Using an iPhone to secretly record a conversation is not a violation of the Wiretap Act if done for legitmate purposes, a federal appeals court has ruled. “The defendant must have the intent to use the illicit recording to commit a tort of crime beyond the act of recording itself,” (.pdf) the ...

Federal authorities announced Tuesday they will not prosecute administrators connected to a webcam spying scandal at a suburban Philadelphia school district. Prosecutors and the FBI opened an inquiry following a February privacy lawsuit accusing Lower Merion School District officials of spying on students with webcams on the 2,300 district-issued Macbooks. The ...

A wide swath of the net’s top websites, including MTV, ESPN, MySpace, Hulu, ABC, NBC and Scribd, were sued in federal court Friday on the grounds they violated federal computer intrusion law by secretly using storage in Adobe’s Flash player to re-create cookies deleted by users. At issue is technology from ...

Lonnie David Franklin Jr. appears for arraignment on multiple charges as the alleged "Grim Sleeper" killer, in Los Angeles Superior Court Thursday, July 8, 2010. (AP Photo/Al Seib, Pool) When California authorities arrested Lonnie David Franklin, Jr. as the suspected “Grim Sleeper” serial killer last week they based their case in ...

We’re not sure what’s more humorous: That California Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, maintains two unencrypted Wi-Fi networks at her residence, or that a consumer group sniffed her unsecured traffic in a bid to convince lawmakers to hold hearings about Google. A representative for Consumer Watchdog ...

Spokeo, an online data broker, is accused of peddling inaccurate information and violating consumer protection laws in a complaint sent to the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday. The Center for Democracy and Technology, which filed the complaint, alleges Spokeo purports to provide information about individuals’ credit ratings and other financial data, but ...

Foursquare, one of the net’s hottest startups, got an unwanted message on June 20 from a white-hat hacker: it was leaking user data on a massive scale in plain violation of its privacy policy. The company asked the white hat, Jesper Andersen, to give it nine days to deal with the ...

If you have checked in with Foursquare in San Francisco in the last three weeks, Jesper Andersen probably knows where and when — even if you’ve set your check-ins to be published to friends only. Andersen, a coder who recently built a service called Avoidr that helps you avoid social ...

Welcome to the surveillance society. That’s what the American Civil Liberties Union concluded Tuesday with a report chronicling government spying and the detention of groups and individuals “for doing little more than peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.” The report, Policing Free Speech: Police Surveillance and Obstruction of First Amendment-Protected Activity, surveys ...

Starbucks is rolling out free, unsecured Wi-Fi access at about 7,000 of its coffee shops across the United States beginning July 1. But will there be packet-sniffing with your latte? The Seattle-based coffee concern’s move to lure customers with free internet comes amid a growing legal uncertainty about privacy on open ...