As I’ve often said, sometimes just disclosing someone’s name in a context can be a serious problem for the individual. Here’s another case in point: The body investigating historical claims of abuse at Derry care homes for children has been forced to issue an apology – after an error led to a number of names of witnesses…
Category: Breaches
USPS: Snail mail snooping safeguards not followed – Report
Josh Gerstein reports: Cutting-edge data-gathering techniques may have grabbed the spotlight lately, but it turns out the government has been playing fast and loose with a more old-school surveillance method: snail-mail snooping. The U.S. Postal Service failed to observe key safeguards on a mail surveillance program with a history of civil liberties abuses, according to…
Columbia Engineering Team Finds Thousands of Secret Keys in Android Apps
The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University issued the following press release yesterday: In a paper presented—and awarded the prestigious Ken Sevcik Outstanding Student Paper Award—at the ACM SIGMETRICS conference on June 18, Jason Nieh, professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering, and PhD candidate Nicolas Viennot reported that they have discovered a crucial security problem…
Ca: Henry v Bell Mobility: Another Federal Court case shows PIPEDA damages are hardly worth pursuing absent evidence of actual harm
Canadian privacy lawyer David T.S. Fraser writes: The Federal Court, in the recently issued decision in Henry v Bell Mobility 2014 FC 555 (not yet on CanLII or the Court’s site) has awarded a very modest sum of damages to a customer of Bell Mobility whose phone account was accessed by an impostor. At the hearing before…