A few days ago Paul McMullan, former deputy features editor on the News of the World, popped up on a Sunday morning debate programme with his oft-repeated lament that, in the wake of the “chilling effect…
George Clooney revealed details last week about “his” spy satellite over Sudan, which he funds to keep an eye on the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who has been accused of war crimes. The Satellite…
In this election campaign the major parties are carefully dancing round an elephant in the ballroom. The elephant is big and a bit frightening. Its name is privacy policy. Recent months have seen expressions…
Do you have a right to be “forgotten” by Google searches and other internet search engines? That question is being considered in Europe currently, where the European Court of Justice has received advice…
In the wake of former CIA employee Edward Snowden’s revelations of the PRISM NSA mass surveillance, people are once again asking why the general public should care if they’ve got nothing to hide. “Nothing…
Recent news of widespread phone and internet surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) has raised serious questions over the ethical and legal obligations private companies face to protect the…
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…