personal data

Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, a joint venture between Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, unveiled that the personal data of 34,000 investment clients stored on two CDs was lost in transit to a government office last month, says the Wall Street Journal report.

The Journal says that the CDs were password protected but not encrypted. They went gone after the brokerage company mailed them to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance.

Facebook released a statement where the social networking giant is disclaiming its extracting numbers and other details from handsets before making them available on the social network. Rumors and complaints suggested the official Facebook iPhone application uploads all users numbers in a phone's address book to Facebook, apparently without warning, potentially be accessible to anyone.

Users of Firefox are being tricked into installing a Trojan that makes the browser to save all login credentials by default and subsequently uses the stolen information to create a new user account (username: Maestro) on the compromised machine. Then it steals personal user data from the Windows Protected Storage Area which is on a constant basis transferred to the crooks’ server.

The author behind the Trojan known as Salar “Salixem” Zeynali is an Iran-based crimeware hobbyist and heavy metal enthusiast, according to his Facebook profile.

According to the Wall Street Journal last report, Facebook has been providing advertisers with the data they can use to discover users' names and locations, despite terms of its privacy policy.

New data provided by a website called What the Internet knows about you shows that today browsing the Internet implicates exposure of your personal information starting from news articles you read and ending with the Zip Code.

The new report reveals that about 76% of users exposed their browser histories, with the proportion of those using Apple's Safari and Google Chrome browsers even higher. Surprisingly, the percentage was also higher among browsers that turned off JavaScript.

Kirk Skaugen, Intel vice president, said that the hardware maker will not follow the software developments anymore, instead it will lead the market.

"We learned our lesson in waiting for software. We did this 64-bit thing that was perceived to be a little bit late relative to the market. So we will get the hardware out there as soon as it's ready," Kirk Skaugen of Intel's Architecture Group told a group of analysts and reporters gathered in San Francisco Tuesday morning for the rollout of the Xeon 7500 and 6500 series (née Nehalem-EX) server processors.

In a move to protect privacy of the Internet subscribers in the United States fierce competitors Microsoft and Google have joined their forces and teamed with over 20 other technology providers and lobby groups from the right and left of US politics to update a US privacy law. The law was written in 1986, which was not even the start of the era of the web, email and mobile phones.