Thursday, May 6, 2010
Alexandria residents soon will have to pay for larger home recycling bins featuring built-in monitoring devices.
The City Council added a mandatory $9 charge to its residents' annual waste collection fee.
That cash -- roughly $180,000 collected from 19,000 residents-- will pay for new larger recycling carts equipped with computer microchips, which will allow the city to keep tabs on its bins and track resident participation in the city's recycling program...
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/New-recycling-bins-with-tracking-chips-coming-to-Alexandria-92880219.html#ixzz0nBD56TQK
Labels: big brother, microchip, personal Information, recyling, tracking
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Protecting your privacy on Facebook can feel like a full-time job. The social network has made a habit of tweaking its privacy policies with some regularity — and in many cases, it's up to you to take proactive steps in order to keep your info out of the public eye.
The recent introduction of Facebook's "Open Graph" is no exception. By default, you're now opted in to the company's new social sharing services, and this time, they stretch way beyond the confines of Facebook.com.
If you're comfortable with that, more power to you. But if you'd rather keep your personal preferences private, here's a step-by-step guide to taking back control...
Labels: Facebook, information, personal Information, privacy
Washington (CNN) -- Four Democratic senators called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday to reconsider the recent changes in its privacy settings and asked the Federal Trade Commission to streamline guidelines regarding privacy on all social networks.
"Now, users have less control over private information, and it was done without the users' permission," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, said on Capitol Hill.
Schumer and Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Mark Begich of Alaska and Al Franken of Minnesota sent a letter to Zuckerberg about Facebook's decision to allow third-party sharing of users' information...
Labels: Facebook, information, Mark Zuckerberg, personal Information, privacy
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Google's roving Street View spycam may blur your face, but it's got your number. The Street View service is under fire in Germany for scanning private WLAN networks, and recording users' unique Mac (Media Access Control) addresses, as the car trundles along.
Germany's Federal Commissioner for Data Protection Peter Schaar says he's "horrified" by the discovery.
"I am appalled… I call upon Google to delete previously unlawfully collected personal data on the wireless network immediately and stop the rides for Street View," according to German broadcaster ARD...
Labels: Google, MAC addresses, personal Information, privacy, Street View, WiFi, WLAN networks
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Copy Machines A Security Risk To Personal Information
Your Office Copy Machine Might Digitally Store Thousands of Documents That Get Passed on at Resale
(CBS) At a warehouse in New Jersey, 6,000 used copy machines sit ready to be sold. CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports almost every one of them holds a secret.
Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive - like the one on your personal computer - storing an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine.
In the process, it's turned an office staple into a digital time-bomb packed with highly-personal or sensitive data.
If you're in the identity theft business it seems this would be a pot of gold.
"The type of information we see on these machines with the social security numbers, birth certificates, bank records, income tax forms," John Juntunen said, "that information would be very valuable." ...
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Police Records Show Up In Copiers In NJ
BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) - A copy machine may seem harmless, but it's actually a potential jackpot for identity thieves. A CBS News investigation uncovered stunning, confidential information on an old machine in New Jersey from the Buffalo Police Department.
Did you know that almost every digital copier made since 2002 has a hard drive that stores thousands of images and unless you scrub the hard drive they all remain? So your old copier could end up being resold through a warehouse like this in New Jersey, where CBS News investigators bought four used copiers and two of them happened to be old Buffalo Police copiers.
John Johnson of Digital Copier Security said, "We got some documents here in the glass. This machine came from the city of Buffalo Police Sex Crimes Division. This machine has 249,000 copies, has 42,000 prints on it, and it's also used as a fax machine."
A half hour later, the hard drive was removed, then using a forensic software program available free on the internet, tens of thousands of documents were downloaded including detailed domestic violence complaints, and a list of wanted Buffalo sex offenders. On a second machine from the Buffalo Police Narcotics Unit, CBS News found a list of targets from the Operation Impact Drug raid three years ago...
Labels: copier, personal Information
Thursday, April 15, 2010
The CIA will soon have nothing on the social networking watchdogs. Teneros has launched a product that is designed to let a company monitor its employees’ social networking activities. Not that employers who wanted to see what employees past and present might say about them – but it would have been a labor intensive job. Now its automated – employers can discover and monitor their employees’ Facebook and Twitter posts and tweets – with more sites promised (YouTube, MySpace, and LinkedIn, for example)...
Labels: personal Information, privacy, social networking, spying
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Ralph Remakel received a Citibank letter postmarked Feb. 16 that notified him of a recent Citibank error. It turns out he wasn't the only one.
In late January, Citibank mailed year-end tax statements to 600,000 Citi customers via the U.S. Postal Service that included the customers' Social Security numbers ... on the outside of the envelope.
Citi called the mistake a "processing error."...
Labels: Citibank, identity theft, personal Information, privacy
Friday, March 12, 2010
Location-based services have superseded the real-time web as the driving force behind internet innovation this year.
Internet giants like Google, Twitter and Facebook are all honing their location-based services. These bigger companies are lining up alongside a healthy serving of smaller internet start-ups (think Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla and Booyah) to provide their consumers with comprehensive geolocation services.
Labels: big brother, Facebook, GPS, Internet, personal Information, privacy, Twitter
In the list of complaint users have against the popular social-networking site Facebook, limits on the ability to share personal information is likely not at the top.
Most issues seem to revolve around the compulsion to share anything and everything personal through such sites. That said, one can hardly blame Facebook for wanting to jump on the success of location-based services such as Foursquare.
According to The New York Times, 
According to The Times, the existence of the feature is reflected in Facebook's new privacy policy, which reads, in part, "When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post."
We reached out to Facebook on the matter and received the following response: "We are constantly experimenting with new ideas and products internally. We don't have anything more to share at this time."
Labels: big brother, Facebook, Internet, personal Information, privacy
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