Privacy

Our reputation is one of our most valuable possessions, determining in large part where we work, how much money we make, whom we date or marry, and many other aspects of our lives. The Internet, however, has made protecting, maintaining and defending our reputations difficult. Photos from college pa...

If you use Google's Gmail and like to access your account from several locations -- work, office, your smartphone, Internet cafes, etc. -- you can now remotely check the status of that account from all your log-in locations. Google announced a new remote signout and monitoring feature designed to en...

IT consultant Amir Khan, a U.S. citizen, has been subjected to U.S. Customs questioning for a total of more than 20 hours after returning from a number of trips abroad. Customs officials have searched Khan's laptop computer, books, personal notebooks and cell phone. He has never received an explanat...

High-profile data breaches continue to spotlight the growing risks consumers face of identity theft and credit card fraud. Four highly visible data breaches disclosed in the last 18 months are particularly worrisome because they show a systemic failure in the procedures that both the public and regu...

A team of scientists recently conducted a study of human travel patterns by secretly tracking the whereabouts of cell phone users. Aiming to investigate the geographical patterns in which humans travel over time, the researchers studied the trajectory of 100,000 anonymized cell phone users -- random...

Google launched the beta version of its Google Health personal health records aggregator Monday. The service, according to Google, will put users in control of their own medical records, giving them 24-hour-a-day access to their health records from a variety of sources. With the introduction of Goog...

Many organizations are decreasing their reliance on user names and passwords for user authentication. They are also learning more about the benefits of deploying strong user authentication to increase the level of assurance for online identities as part of an overall approach to securing access to i...

It seems as though everyone wants to be both social and portable these days. Google, Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace all have recently trumpeted their latest efforts at openness. Are they really the same? In some cases -- Yahoo and Google, primarily -- the OpenSocial framework is providing a set of stan...

Microsoft has given law enforcement officials a new tool known as "Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor," or COFEE, to aid in the pursuit of crimes involving computers. COFEE is a framework of customizable and common forensic tools for law enforcement. Microsoft made the announcement at this ...

When they put in long hours, workers sometimes begin to see their workplaces as something of a second home. They decorate the walls of their cubicles or offices with pictures of loved ones, plants and an assortment of personal memorabilia. No matter what their professional level, when someone's spen...

This cuts close to the heart because I truly believe this Web anonymity thing actually helps criminals more than it protects honest citizens. Microsoft has released a white paper that lays out the problem and asks for feedback on a solution -- asking our opinion first at the very least should be app...

Can you recall the five worst phishing scams to grace your e-mail in-box? Can you spot a genuine e-mail from your financial institution or government agency? Don't feel too technologically challenged if your answer is no to either -- or both -- of these questions. Even security experts are hard-pres...

The news that all three of the front-running candidates for president of the U.S. have been victims of privacy breaches at the passport office may have a silver lining. Sure, Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain have good reason to be irate, and their campaigns are right to bring pres...

Alec Saunders has 1,400 people he calls "friends," at least on Facebook. Some are truly friends from his real life -- many are business contacts, and some are people he met online. Until today, Saunders -- who founded Iotum, developer of the popular Free Conference Calling application for Facebook -...

The "digital universe" of data was bigger than expected in 2007 and continuing to explode in size, according to a new study from IDC. The study, sponsored by EMC and titled "The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011," found that ther...

Technewsworld Channels