Watching other people is human. It’s why TV shows like Big Brother, and paparazzi magazines flourish. But while some people choose to expose private moments, others do not. And Australian law doesn’t always…
If your teenage daughter was sexually active and wanted to go on the pill, you’d want to know, right? Well, think back to when you were her age – would you have told your parents? These questions were…
The hacking of BlackBerry’s official blog by the mysterious collective TeaMp0isoN raises serious questions. This black-hat hacking group, founded in 2009, has so far claimed responsibility for more than…
Participation in Australian society involves providing information about yourself to both public and private sector organisations. Such information may be sensitive, which raises important questions: Can…
Who would have predicted there would be serious talk of a statutory privacy tort in Australia, giving private individuals who feel their privacy as been breached the right to sue? But then again, who would…
Commentary from some sections of the IT community on the recent killings in Norway reminds us national security is still haunted by two visions: 1) With enough data it will be possible to comprehensively…
Reaction to the widening News of the World scandal has again highlighted the lack of protection against invasion of privacy by the media in Australia. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating renewed his attack…
The Apple iPhone feature of logging and storing users’ location information has attracted worldwide attention. But discussions about location privacy aside, a more basic question needs to be asked: how…
Doctors are supposed to keep patient information confidential unless told otherwise, right? Well, not any longer. If you’re diagnosed with a genetic disorder, medical specialists are now allowed to contact…
Advanced surveillance and social media might seem like strange bedfellows. Until you look a bit closer, that is. Technologies developed for surveillance applications are typically designed with robustness…
Commercial ports, railway stations and other crucial infrastructure are at constant risk from security incidents that can halt operations and, more worryingly, put you and I in harm’s way. This is a reality…
In the surveillance world there are certain grand challenges – holy grails that researchers and those who use surveillance pursue doggedly, spurned on by the technical issues such challenges pose. Paramount…
It’s hard to discuss public surveillance without immediately being asked about privacy issues. As technologists working on computer-based surveillance, it’s tempting to say this is outside our area of…
Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, hit back at reports yesterday that the company’s iPhones track the movements of its 100 million users. The charge was that Apple was storing a database of this information, to which…
PRIVACY – Your location is arguably more personal than your genetic profile; even identical twins can’t be in the same place at the same time. In terms of value, it’s on a par with your medical records…
Unless you’ve been chained to a fax machine for the past seven years, you’ll have noticed that Facebook is immensely popular. Users numbered 641 million by February of this year. Making and maintaining…
Professor (adjunct) and Senior Fellow, Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto