I wonder if you would be safe from the probings of data miners even if you were part of a witness protection program... Databases know more about you than you realise. A Carnegie Mellon University study recently showed that simply by knowing gender, birth date and postal zip code, 87% of people in the United States could be pinpointed by name. Websites can collect huge amounts of data ... Read full entry

Google's Cookie monster Google captures details of web surfers' search activities by way of cookies. DoubleClick, a worldwide advertising company captures details of the sites web surfers visit, once again with cookies. Google recently bought out DoubleClick. Once Google compares data from its cookies with the data from DoubleClick, they will know a lot about us. Is this a good thing? For most web surfers a cookie is something ... Read full entry

Privacy in a Very Open Internet It's the sum of the parts of the personal information we have chosen to share online that can present the real "opportunities" for misuse. As Mike Bogle points out, a Facebook book profile here and a Flickr account there, in isolation aren't necessarily a problem, but the collective information both contain could be. For instance mentioning the suburb you live in on ... Read full entry

Suspicious spouses turn to spyware As if there's any need to remind computer users to keep their virus and internet protection suites up-to-date. Nasty computer spyware isn't only used by hackers to steal your credit card details - suspicious spouses have adopted it as a way of monitoring and controlling their partners' every online move. Spyware is software that is surreptitiously installed on a computer with the aim of collecting personal ... Read full entry