Privacy

A court recently revealed via email that the UK government had been spying on Amnesty International. GCHQ had put Amnesty under surveillance -- despite this having previously been denied -- and now the human rights organization wants answers.

In a letter to the UK Prime Minister David Cameron, Amnesty International asks for an explanation for the surveillance. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal's (IPT) email made it clear that GCHQ had been intercepting, accessing and storing communications, something that Amnesty International's Secretary General, Salil Shetty believes "makes it vividly clear that mass surveillance has gone too far".

Caspar Bowden, the privacy advocate who was warning about the activities of the NSA before Edward Snowden, has died. The co-founder of the Foundation for Information Policy Research lost his battle with cancer, and tributes have been paid by the world of technology.

Bowden, the former head of privacy at Microsoft, had long-warned about potential backdoors in software and services. He campaigned passionately for the privacy of the individual and voiced grave concerns about the NSA and the FISA Amendment Act. He sat on the board of Tor and was one of the most knowledgeable and well-loved figures on the privacy scene.

Following a massive security breach over the weekend, Hacking Team has issued a warning that its surveillance and remote access software could now be used by anyone -- including terrorists. The Italian security and surveillance firm fell victim to an attack that relieved it of 400GB of company data, including source code for its software.

Whoever was responsible for the security breach made this data available via torrent, meaning that anyone was able to get hold of it. Hacking Team's software is favoured by governments around the world for mounting NSA-style surveillance and monitoring programs and the company has now issued a stark warning: "Terrorists, extortionists and others can deploy this technology at will if they have the technical ability to do so".

Adding backdoors so governments can access data is a "major security risk". This is the (perhaps slightly obvious) conclusion of security experts and cryptographers writing in a report entitled Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications.

The report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab criticizes plans to allow law enforcement agencies unfettered access to encrypted data through the use of either front doors or backdoors. More importantly it poses the question: "if we want to maintain the security of user information, is this sort of access even technically possible?"

The Right To Be Forgotten has proved controversial. A little over a year ago Google was told by a European court that it should accept requests to remove from search results pages that are "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant". Now, calls for the scheme to be extended to the US are growing ever-louder.

Consumer Watchdog not only says that the Right To Be Forgotten should be brought to the US, but also that Google's refusal to do so is an "unfair and deceptive" business practice. The consumer group is writing to the Federal Trade Commission calling for the search giant to be investigated and forced to consider the removal of certain search results. As has been proved in Europe, it's something that is not without controversy.

A court has revealed that the UK intelligence agency, GCHQ, illegally spied on human rights organization Amnesty International. It is an allegation that the agency had previously denied, but an email from the Investigatory Powers Tribunal backtracked on a judgement made in June which said no such spying had taken place.

The email was sent to Amnesty International yesterday, and while it conceded that the organization was indeed the subject of surveillance, no explanation has been offered. It is now clear that, for some reason, communications by Amnesty International were illegally intercepted, stored, and examined. What is not clear is when the spying happened, what data was collected and, more importantly, why it happened.

[BetaNews Recommended Reading] Companies today have access to more information about their customers than ever before. This gives them the opportunity to effectively personalize their marketing messages, but are they failing to take advantage of the opportunities this offers? And with large volumes of often unstructured data available how difficult is it to find and use the right information?

We spoke to Sara Vera, data scientist at CRM specialist Insightly to find out more about the challenges enterprises face in adapting to a personalized world.

Heightened awareness about online security means that more and more websites are using encryption to boost privacy and security. A few weeks after Wikimedia announced it was using HTTPS to encrypt traffic to its site, The Washington Post has followed suit.

It's a move designed to stop snooping on readers' browsing habits. The news outlet explains that it will make it "more difficult for hackers, government agencies and others to track the reading habits". For those concerned about privacy, this will come a good news, but there's a catch; encryption does not apply to the entire site.

US consumers are most concerned about the ability of retailers and government departments to protect their data according to a new survey.

The Security Insights survey from Unisys shows that 44 percent of American respondents are worried that their personal data held by retailers is likely to be breached in the next year, as many consumers seem to be losing trust in retail data security owing to recent high profile breaches.

If you thought that you can avoid all that mass surveillance by using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), think again. A study shows that even the VPNs leak user information.

Of course it does make it hard for law enforcement agencies to monitor people, but it does not prevent them from accessing the required information. VPNs are currently used by approximately 20 percent of the European internet users.

The day after the US Supreme Court voted to legalize same-sex marriage in all 50 states, the self-explanatorily named Stop Abuse Online website has launched. While the site has been set up with the intention of combating online abuse and trolling in general, female and LGBT victims are a particular focus.

The aim of Stop Abuse Online is to offer advice to those who find themselves falling victim to abuse -- be it online harassment, stalking revenge porn, or blackmail -- complete with legal tips about how to deal with different circumstances. The site is run by seven voluntary organizations in the UK and looks to bring the same protection to the web that people expect in the real world.

Google's Right To Be Forgotten gives people the chance to request the removal of search results linking to pages that contain information they believe to be "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant". Google says it rejects more requests than it complies with, but there is still concern that the company is not providing enough detail about what it is doing. There have been calls for greater transparency from the company about the censorship that is taking place.

The BBC has published a list of all of the stories from its own site that have been removed from Google search results. The corporation announced that it wanted to be clear with people about which links has been deleted and plans to update the list each month. It already extends to nearly 200 entries and the BBC explains that while the stories may no longer be shown by Google, they are still available uncensored on the BBC site.

A couple of days ago, Google took Gmail's Undo Send feature out of its six year beta period, and brought the option to a wider audience. Although the feature has been widely welcomed, there has also been criticism, particularly about the measly 30 second time limit users are given to change their mind and recall an email. Today Fasetto launched Messaging 2.0 which includes the ability to recall or edit messages or files that have been sent, with no time limits.

Fasetto is a cloud storage platform that offers security features that will appeal to the enterprise, as well as home users. Available for Windows, Android, iOS, OS X, and even Windows Phone, the platform has a focus on security that extends to being completely free of tracking and log files, but it also has a thing or two to teach Google.

If there’s one thing that Edward Snowden left us with, it’s the notion that our digital data isn’t all that safe and that the government knows what we did last summer. But in essence, that only applies to that data being created and used using standard tools -- emails, browsers, etc.

However, if you really want to keep your data private, including browsing history and email, there are ways to do it. They’re simple to use, accessible and close to impossible to crack.

Google has removed an extension from its open source browser Chromium after people complained that it had been downloaded without permission and then listened to users through their microphones. The Chrome Hotword extension was used by Chromium to offer "OK, Google" voice activation to the browser.

Privacy advocates were concerned about the potential for eavesdropping, particularly in light of the fact that users were not warned of the presence of the extension. There was also concern that the extension is not open source, so it was not possible to see exactly what it was doing. In response to complaints, Chrome Hotword has now been made an optional component.