Privacy in the digital world covers how personal data is collected, stored, and used. Posts in this category discuss ways to protect your information online, privacy tools, and related concerns. As more of life moves online, understanding privacy becomes more important.
September 2009 saw Facebook bury its Beacon tracker, courts and regulators press Google over books and voice data, and researchers show how location and friend lists quietly betray the people who generate them.
August 2009 turned location, tracking and old-fashioned card theft into front-page worries, as a record breach indictment, a Twitter blackout and quiet browser snooping all landed in the same month.
July 2009 turned on cascading account takeovers, remote control of devices we thought we owned, and a wave of state and corporate surveillance that pushed regulators and privacy advocates into action.
June 2009 turned the spotlight on state surveillance, as Iran throttled the net during its election and China ordered censoring software onto every new PC, while Western firms tracked, leaked and reassured in equal measure.
May 2009 paired a run of painful breaches with hard questions about location tracking, deep packet inspection and who gets to watch the wires.
April 2009 was dominated by botnets, worms and government surveillance, as Conficker stirred, Twitter buckled under self-spreading scripts, and Britain and the United States pressed ahead with plans to log everyone's communications.
Conficker scared the world, leaked national blacklists exposed state censorship, and Google pushed behavioural tracking onto the web.
February 2009 was dominated by the Conficker worm crippling courts and air forces, a Facebook revolt over who owns your data, and fresh scrutiny of location tracking and behavioural advertising.
January 2009 was dominated by the record Heartland card breach, the Conficker worm sweeping through hospitals and navies, and a run of high-profile account and database compromises.