Privacy and data protection

We need to talk about love.

It is a wonderful thing. It makes the world go around. But sometimes it doesn't live here anymore.

It is then that bad things can happen.

You might get cut off by your ex, your gym membership suddenly inactive. You might hear from friends that you did none of the work in the relationship. You might hear that you were mean and cruel.

On the other hand, your ex might actually be the mean and cruel one.

For you might suddenly find that your passwords, bank account numbers, and even that photo of you wearing nothing but a caring grin on a remote Indian beach will suddenly see the light of more days than are comfortable. … Read more

BlackBerry is counting on Trend Micro to help ensure the security of its third-party apps.

Like other app store owners, BlackBerry already scans apps for malware to protect BlackBerry World customers. But the company will add Trend Micro's Mobile Application Reputation Service to take that protection a few steps further.

Both current and new apps submitted to BlackBerry World will be scanned by Trend Micro's cloud-based service to hunt for malware.

"BlackBerry is working with Trend Micro to implement a more robust approach for addressing privacy and security concerns related to third-party applications," Adrian Stone, director … Read more

A coalition of privacy groups has written to leading U.S. politicians to seek assurances that policymakers "advance the aim of privacy" in Europe, rather than hinder the development of new European data protection and privacy laws.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and more than a dozen other groups are seeking to meet with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and U.S. Acting Secretary of Commerce Rebecca Blank, to ensure that new European data law proposals are bolstered … Read more

Hot on the heels of reports from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, another storied U.S. newspaper -- The Washington Post -- has confirmed that it too was attacked by what it suspects were Chinese hackers. And a new book from Google's Eric Schmidt reportedly calls the Asian country "the most sophisticated and prolific" hacker of foreign companies.

In an article published today, the Post says attackers gained access to the paper's computer systems as early as 2008 or 2009 and that malware installed on the systems was neutralized in 2011 by … Read more

While on assignment for business recently, Jeffrey Paul posted a photo to the social network Path.

For business reasons, he didn't want to tell his contacts where he was at the time. He had already disabled Path's access to his location in iOS settings. After he took his photo, he had carefully cropped it to obscure anything that might have identified his location.

But when he hit publish, there it was: the name of the city he was in. He deleted the post immediately, but the disclosure shook him. In a subsequent post on his company's blog, … Read more

Internet and social media ranked at the bottom on a list of the most trusted industries for privacy, according to the Ponemon Institute.

Released yesterday, Ponemon's "2012 Most Trusted Companies for Privacy" was compiled from a survey of U.S. adults asked to name the five companies they trust the most to protect the privacy of their personal information.

Based on more than 6,700 responses, the Top 20 list did not include several tech players that had been on it in past years.

Apple failed to make the list for the first time in four years. … Read more

Wickr (download) gained new secure sending and subsequent self-destructing powers in a big update to the encryption and security app today, perhaps not coincidentally Data Privacy Day.

There are four new features in the app. You can now send and subsequently self-destruct images and PDFs from Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box to other Wickr users, which expands the limits of the original send-and-self-destruct feature. You can also send up to three 30-second videos, up to 5 MB, per message. Audio messages, which function like voice mails, have been extended to 30 seconds long, as well.

Wickr can now connect to … Read more

One of the world's most popular cross-platform applications "violates" international privacy laws, according to the Canadian and Dutch data protection authorities, because it requires users to provide their entire contact list to the service.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the Dutch Data Protection Authority today announced their findings for what they called a "collaborative investigation into the handling of personal information" by the California-based company.

WhatsApp, an instant messenger application for iPhone, Android devices, and BlackBerry smartphones, provides a free service to rival text messaging, and sends more than 1 billion … Read more

Twitter gives government agencies in the United States at least some of the information they ask for on users 69 percent of the time.

That data and much more about how the social network responds to government requests for user information, as well as demands to remove tweets and reports of copyright violations was part of Twitter's second so-called transparency report, which it issued today "in celebration of" Data Privacy Day. Google issued such a report today as well.

"We've been thinking about ways in which we can more effectively share this information, with an … Read more