An Associated Press release http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100927/ap_on_hi_te/us_internet_wiretaps today indicates that the Obama administration is drafting legislation that would require companies to make it technically possible to intercept all electronic communications in the US. This would affect all of the US telephone companies, Skype, and also companies, such a RIM (Blackberry) that are based outside of the US.

Recently a lawsuit was filed against Walt Disney’s internet subsidiary and some of its partners as well. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/17/flash_cookie_lawsuit/ At issue is the use of a special kind of cookie that is used in conjunction with Adobe Flash. These “supercookies” are called Local Shared Objects or LSOs for short. LSOs are not deleted when you use

In the security industry, we’re sometimes over-ready to be over-prescriptive, seeing security and privacy concerns as paramount where others see them as a distraction. And we’ve become used to the mindset that computer users will always prefer convenience to security.

I decided to download the card game Solitaire (by ZenTech Labs) on my Android based phone. Being a free app it is paid for by advertising. When you play the game there is always a banner ad at the bottom of the screen. One of the ads caught my eye. It said “Leslie2088 is .7

Gizmodo ran a story about who is downloading the files with the information about 100 million facebook users.   http://gizmodo.com/5599970/major-corporations-are-downloading-those-100-million-facebook-profiles-off-bittorrent It turns out that lots of people are. The story says companies, such as Motorola, IBM, Apple, and Disney, among others, are downloading the data. Organizations such as the United Nations made the list as well.

A recent article on TheStreet talk Wal-Mart putting RFID tags in its merchandise.  The article questions whether or not this is an invasion of privacy, and some privacy advocates are up in arms about this. According to Wal-Mart the RFID tags can be removed from purchased items. The RFID tags are not personalized to the

You might recall back in November of 2009 ESET released the findings of a survey about cybercrime http://www.eset.com/threat-center/blog/2009/11/16/once-upon-a-cybercrime%E2%80%A6. We went back to Competitive Edge Research & Communication and commissioned them to conduct a new survey to determine prevalence of social networking as well as to identify online security and privacy concerns of Americans. In addition

Mashable reports a halt to the insanity over privacy may be only a day away… On Sunday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised simplified privacy settings “in coming weeks.” It now looks like that timetable has been bumped up, with an executive at the social network revealing at an event in New York that new features

[Update: according to Neil Rubenking, FB chat is now working again and it's no longer possible to view friend requests or chat activity for other users.] I've just blogged yet again about Facebook and privacy: I don't usually publish the same content on different blog sites, but this is a recurrent hot topic in the ThreatBlog,

…but not in a good sense. Clearly there's a lot of confusion about the detail of Facebook's latest changes, as suggested by MSNBC at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36877160/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/, though it's clear enough that they don't amount to a victory for common sense and user privacy. But what do you do about it? Well, here's a good start. Social Media