Facebook and Google both announced huge changes with major privacy implications in the past 48 hours. Once again, both companies have made subtle steps designed to erode your privacy to benefit their invasive business models. Here’s what happened: Facebook made it easier for strangers to search for you and find [Keep reading]
Now that fall has fully arrived, can I play a game with you? What did you do on your summer vacation? I don’t want to know where you went, though you can tell me that, I bet it would have been somewhere exotic like somewhere in Southeast Asia, did you [Keep reading]
Studies are the engine of the news business these days. One out of three adults say they hate their job. Nine out of 10 adults say they’ve considered buying a new cell phone lately. Two out of three say they don’t trust the government. Four out of five like dogs [Keep reading]
You can feel the desperation in the woman’s short message. “My boyfriend posted sexually explicit photos of me on an ‘ex-girlfriend’ porn site,” she wrote on a legal advice website, AVVO.com. “I want them removed, but the website charges $500. Can I take legal action? Against the website or my [Keep reading]
Consumers who have been lulled in to a false sense of security over credit card fraud could be in for a rude awaking. That was the message delivered at Visa’s Global Security Summit held in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Disclosure last week of a serious data theft involving some of [Keep reading]
You know those annoying reminders you keep getting from Adobe to update your Acrobat or Flash software? Now would be a good time to pay attention to them. Brian Krebs at KrebsOnSecurity.com discovered last week that computer criminals had gained access to Adobe’s servers and stole a treasure trove of [Keep reading]
The economics of petty theft is an interesting chicken-and-egg game. That’s how New York City police officers recently ended up imploring consumers to download the new iPhone operating system, iOS 7. They want you to be the egg. Last week, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman was among leading law [Keep reading]
Everyone is online, right? Wrong. About one in seven U.S. adults don’t use email or the (not quite the whole) worldwide web, according to a poll published by Wednesday by the Pew Research Center. Many in the disconnected crowd are older and poor, as one might expect. But a large number [Keep reading]
You’d be hard pressed to find a sadder story of life in the digital age. The picture of a Canadian girl who committed suicide earlier this year after a horrific cyberbullying incident was used in a singles’ advertisement shown on Facebook. Facebook has apologized and the firm responsible for the [Keep reading]
In the movie Sneakers, which I consider the best hacker film every made, Robert Redford leads a band of criminal geeks who are chasing a madman named Cosmo. Unlike traditional villians, Cosmo isn’t trying to steal a nuclear bomb or extort the world by threatening to release a deadly virus. [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan