Murad Ahmed reports: Google cannot be trusted to help manage Britain’s new anti-terror database, the UK Government’s privacy watchdog said yesterday. Records of all communications, including e-mails, text messages and the use of Facebook, Twitter and Skype, will kept by the company and internet service providers for at least 12 months under a scheme being…
Category: Non-U.S.
NZ: Search & Surveillance Bill goes too far, EPMU
From their press release: The government’s Search & Surveillance Bill goes too far in extending search and seizure powers to allow the police to order journalists to hand over documents and reveal the identity of their sources, says the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU). These powers were recently used by the SFO to order…
Cookie monsters: browser beware as political websites plant spy devices
Nicky Phillips reports: Politicians are letting foreign-owned companies covertly gather information about voters. The websites of Barry O’Farrell, Kristina Keneally, Tony Abbott and the Greens plant spying devices on visitors’ computers, which can track them as they browse the internet. […] The websites of Ms Keneally, Mr Abbott and the Greens also planted flash cookies…
Digitally desecrating Germany’s landscape
Jeff Jarvis writes: Street View is online in Germany and it includes – or rather, excludes – 244,000 addresses that Germans have demanded be pixelated. They have, in their word, demanded their Verpixelungsrecht. It is more offensive than I had imagined, a desecration of the public demanded and abetted by German politicians and media on a supposed…