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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Forecast of social network's impending doom comes from comparing its growth curve to that of an infectious disease
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
- Mass Layoffs at IBM, But Mostly in Secret (PIPs and 'Voluntary' Redundancies)
- Gerstner laid off a record number of people; Krishna tries to find 'innovative' new ways to cause workers to leave
-
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 158 Out of 200: Making Alliances With Men Arrested for Strangling Women Was Always a Terrible Strategy
- They work for American slop companies
- Links 22/08/2026: TikTok Settles With Feds, Harms Caused by Social Control Media Gaining Attention
- Links for the day
- New Data Shows Microsoft's XBox is Really Dying
- XBox is a "burning platform"
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 21, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, August 21, 2026
- Sources-First Publication
- Thank you for keeping us on track
- Ubuntu is Not Linux
- I was one of the first users of Ubuntu
- Links 21/08/2026: Outrage Over Politicians Who Support Slop-Feeding Data Centres, "America Is About to Get More Expensive"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/08/2026: Rain Coming Back and "Small Internet"
- Links for the day
- Slop-ware: Nobody Knows What Code Goes Into Linux and Most Developers Cannot Understand the Rust Code (Even If They Tried)
- So nobody is in charge
- The Slop Pyramid Scheme (Not Boon!) Isn't Good for GNU/Linux, Even If the Plagiarism Engines (Framed as "Training" or "Intelligence") Almost Always Run GNU/Linux
- We need the slop pop - we need the bubble to pop
- North America: GNU/Linux Measured at 13%-15% Every Night
- many (north) Americans use GNU/Linux at home and are using it to access the Web in the small hours of the morning
- Links 21/08/2026: "Silicon Valley’s Billionaire Cults Are Coming for Democracy" and "Who’s Raking it in as the National Debt Explodes?"
- Links for the day
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 157 Out of 200: What is a 'Defamation Troll'?
- "Defamation Mill" also
- Northern Europe Leads the Pack in Abandoning Windows After Threats Made to Greenland (Says Clownflare Data)
- Clownflare has a vast trove of data, so it cannot be easily dismissed as pure nonsense
- Clownflare: In Past 12 Months Microsoft Windows Fell From ~80% to ~75% on Desktops/Laptops in Asia
- Microsoft is deep in debt
- Secret Layoffs at Microsoft, Apparently More Sites Will Shut Down Entirely
- vindicates us and serves to affirm what we've said for over a month
- The State of Slopfarms About "Linux" in August 2026
- The Web needs serious cleanup, which curation can help deliver
- IBM Offers Workers Some Money to Fire Themselves, It's Called "Next Step" and It's Allegedly 'Extended' (Not Enough Fools Have Fired Themselves)
- Will IBM executives - including the CEO - ever be held accountable?
- £5 Million Unsolicited/Undisclosed Bribes and What That Means to British Politics
- It still remains unknown (disclosure denied) who helps fund the £1 million lawfare against us
- [Satire] Pocock, Binface & nobodies vs Farage: defamation before UK High Court
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- The IBM Censorship Team, PIPs (Silent Layoffs) in IBM Europe
- There seem to be many de facto layoffs going on at IBM right there
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 156 Out of 200: Brett Wilson LLP Becoming Wilson FC
- Now acting almost like one-person shop (lots of staff has fled this past year)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 20, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, August 20, 2026
- Gemini Links 21/08/2026: "Ensmallening the BigWeb", "Rust Dependencies"
- Links for the day
- Links 20/08/2026: 'Linux' Foundation Promoting Slop Hype for Money (Hype as a Service), Malaysia’s Exports Jump 38% Year-on-Year
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 20/08/2026: A "Break From Routine" and "Modem Was the Problem"
- Links for the day
- Clownflare Reckons GNU/Linux is on Almost 1 in 10 Laptops/Desktops in Western Europe
- Western Europe and China are leaving more of GAFAM behind them
- Looking Ahead at September
- Rianne and I look forward to a productive September
- Links 20/08/2026: Facebook "Ran Ads for an App That Promised to Nudify Female Politicians" and Facebook Faces "Social [Control] Media Addiction Trial"
- Links for the day
- Clownflare Sees GNU/Linux at 16% Market Share on Desktops/Laptops in Tajikistan
- in Tajikistan it seems like adoption of GNU/Linux is exceptionally high, based on a very large data set associated with Web access
- The Demise of Social Control Media Continues
- Entering (anew) social control media in 2026 seems foolish
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 155 Out of 200: Throwing Stones in Houses Made of Glass
- character-assassination-as-a-service
- Gemini Links 20/08/2026: Planners, Pantsing, Vinylyssee
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 19, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, August 19, 2026