When I see the frequent news stories about theft of personal data, such as the recent theft of medical records of more than 160,000 individuals from the University of California at Berkeley, I start to fear that Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun, may have been correct when he said “You have zero privacy anyway. [...]

A WIsconsin appeals court has issued a decision (HTML, PDF) that it is acceptable for the police to surreptitiously plant GPS tracking devices onto the cars of suspects without getting warrants, because doing so is not a search or seizure.  Apparently the court doesn’t think that doing so violates anyone’s constitutionally protected rights.
That being the [...]

Google has taken steps to address the privacy concerns over their Latitude service, and most people seem to be satisfied.  One thing I’m slightly surprised about is that no one seems to be particularly suspicious of what their statement
Google stores only the most recent automatic update or location selection you manually entered on our servers.
does [...]

I just got a refurbished Apple Mac mini, with the 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It is mainly intended for use compiling my open source programs such as Nonpareil for Mac OS X. I am extremely surprised at the user experience of booting Mac OS X Leopard for the first time, [...]

Yesterday I received a mailed notice from Monster.com, stating that their database had been compromised, including my contact information. Fortunately I had not provided them with any information that I consider sensitive.
Given how many such cases of personal data theft or loss are reported, I wonder how many are covered up, and how many [...]

Thinking about starting a lucrative career in identity theft? Don’t rely on stolen backup tapes! Buy our new database containing nearly one billion Social Security Numbers, many of which are actually valid. The list includes the Social Security Numbers of:

The US President, Vice President, and cabinet members
[...]

AT&T now claims that they will deploy some kind of filtering to keep copyrighted content off their network, effectively spying for the MPAA and RIAA. No one has developed a reliable way to even identify copyrighted content, but even if that existed, how would they distinguish legitimate transfers of copyrighted content from unauthorized transfers?
It [...]

In Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), Justice Douglas gives a concurring opinion in which he expresses serious concern over warrantless wiretaps:
While I join the opinion of the Court, I feel compelled to reply to the separate concurring opinion of my Brother WHITE, which I view as a wholly unwarranted green light [...]

The HP “pretexting” scandal was publicized in such a way as to make people think it was a new problem, and required new legislation.  Apparently it didn’t occur to anyone that the very term “pretexting” is a euphemism to disguise the nature of the act, which is actually “fraud.”  Fraud is defined by Wiktionary as [...]

At the security checkpoint, they usually tell you to remove your laptop from a bag and put it in a bin to be xrayed separately from the bag. And to take your shoes off, etc.
Yesterday they didn’t tell me to do that, and I’d forgotten about it, so I just sent my entire backback [...]