Wired News reports that citizens who fall victim to ID theft becuase of the ChoicePoint debacle will find it difficult to recover damages for their losses if they decide to seek recourse against ChoicePoint:Legal experts say that people who suffered…
Category: Privacy
Curse of the Secret Question
It appears that Paris Hilton's Sidekick was hacked becuase her secret question was "What's your favorite pet's name?" The answer, of course, was her dog, Tinkerbell, who is almost as famous as she is.This is what Bruce Schneier has called…
Google Calendar Next?
Search Engine News reports speculation that Google might soon launch its own Calendar tool. If true, I'm sure it'll be a useful and attractive tool, likely based on Apple's iCal calendar program. What this also means, however, is that Google…
The ChoicePoint Data Security Breach: What It Means for You, and How to Find Out What ChoicePoint Knows about You
In the aftermath of the ChoicePoint security breach(here and here), the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has produced a lengthy page on what the incident means to you and what data aggregators like ChoicePoint may have on you:Many consumers who contact the…
Call to add privacy rights to Japan’s constitution
ComuterWorld reports that a senior legislator in Japan is calling for the addition of data privacy rights to the country's constitution:An influential Japanese politician earlier this month called for the right to information privacy to be added to the country's…
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Stop Getting Credit Card Offers
The major credit bureaus have the right to sell your personal information to credit card and insurance companies, resulting in the deluge of junk mail. But you have the right to exclude your name from preapproval lists (either permanently or…
Amazon Personal Search History
Slashdot reports on the recently disclosed patent application by Amazon.com for "Persistently storing and serving event data," which describes a9.com's personal search history feature. Admittedly, I need to spend more time studying the privacy implications of "personalized searching" - the…
Safeway Shopper Card Leads to (false) Arson Arrest
(via A blog doesn't need a clever name)Richard Smith at ComputerBytesMan writes about how a frequent shopping card database led to a false arrest:Tukwila, Washington firefighter, Philip Scott Lyons found out the hard way that supermarket loyalty cards can come…
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Update on ChoicePoint story & “Hackers”
More news outlets are finally covering this story (CNN, Reuters, ZDNet). Interesting, however, is that the AP story (picked up by the Washington Post, LA Times, and others) label the perpetrators as "hackers" who "penetrated the company's computer network." Nowhere…
Federal Judge: No Warrant Needed to Use GPS Tracker
(via Privacy.org) A very chilling precedent from an upstate New York federal judge who ruled that police can secretly attach Global Positioning System devices to a suspect's vehicle without a warrant, stating that suspects had "no expectation of privacy in…
Read More Federal Judge: No Warrant Needed to Use GPS Tracker
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