The US National Security Agency (NSA) has direct access to information on the servers of major American internet companies, according to reports published in the Guardian and the Washington Post. The NSA…
Privacy and technology go together like music and dance: it’s only when both work well together that the magic happens. But what about privacy in the age of big data, an era in which your every move has…
In the late 1970s I found myself wandering the mostly deserted streets of East Berlin, having successfully negotiated Checkpoint Charlie and a horde of East German border guards. I remember commenting…
By making it possible to screen for gene variants linked to a higher risk of disease, gene testing has the potential to transform the way we manage health. It opens up the possibility of routine screening…
Initial responses to Facebook’s newly announced Graph Search (a name only a software engineer could love) appear to be split into two main camps: those who have celebrated the level of nuanced detail that…
Instagram’s announcement yesterday of a new set of terms and conditions has elicited a backlash from many of its 100 million users, with many vowing to ditch the service before the changes take effect…
New laws to govern publishing on the internet will likely be needed in future, the chair of the UK’s biggest inquiry into media practices and phone hacking has said. Lord Justice Brian Leveson made the…
In an age of Facebook, eBay and online banking, data privacy is becoming more important than ever before. The majority of Australians have personal information stored online with a range of organisations…
It may be time to move beyond Facebook’s assurance of its trustworthiness and specifically restrict the company’s use of face recognition. Changes within Facebook Europe would seem to suggest so. For gullible…
Most of us value our privacy. But in Australia, despite recommendation after recommendation that we reform the law to protect citizens from serious invasions of privacy, there is often little protection…
Telstra representatives have this week admitted to collecting data for a new internet filtering product and sending this data to the USA office of Netsweeper Inc. Netsweeper Inc, based near Toronto, Canada…
AUSTRALIA BY NUMBERS: Today, the Australian Bureau of Statistics will release the first batch of its 2011 census data. We’ve asked some of the country’s top demographers and statisticians to crunch the…
Amid indications that Fairfax is going into the corporate death spiral – ongoing disinvestment resulting in smaller market share - we’re asking the wrong questions about the future of the Australian media…
British novelist E M Forster famously offered two cheers for democracy. We might say the same about the national Privacy Amendment (Enhancing Privacy Protection) Bill introduced into Parliament last week…
Yesterday on The Conversation, Timothy Smith from the Florey Neurosciences Institute argued that in order to improve genetics research, we need free and open access to genetic information. But while the…
We all know Google has a history of privacy-related misdemeanors but a report in the Wall Street Journal last week suggests the search giant hasn’t learn from its mistakes. The report, about the findings…
What if you used your smartphone, knowing you might be sharing certain information, but had no idea what exactly was being shared? Or why you might be sharing it? If you knew someone could be recording…
What can only be described as “growing consternation” has resulted from revelations by a developer, Trevor Eckhart, that a large number of mobile phones are secretly monitoring users’ actions on the phone…
The Australian Health Survey (AHS) has recently been in the news, with people expressing concern that a national health census is an egregious infringement of their right to privacy and a manifestation…