The internet activity of everyone in UK will have to be stored for one year by Internet service providers, under the new surveillance law plans. "This duty would include forcing firms to hold a schedule of which websites someone visits and the apps they connect to through computers, smartphones, tablets and other devices. Police and other agencies would be then able to access these records in pursuit of criminals -- but also seek to retrieve data in a wider range of inquiries, such as missing people." more
Companies such as Apple, Google and others will be banned from offering encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to under the UK's Investigatory Powers Bill. more
Members of the European Parliament have taken stock of the lack of action taken to safeguard citizens' fundamental rights following revelations of electronic mass surveillance. more
The European Union has struck a deal "in principle" with the United States on a new data-sharing agreement to allow digital information to flow between borders. more
Facebook lobbyists are working behind the scenes for a major cyber bill set for a final Senate vote Tuesday despite growing opposition to the bill among tech companies, according to a digital rights advocacy group fighting against the measure. more
Despite positive discussions currently underway at the ICANN54 meetings in Dublin regarding protection of privacy services for domain name registrants, another meeting in Paris seems to be contradicting the efforts. more
The personal data of Europeans held in the United States by Internet companies is not safe from US government snooping, the European court of justice ruled today, in a landmark verdict that hits Facebook, Google, Amazon and many others. more
The Internet Engineering Task Force has approved a Draft RFC for "The .onion Special-Use Domain Name" by the Tor Project, the provider of online anonymity and privacy services. more
In a statement released today, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has criticized ICANN for not being proactive on privacy matters, saying the organization "can't seem to wrap its head around" the issue. more
Decix, the largest internet traffic exchange point (IXP) worldwide, has had it with the snoops. The Frankfurt company on Thursday confirmed a report by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung that it will file a complaint at the German Federal Administrative Court against the obligation to grant broad access to the German Intelligence Service (BND) to the traffic transiting its large switches. more
Google is closing its engineering office in Russia as a result of new law coming into force next year requiring foreign firms to store Russian users' personal data on servers located in Russia. more
A survey of Internet users in 24 countries has found that 83% believe affordable access to the Internet should be a basic human right, according to the "CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust." The results of the new survey, commissioned by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and conducted by global research company Ipsos, were presented today in Ottawa, Canada. more
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has issued a statement recommending that encryption be the default traffic option for protocols: "The IAB urges protocol designers to design for confidential operation by default. We strongly encourage developers to include encryption in their implementations, and to make them encrypted by default. We similarly encourage network and service operators to deploy encryption where it is not yet deployed, and we urge firewall policy administrators to permit encrypted traffic." more
A first-time study of publically-reported data breaches in the 28 European Union member countries, plus Norway and Switzerland, conducted by the Central European University's Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS) has found that between 2004 and 2014 the continent's organizations suffered 229 incidents covering 227 million personal records. more
On October 30 – 31, 2013, The New York Review of Books held a conference called "Power, Privacy, and the Internet," taking a look at the role of the Internet both as a vehicle of political and cultural dissent and, in the hands of the state, as a weapon of repression and control. The recordings from the event have recently been released where listeners can stream or download the audio. more