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NewsVac: News from around the Web

• Note to privacy advocates: Good luck 3 weeks ago
  
  There are plenty of legitimate concerns about the privacy intrusions of Google Maps' Street View, but one privacy group went a bit overboard with an attack on the search giant's all-seeing eye.
• U.S. Agents Can Seize Travelers' Notebook PCs 3 weeks, 3 days ago
  
  New Department of Homeland Security policies clear federal agents to hold travelers' laptops without suspicion of wrongdoing, according to a report.
• Researchers could face legal risks for network snooping 1 month ago
  
  A group of researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Washington could face both civil and criminal penalties for a research project in which they snooped on users of the Tor anonymous proxy network. Should federal prosecutors take interest in the project, the researchers could also face up to 5 years in jail for violating the Wiretap Act.
• First European privacy seal awarded 1 month, 2 weeks ago
  
  EuroPriSe today awards the first European Privacy Seal for ICT products and IT-based services. The seal guarantees compliance with the demanding EU laws and regulations on data security and privacy. EuroPriSe is funded by the European Commission's eTEN programme with 1.2 million Euro and implemented by a consortium of nine organisations. Under the scheme, IT products and IT-based services are audited in order to see if they can be certified as compliant with European regulations on privacy and data security.
• Google, Viacom now clashing over YouTube employee records 1 month, 2 weeks ago
  
  Viacom wants to know whether YouTube employees watched or uploaded pirated clips of TV shows or movies, CNET News has learned. The information could prove central to its lawsuit.
• Do Flickr's APIs protect its users enough? 1 month, 2 weeks ago
  
  "When picking Flickr or any other photo site, it's important to understand not just its pricing scheme, reliability, and how well their user interface works but, as importantly, the underlying priorities that drive all sorts of design choices .... "
• Data for 6,000 UCSF patients gets exposed online 3 months, 3 weeks ago
  
  Patient data exposed on the Internet for months after [The University of California, San Francisco] gives records to third party for help in targeting potential financial donors, newspaper reports.
• Who is in charge of my privacy? 5 months, 2 weeks ago
  
  It should concern us that most computer users -- ourselves included -- see themselves as dependent variables in respect to large companies' privacy policies, rather than as independent variables.
• To be anonymous or not to be, that is the privacy question 5 months, 3 weeks ago
  
  Privacy experts debate merits of surveillance society at Stanford legal conference.
• AT&T to crush copyrighted network packets 7 months, 2 weeks ago
  
  "AT&T says it's time to start filtering copyrighted content at the network level. During a panel discussion at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), The New York Times reports, the communications giant joined Microsoft and NBC Universal in arguing that internet service providers - like AT&T itself - should be sniffing your networks packets and blocking anything that copyright holders don't traveling over the wire."
• New privacy tips video series 8 months, 1 week ago
  
  "In order to give you the best possible information about the privacy settings for our products, we asked the engineers and product managers who actually designed them to explain how they work in a series of new videos we released today on our YouTube Privacy Channel. These videos feature Googlers sharing privacy tips, like how to use Google Chat’s “Off the Record” feature, how to limit the number of people who can view your Picasa photos, how to unlist your phone number from Google search results, and how to make the details of your Google Calendar entries private."
• Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers 1 year ago
  
  Many new applications do a great job of making it easy and free for you to post your information online. In a lot of cases, your data is combined with other people's data, to pull helpful or interesting relationships out of aggregate data. This shift has many implications for privacy, and it is worth wondering what the future of privacy is for web application users. A security breach on one of the most popular hosted web applications could easily reveal private information about thousands or even millions of the site's users. How should a user of these applications think about these risks?
• Undercover NBC Dateline reporter bolts from DEFCON 2007 1 year ago
  
  Undercover reporter Michelle Madigan (Associate Producer of NBC Dateline) got a little more than she bargained for when she tried to sneak in to DEFCON 2007 with hidden cameras to get someone to confess to a felony.
• Collecting minimal user information 1 year, 2 months ago
  
  Web applications are in constant competition for a user's attention. Unlike shrink-wrap software, there's often no captive audience, and web apps must gently guide and woo users to help them to the best experience of the software.
• EU privacy watchdogs extend search engine probe 1 year, 2 months ago
  
  "Equal treatment for all our big brothers: EU privacy worrywarts will expand their investigation into Google to other search engines' data retention policies."
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