Obama administration pushes for legislation on student data privacy
February 5, 2015
By Christi Parsons (TNS) WASHINGTON — The White House began pushing Thursday for legislation to protect the online privacy of students, allowing them to do schoolwork while keeping the door closed to marketing and sales, according to senior officials. “We should be able to encourage those innovations,”...
Security flatlines with the discovery of Heartbleed
April 15, 2014
Whether we like it or not, we put a lot of trust and faith into the systems that carry our personal information. Our phones, our computers, and the ever-evolving “cloud,” are our repositories of the information we don’t want to memorize (phone numbers, calendar events, email archives, etc). So...
Supreme court decision on search warrants is chipping at privacy
March 19, 2014
Body armor. Semi-automatic rifles. Armored vehicles. Lack of warrants. This all currently describes America’s militarized police stratagem. The ruling of Fernandez v. California asserts that warrants are now no longer necessary in the search and seizure of homes, with the sanction of one individua...
I.T. warns of potential breaches to prevent monitoring of emails
April 1, 2013
CSUN continues to closely monitor incoming emails in the midst of persistence by hackers who break into servers. After a cheating scandal hit Harvard, a group of deans were outraged last fall by their emails having been monitored without their knowing. Chris Olsen, senior director of infrastructure s...
Don’t fool yourself, It’s not private
January 29, 2013
It's impossible to graduate college without the Internet. It's almost as hard to maintain a social life without it. Search engines are replacing encyclopedias while smartphones are on par with food and drink. Almost everyone in the developed world is online. The Internet is the technology that has become a staple in virtually all w...
Google Buzz lawsuit settlement gives students privacy control
November 18, 2010
Google Inc. was recently sued and settled a lawsuit concerning alleged privacy violations, according to an e-mail sent on Nov. 2 to all Gmail users in the United States. Google’s social networking program, Google Buzz, which launched in February of this year, was at the crux of the allegations. Google...
Google Buzz faces privacy backlash
February 22, 2010
Last week, the Google war-machine released its latest weapon in the microblogging turf-war. Its name, Google Buzz, sounds less like a jolting juggernaut and more like a bothersome insect. As many GMail users are already aware, the new Buzz feature can be found under the “Inbox” category in the em...