privacy

NEW YORK--For private investigator Steven Rambam, the Internet is his most valuable tool in helping to find missing persons, cheating husbands, and your competitor's dirty secrets.

But while the intelligence business is booming, individuals are losing the battle to protect their privacy with every blog post, Google Web search, and online photo, Rambam, director of the Pallorium investigative agency, said in a keynote session late on Saturday at the Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference.

"Anything you put on the Internet will be grabbed, indexed, cataloged, and out of your control before you know it," he … Read more

Facebook said on Wednesday that it fixed a hole that exposed the birth dates of members during a public beta of a new design for profile pages earlier this week.

Security company Sophos alerted Facebook to the problem and is suggesting that Facebook users input fake birth dates instead of real ones to prevent any similar problems going forward because of the risks from identity fraud.

"My advice to Facebook users would be, even if your data of birth is set to be non-visible, change it to a made-up date in case this kind of blunder happens again," … Read more

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