The following editorial urging Congress to pass a national data protection law is from today’s New York Times: In 2006, a Veterans Affairs Department analyst lost a laptop and external drive with Social Security numbers and other personal data from more than 26 million veterans and active duty troops. There was a national call for…
Category: Breaches
The Google trial in Italy: Fleischer comments
Peter Fleischer, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, has resumed blogging after a long hiatus that is related to Italy’s criminal charges against him and other Google executives. The charges are the result of a video that some Italian teens uploaded showing the harassment of a classmate with Down’s Syndrome. Peter explains his absence: I was rattled…
Judge dismisses Andrew Speaker suit against CDC
Shelia M. Poole reports: A U.S. District Court judge has dismissed a lawsuit against the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention filed by an Atlanta lawyer who claimed the agency invaded his privacy. The lawsuit stemmed from a high-profile case involving Andrew Speaker, who alleged the federal agency divulged private medical information during a tuberculosis…
IE bug leaks private details from 50 million PDF files
Dan Goodin reports: A bug in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser is causing more than 50 million files stored online to leak potentially sensitive information that could compromise user privacy, a security researcher said. The documents stored in Adobe’s PDF format display the internal disk location where the file is stored, an oversight that can inadvertently…