecting Consumers’ Data Used By Businesses

by David Lazarus, Los Angeles Times

In California, businesses are required to report a data breach only if it’s “reasonably believed” that unencrypted data has fallen into the hands of hackers. Since 2005, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, nearly 896 million consumer records have been put at risk by more than 4,700 known data breaches. The actual number of breaches, said Beth Givens, the advocacy group’s executive director, “is almost certainly much higher but never were reported.” The FTC has asked Congress for more authority to regulate privacy matters. So far, Congress has ignored the agency’s requests. Read More ›

Google Is Tracking Students As It Sells More Products To Schools, Privacy Advocates Warn

by Andrea Peterson, Washington Post

In 2014, 28 student data privacy laws were signed into law across 20 states. … One of the toughest was a California law that bars school vendors from selling student data, using it to target advertisements, or building a profile about them for non-educational purposes. … The Roseville City School District in California [where one concerned parent has struggled to keep his 4th grade daughter out of Google’s data] said the school system is evaluating how the state law will impact their district and its vendors. Read More ›

Few Consequences For Health Privacy Law’s Repeat Offenders

by Charles Ornstein and Annie Waldman, ProPublica

ProPublica has reported on loopholes in [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] and the federal government’s lax enforcement of the law. … The data analyzed for this story show the problem goes beyond isolated incidents, carrying few consequences even for those who violate the law the most. … “Often, when we take a look into those breaches, what we find is that they were not accidents,” [said an OCR director]. “What contributed to the breach of thousands, if not tens of thousands of records, was systemic noncompliance . . . over a period oftentimes of years.” Read More ›

Consumer Federation Of California Releases 2015 Scorecard For State Lawmakers

The Consumer Federation of California (CFC) has released its 2015 Scorecard for State Legislators, which rates lawmakers on the votes they cast on key issues, including privacy, automobile safety, household toxics, truth in advertising, living wages, reform of the California Public Utilities Commission, and other consumer protection … Read More ›

Paris Attacks Spark Another Fight Against Encryption

by Sean Sposito, San Francisco Chronicle

walking smartphone aps illustration

[Encryption “back-doors” for law enforcement] won’t necessarily weaken terrorist organizations’ ability to communicate with each other over the Internet. … But what it could do is make it easier for criminals and terrorists to access our financial, medical and other personal records, said Pam Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum in San Diego. They might find a way through the back-door as well. “Strong crypto means good security for all of us,” she said. “It means that banks and hospitals can secure financial and other transactions in our digital world.” Read More ›

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