Stories about: Privacy International

Digital civil liberties groups in Europe have launched an online platform asking citizens to "name and shame" telecommunications companies that impose Internet access restrictions.

A privacy activist plans to ask for a judicial review of British prosecutors' decision not to bring a case against BT and the online advertising company Phorm for running secret trials of a system that monitored peoples' Internet use without their consent.

Security concerns over Facebook have been raised yet again after a security consultant collected the names and profile URLs for 171 million Facebook accounts from publicly available information. The consultant, Ron Bowes, then uploaded the data as a torrent file allowing anyone with a computer connection to download the data.

Google's secret Wi-Fi snooping was powered by new sniffing technology that the company wants to patent, court documents filed Wednesday alleged.

Google's Street View Cars have logged every wireless network in the UK, it has been revealed.

Google is running into problems with privacy advocates in Japan and Greece over its Google Maps feature, Street View. Google plans to re-shoot Street View photographs in the twelve Japanese cities currently available in Street View after privacy complaints. At issue was the fact that Google's Street View cameras were mounted so high they were shooting over private fences and into Japanese homes. Google says it will lower its cameras by 16 inches for its re-shoot and for all future Street View photographs in Japan. Street View cameras are mounted on cars and take photographs with 360-degree views of the surrounding area.

A privacy group is calling Google's new mapping application an "unnecessary danger" to users' security and privacy.

Google's plans to shorten the life-span of cookies installed on a user's computer, ostensibly to improve user privacy, is being dismissed by some as complete hype.

Google, which has been working to ward off questions about its privacy policies and defend its YouTube subsidiary against a US$1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit filed in March by Viacom, Monday launched a blog that it will use to address those and other public policy issues -- and to try to enlist the aid of Internet users in its lobbying efforts.

Google has decided to make the data it stores about end users anonymous in its server logs after 18 months, according to a blog posted Monday by the company's global privacy counsel.