1 Aug 2010 Sean Rayment reports: An Army sniper is suing the Ministry of Defence over a “catastrophic error” which put him and his family in danger of being kidnapped by al-Qaeda. Police feared the soldier and his family could face retaliatory attacks by British-based Islamists after it was disclosed to the media that he had shot dead several [...]
31 Jul 2010 Matthew Heller reports: Acting couple Eric Dane and Rebecca Gayheart have dropped a $1 million lawsuit against Gawker.com for publishing a videotape featuring them in a nude threesome with a friend after the gossip website agreed to take down the much-viewed posting. Gawker got plenty of mileage from the tape after posting it in August 2009. The [...]
31 Jul 2010 Virgin Media broke advertising regulations when it sent an email promoting deals and offers to a customer who had opted out of marketing communications, the advertising regulator has said. The company had claimed the message was a service update. The advertising industry’s code of self-regulation, the CAP Code, governs how companies use databases for marketing and [...]
31 Jul 2010 Meghan Keane reports: Privacy advocates may not be happy with brands tracking consumers online, but a Brazilian detergent brand is set to begin tracking customers in the real world. Starting next week, Omo is embedding 50 detergent boxes with GPS devices as part of a new video camera giveaway. The campaign is sure to get Omo lots [...]
30 Jul 2010 Julia Angwin and Tom McGinty have a must-read story in the Wall Street Journal: The largest U.S. websites are installing new and intrusive consumer-tracking technologies on the computers of people visiting their sites—in some cases, more than 100 tracking tools at a time—a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. [...] n an effort to quantify the reach and [...]
30 Jul 2010 From a New York Times editorial: It is just a technical matter, the Obama administration says: We just need to make a slight change in a law to make clear that we have the right to see the names of anyone’s e-mail correspondents and their Web browsing history without the messy complication of asking a judge [...]
30 Jul 2010 Christopher Elliott writes: Thanks for the birthday card, Southwest Airlines. The computer-generated missive, complete with signatures of the airline’s executives, landed in my mailbox just before the big day. At first I was flattered by the thoughtful gesture. But then I was troubled. How did they know my birthday? And then it occurred to me: Airlines are now requiring [...]
30 Jul 2010 Caroline McCarthy reports: Does privacy exist anymore? Do we even know what it is? A conversation between digital academics Jeff Jarvis and Danah Boyd on Friday morning at the Supernova conference capped off a week in which many peoples’ perceptions of the tension between public and private data online were shaken (and stirred). “We have no [...]
30 Jul 2010 Chad Skelton reports: A tax collector in B.C. used the Canada Revenue Agency’s computers to look up the private tax files of hundreds of high-income individuals, apparently in the hopes of hitting them up for a business she ran on the side, according to internal government documents. The CRA’s internal investigation report, obtained by the Vancouver Sun [...]
30 Jul 2010 Kevin Ellis reports: Attorneys for Michael Mead had sought to force The Gaston Gazette to reveal information that could have been used to help reveal the identity of an anonymous commenter on the news organization’s website. But Superior Court Judge Calvin Murphy ruled Tuesday to nullify the request, siding with The Gaston Gazette that such information remains [...]* RSS Newsfeeds compiled by pogowasright.org, used with permission.
