Using Bluetooth wireless networking to send information to nearby smartphones, beacon technology could transform how retailers engage with their customers. But customers will notice how their information…
Ello is new social networking space on the web that is receiving a lot of attention of late – so much that it’s caused a few problems with the website out of action from time to time. Ello’s new popularity…
Standing on a stage in San Francisco in early 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that as internet users had become more comfortable sharing their lives online, privacy was no longer a “social…
Those who’ve had their digital privacy violated should have legal rights too.
Reid Rosenberg/Flickr
The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) yesterday recommended introducing new laws that would give a legal remedy for serious invasions of privacy. Unfortunately, the federal government has already…
Who will keep our selfies safe?
www.david baxendale.com/Flickr
Never mind the celebrities; let’s say you and I had naked photos of ourselves (selfie-steams) floating in Apple’s iCloud. If somehow those photos were exposed, we would have little recourse under Australia’s…
Jennifer Lawrence’s naked photos were released online.
EPA/Claudio Onorati
A hacker’s release of personal photos of actress Jennifer Lawrence and other female celebrities on the internet on the weekend has again drawn our attention to the security of our personal information…
The world’s most popular gay social networking app, Grindr, is having a tough time. William Saponaro Jr is suing its developers for negligence, after he was arrested for sexual assault and endangering…
The government wants your movements online to be retained by ISPs and other companies.
Flickr/Envato
With the leaking of a discussion paper on telecommunications data retention, we are at last starting to get some clarity as to just what metadata the Abbott government is likely to ask telecommunications…
Facebook’s Messenger sparked the latest outrage over privacy - but should people be concerned?
Flickr/Karlis Dambrans
The recent furore about the Facebook Messenger app has unearthed an interesting question: how far are we willing to allow our privacy to be pushed for our social connections? In the case of the Facebook…
When employers look at lives online, what do they see?
Dominic Lipinski/PA
Will employers in the future watch what their staff get up to on social media? Allowing bosses or would-be employers a snoop around social media pages is a growing trend in the US, and now a new report…
Online daters continue to express outrage about the revelation that OkCupid has been experimenting on users by telling them they matched well with people they had nothing in common with to see if they…
Love your mobile? There’s nowhere to hide.
Ed Yourdon/Flickr
The explosive uptake of mobile devices including smartphones and tablets has us immersed in a complex, volatile soup of hyper-connected digital technologies, where not only is the perception of time being…
Your computer has a special fingerprint that can give away details of your online browsing.
Flickr/Sandra Nahdi
Just how much information we give away about ourselves as we browse the web has been raised again by a tracking device used in thousands of websites. Researchers at Belgium’s University of Leuven have…
Don’t worry boys, I’ll have the NSA delete it for me.
White House
If you’re selling an old Android smartphone on an online auction site you could be giving away rather more than you intend to, according to a recent investigation by anti-malware company Avast. Going through…
You can hide for now but maybe not forever.
shutterstock man with hat over face
As Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European Commission, congratulates herself for forcing Google to comply with the right to be forgotten, she might want to take a moment to think about some issues…
Tech companies want us all to reset the net.
Reset the Net
When you go online today, you are likely to encounter the Reset the Net campaign. Exactly one year after the first revelations from Edward Snowden about NSA spying, the campaign is designed to mobilise…
What do you mean ‘IHATECAT’ is not a strong password?
konsvi
Several high-profile security breaches have, of late, got many people wondering about their passwords. It would be great news if I could tell you a perfect sure-fire system to manage your passwords; the…
Europe has the right to be forgotten, Google does not have the right to forget Europe.
Eric Fischer
The Court of Justice of the European Union has issued a ruling that affects privacy and data protection for millions of people. But the ruling is also significant because of what it says about whether…
Anyone could be Clarksoned these days.
Mark Hooper
Jeremy Clarkson is in the soup again for saying the wrong thing. This time he has been accused of using deeply offensive, racist language, in a Top Gear outtake two years ago. The usual gang of anti-Clarksonites…