Privacy Watch: Today's Stories of Interest
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-23 21:56:58 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-23 21:56:58 UTC
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Apple has been hit with a hefty class action lawsuit, courtesy of three men from Massachusetts who say the computer company illegally collected and sold its customers’ personal information.
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The NHS has been going through some fairly radical changes. This will affect who can see your medical records and what they can do with them.
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This is the kind of charge that gives people like Richard Stallman fits. Basically, if you have a microphone connected to your computer Chrome accesses it through a Web Speech API and is capable of performing speech-to-text tasks. The claim is that these features can be hijacked through pop-under windows for eavesdropping purposes.
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Forecast of social network's impending doom comes from comparing its growth curve to that of an infectious disease
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The US government’s privacy board has sharply rebuked President Barack Obama over the National Security Agency’s mass collection of American phone data, saying the program defended by Obama last week was illegal and ought to be shut down.
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The bulk collection of phone call data by US intelligence agencies is illegal and has had only "minimal" benefits in preventing terrorism, an independent US privacy watchdog has ruled.
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The U.S. National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone records provides only minimal benefits to countering terrorism, is illegal and should end, a federal privacy watchdog said in a report to be released on Thursday and reviewed by Reuters.
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The federal agency that declared the NSA's telephone dragnet illegal has now released its 238-page report. One of its best features is a succinct presentation of 4 specific reasons that the program cannot be justified even under the PATRIOT Act. "There are four grounds upon which we find that the telephone records program fails to comply with Section 215," the text states. Here are those reasons:
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Pitched to us as an entry in a C-Span competition about what issues Congress should deal with in 2014, Data Obsession breaks down the controversy over domestic surveillance with help from AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein.
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You see, spying is kind of a sensitive topic in the reunified Germany. Before the reunification in 1990, citizens of Communist East Germany grappled with spying on one’s own friends, family and colleagues, under orders by the Stasi secret police.
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An new commission to be headed by Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt is set to investigate the implications of the US snooping affair for the future of the internet.
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Tor, an acronym for “the onion router,” is software that provides the closest thing to anonymity on the Internet. Engineered by the Tor Project, a nonprofit group, and offered free of charge, Tor has been adopted by both agitators for liberty and criminals. It sends chat messages, Google (GOOG) searches, purchase orders, or e-mails on a winding path through multiple computers, concealing activities as the layers of an onion cover its core, encrypting the source at each step to hide where one is and where one wants to go. Some 5,000 computers around the world, volunteered by their owners, serve as potential hop points in the path, obscuring requests for a new page or chat. Tor Project calls these points relays.
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So far, six states (Missouri, California, Oklahoma, Kansas, Washington, and Indiana) have introduced bills that target the NSA. Though they all differ somewhat, each state's bill would impede NSA operations within their boundaries.
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Edward Snowden risked everything to expose the secret NSA spying program of our calls and emails. Now he's been formally charged with violating the Espionage Act—the same law used to charge Bradley Manning, who provided information to WikiLeaks.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Legal Letters Are Not Postcards
- It seems like intimidation, nothing more
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- IAM Magazine is in Effect Dead, It's Now Fused Into Microsoft's Patent Troll (Which It Has Promoted All Along)
- Microsoft-connected patent trolls in Europe [...] Now, in his new job, Wild can use his 'expertise' to help guide blackmail/extortion to better harm Europe's industry
- A Huge Proportion of 'Articles' in The Register MS Are Actually Paid Spam of the Communist Party of China, Selling Compromised (for Wiretapping) Technology
- The Register MS is having a go at becoming a marketing company or "B2B"
- Top Officials Have Just Left Microsoft, Layoffs in Anything But Name
- Microsoft's debt is very fast-growing
- Local Staff Committee The Hague (LSCTH) Meets "Alicante Mafia" at the European Patent Office (EPO)
- Report on meeting with VP1 and his team on 21 April 2026
- UbuntuPit (ubuntupit.com) Has Deleted Slop Pages, Its Slopfarm Experiment Has Failed (Like Always!)
- Turning one's site into a slopfarm is a death knell
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, May 23, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, May 23, 2026
- The "Next Big" Bonus for IBM's CEO Apparently Comes From American Taxpayers While Veteran IBMers Are PIP'd and RA'd (Laid Off)
- the next big thing will be the CEO's bonus
- Links 23/05/2026: Starbucks Scraps Disastrous Slopfest, Colbert’s Final ‘Late Show’
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 23/05/2026: Poetry, Hobbies, ROOPHLOCH, and More
- Links for the day
- Government Bailouts Won't be Enough to Save IBM
- Bailouts from taxpayers in the US
- Links 23/05/2026: Social Media Bans and Demise of Userbase of LLM Chatbots
- Links for the day
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 85 Out of 200: The United Kingdom's Rating for Press Freedom Has Improved, But We Can Do Even Better
- we see the US at #64
- Sites Realise That Becoming More Active by Using Bots (LLM Slop) is Self-Destructive
- We'll soon (maybe next year) also show that some of the 85+ KG of legal papers sent our way are computer-generated garbage, which might run afoul of some rules
- European Patent Office (EPO) Strikes Persist, EPO Management Tries to Give False Impression of "Happy Staff"
- EPO is trying to broadcast to the world a totally phony image of itself
- Gemini Links 23/05/2026: Patience, LLM Chatbts Being Bad, and Unexpected Computer Surgery
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, May 22, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, May 22, 2026
- Links 22/05/2026: Ebola Crisis and Samsung Averts a Walkout With Big Bonuses
- Links for the day
- The End of FOSSPost (fosspost.org), It Has become an LLM Slopfarm Like FOSSLinux
- These sites will never get lucky with slop. These experiments always end badly.
- Links 22/05/2026: Inflation Fears and Thailand Tightens Visa Rules for Tourists From Dozens of Nations
- Links for the day
- EPO Staff Representation Speaks of This Week's Discussion With the EPO's Budget and Finance Committee (BFC) Amid Mass Strikes
- The Central Staff Committee's outline (prepared in a rush) or the "flash report"
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 84 Out of 200: New Legislation Against SLAPPs on the Way (After We Reached Out to Ministers)
- They dealt with the matter individually too, but we won't share this in public, at least not at this time
- The Corrupt Lecture the Non-Corrupt - Part XXX - Where Was "The Ethics and Compliance Team" When the Family of EPO President Campinos Was Caught Doing Cocaine?
- It remains to be seen if national delegates will tolerate this in future meetings
- Gemini Links 22/05/2026: Esperanto Music History, Suspicious Adoption of Signal, and Unauthorised LLM Slop in Code
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 21, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, May 21, 2026