After we all did Big Brother stories last week about Samsung’s ominous Smart TV privacy policy, more alarming information was found. The biggest “Doh!” — Samsung not only collects what you say in your living room, it uploads the content in the clear, without encrypting it. That means anyone who [Keep reading]
Elder financial abuse is a big problem that’s getting bigger. Back in 2010, MetLife released a report estimating that $2.9 billion is lost by America’s elderly each year, based on published accounts of fraud, but most observers believed that figure was low. A new survey released last week might be [Keep reading]
Looking for love this Valentine’s Day? Remember: safe online dating requires good hygiene. Digital hygiene. A new study released this week by IBM found over 60 percent of leading dating Android mobile apps they studied are potentially vulnerable to a variety of cyber-attacks that put personal user information and corporate [Keep reading]
Facebook has added a thoughtful feature today that will make things easier for folks using social media to grieve the loss of a loved one. It’s called “Adding a Legacy Contact,” and it allows users to name a person who has can make limited adjustments to the deceased’s Facebook account [Keep reading]
Just how bad is the tax ID theft problem? About half of all filers seeking refunds in the state of Ohio now must answer a series of challenge questions just to prove they are who they say they are. Ohio has already intercepted nearly 60,000 returns seeking an astonishing $250 [Keep reading]
As a leader of the oft-paranoid-sounding-privacy-sensitive crowd, let me be the first to congratulate Samsung for its honesty. Plenty of my friends in paranoia have pointed out the language included in Samsung’s new SmartTV privacy policy. Because the gizmo uses voice recognition to let owners change the channel and do [Keep reading]
Tax ID theft is reaching epidemic proportions. Well, it did last year when the IRS issued seemingly endless warnings about it. That wasn’t enough to get state taxation agencies to fix their systems, apparently, as TurboTax announced it has taken the extraordinary step of “pausing” state tax return filings for [Keep reading]
Day 2 of the Anthem hack, and we don’t know much more than we knew yesterday. There are intriguing grain-of-salt reports that Chinese hackers stole the data as part of a never-ending quest to build intelligence on U.S. government agents. There are plenty of reports — which must be true, [Keep reading]
Another day, another massive computer hack that sets millions of people in a tizzy about something they can’t control. The Anthem health data leak isn’t the Big One — that’s still coming, believe me — but it’s pretty big. Perhaps 80 million people now have to worry that a criminal [Keep reading]
The next time a company tells you that it wants your information, but “Don’t worry, it’s anonymized,” don’t believe it. A group of researchers from MIT proved this week that it can identify almost anyone using just four pieces of information in a supposedly anonymized database of credit card transactions [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan