Privacy

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

You've heard all about how banks present a danger to the financial system once they become "too big to fail" (I'm looking at you, JPMorgan Chase). Here's the equivalent question about a much different company: Has Google become too big to trust? To ask the question is to answer it, but in case that's not explicit enough, the answer plainly is yes. It's become impossible to ignore Google's lengthening string of privacy and regulatory missteps. The company has been found by the Federal Communications Commission to have collected and kept emails and Web browsing histories, even passwords, of individuals whose Wi-Fi signals were intercepted by vehicles photographing street scenes for its Street View program.

In his first public comments since allegations that he assaulted his mother and sister at a London hotel, actor Christian Bale asked for privacy Thursday. The Welsh-born actor brushed off questions about the alleged family dispute, saying he preferred to focus on the blockbuster movie "The Dark Knight," which had its premiere in Spain on Wednesday. "It's a deeply personal matter," Bale said at a news conference in Barcelona. "I would ask you to respect my privacy in the matter." The 34-year-old actor spent four hours talking to British police Tuesday after allegations he assaulted his mother and one of his three sisters in his suite at London's Dorchester Hotel two days earlier.

An environmental crusader known as "Mr. Malibu" has apologized to Pepperdine University and retracted accusations that the school is to blame for effluent flowing down Marie Canyon Creek and into the Pacific Ocean. In exchange, the university has agreed to drop a lawsuit against activist Cary ONeal that alleged libel and "invasion of privacy by placing person in a false light in public eye. " In two videos he posted online, ONeal claimed that a foamy substance pooling on a Malibu beach was sewage released by Pepperdine.

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

Individual privacy is under threat around the world as governments continue to introduce surveillance and information-gathering measures, according to an international rights group. Although privacy is improving in the former communist states of Eastern Europe, it is worsening across Western Europe, London-based Privacy International said. Concerns about terrorism, immigration and border security are driving the spread of identity and fingerprinting systems, it said. Greece, Romania and Canada had the best records of the 47 countries surveyed.

Party on, YouTubers. No need to worry about your privacy. Google Inc. has reached a deal with Viacom Inc. to protect the privacy of tens of millions of YouTube viewers. A judge had ordered Google, YouTube's corporate parent, to hand over user data as part of the $1-billion copyright infringement case brought by Viacom. According to the agreement, YouTube will mask the identities of individual viewers when it provides viewership records to Viacom. Among the things YouTube will cloak: user IDs and Internet protocol addresses (the unique numbers for each Web-connected device)

Cable company Charter Communications Inc. should delay plans to track customers' Internet use because of privacy concerns, two members of Congress said. Collecting data about Web surfing habits "raises substantial questions" about compliance with privacy law, Reps. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) said in a letter to Charter President and Chief Executive Neil Smit. Charter, which has 2.8 million Internet customers, plans to begin the service as a test project in June with "a couple of hundred" customers in four markets, a spokeswoman for the St. Louis-based company said.

Start-up companies generally get their money from two sources: professional venture investors and, a few years down the road, stock market investors. What's the difference? Here's how one of the smartest high-tech entrepreneurs I know puts it: "Venture money is expensive money, but it's smart money. Stock market money is cheap money, but it's dumb money. " Facebook is about to cannonball itself into a vast pool of dumb money. The big social media company is expected to announce its initial public offering as soon as Wednesday.

UCLA's neuropsychiatric hospital has banned all cellphones and laptop computers after a patient posted group photos of other patients on a social networking website, officials confirmed Monday. Dr. Thomas Strouse, medical director of the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital, said in a statement that the decision was part of "UCLA Health System's ongoing efforts to enhance patient privacy and confidentiality in compliance with California's patient rights law."

SAN FRANCISCO - It looks likeGoogle Inc.won't be able to put the Street View privacy scandal in its rear-view mirror any time soon. A newly unredacted report from federal investigators and fresh information about the engineer behind the data collecting software are casting doubt on Google's assurances that it did not realize that its street-mapping cars were snatching personal data from Wi-Fi networks used by millions of unsuspecting households....

WASHINGTON — Police departments across the country have bought inexpensive small drone aircraft with cameras to help track drug dealers, find missing children and locate wandering Alzheimer's patients, but federal rules designed to protect the nation's airspace have kept them grounded. That is about to change in a dramatic way. Under a law President Obama signed in February, the Federal Aviation Administration must write rules by May 14 on how it will license police, fire department and other public safety agencies eager to fly lightweight drones at low altitudes.

With the advent of Google Drive, we talk about cloud computing as if the bits and bytes of our lives are stored somewhere up in the air, but, really, the "clouds" are very terrestrial. What's more up in the air are the laws that govern who can access your stuff and how. Originally a way for geeks to explain to the rest of us the notion of remote servers storing and serving up content, cloud computing can be defined several ways, depending on whom you ask. In some ways, even email is a form of cloud computing.

WASHINGTON - Add cyber-security to the list of tough problems Washington can't agree on how to tackle. A bipartisan bill whose chief sponsors are the chairman and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee has run into trouble, including opposition from leading privacy groups and the White House. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Rep.C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), passed the Republican-controlled House on Thursday night.

This is a bit of an eye-opener: the Obama administration threatened Wednesday to veto HR 3523, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, because of concerns about the bill's impact on privacy. Sponsored by the top Republican and Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, CISPA would let federal agents share classified information about hackers with Internet service providers, utilities and online networks. More controversially, it would also encourage online services to share information about cyber threats with the federal government.

Leaders of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence pledged Tuesday to amend their cybersecurity bill, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act , to address the main concerns raised by civil libertarians and privacy advocates. The revisions are clear improvements, and they show that the committee is trying hard to limit the measure's scope. Nevertheless, the bill still has a fundamental problem : By encouraging network operators to share information with the government about what their customers do online, it threatens to turn ISPs and online service providers into snoops.

First Lady Barbara Bush offered a strong defense of private lives, including her own, saying Wednesday that she sympathizes with Wellesley College students who raised questions about her speaking at their graduation, but she thinks they don't understand "where I am coming from." "That's all right," Mrs. Bush said. "I chose to live the life I've lived, and I think it has been a fabulously exciting, interesting, involved life. I hope some of them will choose the same. . . .

This historic town, where America's founding fathers plotted during the Revolution and Milton Hershey later crafted his first chocolates, now boasts another distinction. It may become the nation's most closely watched small city. Some 165 closed-circuit TV cameras soon will provide live, round-the-clock scrutiny of nearly every street, park and other public space used by the 55,000 residents and the town's many tourists.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center is demanding that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission release the complete report on its Google Street View investigation. The Washington advocacy group has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see the full 25-page report . The version that the FCC released last Friday was heavily redacted. The FCC has proposed imposing a $25,000 fine on Google for stonewalling its investigators about how its street-mapping service collected and stored personal data including names, email addresses, text messages and passwords from unprotected wireless networks.

SAN FRANCISCO — Privacy watchdogs are urging the nation's top law enforcer to launch a new investigation into Google Inc. after the Federal Communications Commission did not find evidence that the Mountain View, Calif., company broke eavesdropping laws in collecting Internet data from millions of unknowing U.S. households. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, the Washington advocacy group that filed the original complaint with the FCC over Google's controversial data-collection practices, sent a letter Monday to U.S. Atty.