Privacy and data protection

It's a sad occasion when a laptop is stolen. All that money, time, and personal data just disappear into the night. This is the Tumblr story of a boy and his stolen laptop. Dom Deltorto lives in London. In early February, he says, someone broke into his flat and made off with his MacBook Pro and his iPad.

Deltorto was prepared for just such an incident. He had installed Hidden App on his laptop, a program that tracks the laptop's location and sends back images of the thief. However, Hidden App still needs to be connected to the Internet to work. After more than a month of radio silence, Deltorto reports that his MacBook suddenly came online, but it wasn't in a place where he could just call the London police and have them recover it.… Read more

As Congress readies for what's sure to be a heated debate over the controversial cybersecurity bill CISPA, leaders in the tech community are speaking out.

Unsurprisingly, a known activist for Internet freedom and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is one of those leading the charge. In a comical video released today in conjunction with digital rights advocate group Fight for the Future, Ohanian calls on tech CEOs to join his cause (see below).

"I'm hoping all of these tech companies take the stand that their privacy policies matter. Their users' privacy matters," Ohanian said in the video. &… Read more

Consumer data broker Acxiom plans to introduce a service that will reveal to people what it knows about them, according to a Financial Times report.

The company, which is based in Little Rock, Ark., bills itself as an enterprise data, analytics, and software-as-a-service company. It serves 47 of the Fortune 100 companies, more than 7,000 in all, and counts more than a trillion data transactions each week from 700 million consumers worldwide.

Even though the company probably has a file on you, that data has never before been available to you. The FT's Emily Steel reports that, in … Read more

Samsung found itself the target of a police raid in South Korea on Monday over the alleged theft of OLED display panel technology.

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency investigated Samsung's headquarters in Asan, South Korea, in an attempt to find documents related to OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology, Bloomberg reported late yesterday.

Police are trying to determine whether Samsung is tangled up in an alleged leak of OLED technology documents by partners of LG Display, a Samsung spokesman told Bloomberg. No details were revealed as to who called the police, but LG said it didn't contact them.

"… Read more

The city of Yokohama in Japan has had to offer up some quick apologies to its nearly 42,000 followers for erroneously tweeting that North Korea had launched a missile at its homeland.

Earlier today, the Crisis Management Office Affairs Bureau for Yokohama tweeted that North Korea had launched a missile at Japan. The tweet stayed up for 20 minutes before being taken down and replaced with an apology from the city, saying that its tweet was sent out in error.

Yokohama acknowledged the error on its Web site (Google Translate), saying it created the tweet in advance to inform … Read more

Video service Vudu began warning users today that it has instituted a systemwide password reset following an office break-in last month.

A burglary March 24 resulted in the loss of hard drives that contained users' sensitive personal information, including names, e-mail addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers, account activity, dates of birth, and the last four digits of some credit card numbers, Vudu Chief Technology Officer Prasanna Ganesan informed customers in an e-mail. He said no complete credit card numbers were stolen because the company does not store that information.

The stolen hard drives also contained encrypted passwords, and while Ganesan … Read more

Mozilla's Web site log-in alternative known as Persona unveiled a Beta 2 version today. Now you can sign in to any Web site supporting Persona using a Yahoo Mail account.

Persona, which is still in development, is an open authentication system that works on desktops and mobile devices. In addition to being able to log in using either your Persona ID or your Yahoo credentials, today's release introduces support for Firefox OS, which means you can expect to use Persona to log in to any Firefox OS devices that launch later this year. It also includes back-end changes … Read more

Facebook users in the U.K. are being treated to the same premium charges their counterparts in the U.S. have been hit with when sending messages to certain high-profile members on the social network, as well as people outside their circle of friends.

According to U.K. news site The Sunday Times, Facebook users in the U.K. late last week started being charged as much as 10 British pounds (about $15) to send messages to celebrity-status Facebook members. Olympic diver Tom Daley and former Children's laureate Michael Rosen are the most expensive celebrities to contact.

Facebook last year announced what it called a "small experiment" … Read more

When Mark Zuckerberg and friends debuted Facebook Home yesterday, they downplayed the ever-growing importance your data has for the company. While the Facebook-obsessed may love Home, chances are your privacy won't feel welcome at all.

Facebook has earned a reputation for developing new products and features that are respectful of user privacy, and then slowly, sometimes with great subtlety and sometimes with mastodon-like lumbering, walking those policies back to a decidedly less-respectful state.

There's little indication that Facebook Home will be any different. At the Facebook Home question-and-answer session that followed Thursday's announcement, Zuckerberg said, "Analytics … Read more