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NewsVac: News from around the Web

• Data for 6,000 UCSF patients gets exposed online 2 weeks ago
  
  Patient data exposed on the Internet for months after [The University of California, San Francisco] gives records to third party for help in targeting potential financial donors, newspaper reports.
• Who is in charge of my privacy? 2 months ago
  
  It should concern us that most computer users -- ourselves included -- see themselves as dependent variables in respect to large companies' privacy policies, rather than as independent variables.
• To be anonymous or not to be, that is the privacy question 2 months, 1 week ago
  
  Privacy experts debate merits of surveillance society at Stanford legal conference.
• AT&T to crush copyrighted network packets 4 months ago
  
  "AT&T says it's time to start filtering copyrighted content at the network level. During a panel discussion at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), The New York Times reports, the communications giant joined Microsoft and NBC Universal in arguing that internet service providers - like AT&T itself - should be sniffing your networks packets and blocking anything that copyright holders don't traveling over the wire."
• New privacy tips video series 4 months, 4 weeks ago
  
  "In order to give you the best possible information about the privacy settings for our products, we asked the engineers and product managers who actually designed them to explain how they work in a series of new videos we released today on our YouTube Privacy Channel. These videos feature Googlers sharing privacy tips, like how to use Google Chat’s “Off the Record” feature, how to limit the number of people who can view your Picasa photos, how to unlist your phone number from Google search results, and how to make the details of your Google Calendar entries private."
• Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers 8 months, 4 weeks ago
  
  Many new applications do a great job of making it easy and free for you to post your information online. In a lot of cases, your data is combined with other people's data, to pull helpful or interesting relationships out of aggregate data. This shift has many implications for privacy, and it is worth wondering what the future of privacy is for web application users. A security breach on one of the most popular hosted web applications could easily reveal private information about thousands or even millions of the site's users. How should a user of these applications think about these risks?
• Undercover NBC Dateline reporter bolts from DEFCON 2007 9 months, 2 weeks ago
  
  Undercover reporter Michelle Madigan (Associate Producer of NBC Dateline) got a little more than she bargained for when she tried to sneak in to DEFCON 2007 with hidden cameras to get someone to confess to a felony.
• Collecting minimal user information 10 months, 4 weeks ago
  
  Web applications are in constant competition for a user's attention. Unlike shrink-wrap software, there's often no captive audience, and web apps must gently guide and woo users to help them to the best experience of the software.
• EU privacy watchdogs extend search engine probe 10 months, 4 weeks ago
  
  "Equal treatment for all our big brothers: EU privacy worrywarts will expand their investigation into Google to other search engines' data retention policies."