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

The next release of Internet Explorer may include a private browsing feature that automatically deletes all traces of a user's web browsing activity. Presently Safari is the only well known browser offering such an option, which is sometimes to referred to as "porn mode", for reasonably obvious reasons... One obvious use case for privacy browsing modes is surfing the Net for pornographic materials without leaving traces, but other, ... Read full entry

Outgoing Chief Justice of the Australian High Court, Justice Murray Gleeson, has questioned the relevancy of privacy laws, given the apparently increasing willingness of people to discuss private matters on mobile phones in public, and divulge what was previous regarded as "personal information" on social networking websites. "I used to think that having a telephone conversation was normally private. But you can't walk down the street without hearing ... Read full entry

Informative forum post by Craig Thomler, in response to one of the many discussions taking place about Google Street View, invasion of privacy, and the ability of people to "track you down" using online tools and applications. The electoral role is a public document containing the address details of voters. The white pages contains most street addresses. Our streets are mainly public, therefore anyone is within their rights ... 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

To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You So long as this surveillance is only for serving "targeted advertising", being watched shouldn't prove too a big problem... A new analysis of online consumer data shows that large Web companies are learning more about people than ever from what they search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred ... 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

Microsoft seeks patent for office 'spy' software. Microsoft is apparently seeking to patent new software that sounds a lot like something out of a science fiction story... The system would allow managers to monitor employees' performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer's assessment of their physiological state. It sounds like ... Read full entry

Privacy, Free Speech and Anonymity on the Internet. The transcript of an interesting Question & Answer session hosted by Daniel J. Solove, an associate Law Professor at George Washington University on the Washington Post website, which covers the Megan Meier MySpace suicide case, and the concerns of members of social networking sites regarding their privacy. People do indeed put a lot of personal information about themselves online, especially teenagers ... Read full entry

Bebo named as best social networking site in survey. Oh groan, I guess I'll have join Bebo now... Bebo and Facebook achieved the highest scores of 79% and 74% respectively, and were rated easier to use than MySpace and best for socialising. Bebo, which is used predominantly by the 13- to 24-year-old age group, is praised for working hard to encourage responsible networking. "Users can restrict who sees their information, ... Read full entry