Privacy

NEWTON - Dan Kennedy will graduate from Boston College on Monday, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and the recipient of the school's most prestigious prize, the Edward H. Finnegan Award. Winners of the Finnegan, given to the student who best exemplifies the BC motto, "ever to excel," tend to go big - top grad schools, Wall Street, overseas fellowships. Kennedy is planning to give away his computer, recycle his Blackberry, and move to a modest communal house in St. Paul, Minn.

I don't want any trouble, and certainly not online. The trouble is, the Internet won't leave me alone. Websites are constantly tracking me with little files called cookies, criminals are trying to swipe my digital identity with spam, and online information brokers are selling the story of my life to anybody with a valid credit card. No wonder there's a ready market for online privacy protection tools. I've gone over four of the coolest, including browser plug-ins that block tracking cookies, a subscription service that helps conceal your possibly embarrassing past, and a program that can make...

Barney Frank is in love. This is not exactly news — he's getting married in July — but it's still striking, the way a congressman who has cultivated a reputation for prickliness can be so publicly, sweetly sentimental. "It's funny," Frank said last week, musing about his relationship with his fiance, Jim Ready. "I used to listen to these songs about love and . . . they didn't mean anything to me. I would almost be kind of annoyed by them, you know — it's like I was left out. The whole thing takes on a meaning it didn't have.

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — A former Rutgers University student who used a webcam to spy on his gay roommate was sentenced Monday to 30 days in jail — a punishment that disappointed some activists, but came as a relief to others who feared he would be made a scapegoat for his fellow freshman's suicide. Dharun Ravi, 20, could have gotten 10 years behind bars for his part in a case that burst onto the front pages after Tyler Clementi threw himself off the George Washington Bridge.

WASHINGTON -- The incoming Senate Judiciary Committee chairman pledged greater scrutiny yesterday of computerized government anti terrorism screening after learning that millions of Americans who travel internationally have been assigned risk assessments over the past four years without their knowledge. "Data banks like this are overdue for oversight," said Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who will take over as head of the committee in January. "That is going to change in the new Congress.

WASHINGTON -- Nearly three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, two key elements of the Bush administration's effort to bolster airport security remain works in progress: more rigorous background checks of passengers and a better way to check for explosives in luggage. A plan to prescreen air travelers for terrorist connections, once described by the administration as an urgent need, has been sent back to the drawing board. And only eight of 441 commercial airports have systems recognized as the best at quickly and effectively screening checked baggage.

Here's a juicy one:  As I approach the birth of my first child within a few weeks, my husband and I have been discussing the issue of privacy and Facebook. Neither of us uses Facebook, but many of our friends and family members do. The topic has come up recently because my mother is a repeat offender when it comes to posting information or pictures about us that we have asked her not to share. For example, she outed my pregnancy twice on Facebook before we were ready to announce it to our friends and extended family - after she was asked specifically and...

BERKELEY, Calif. - Sharp-eyed dog walkers along the San Francisco Bay waterfront may have spotted a strange-looking plane zipping overhead recently that looked strikingly like the US stealth drone captured by Iran in December. A few key differences: The flying wing seen above Berkeley is a fraction of the size of the CIA's waylaid aircraft. And it is made of plastic foam. But in some ways it is just like a real spy plane. The 4 1/2-foot-wide aircraft, built by software engineers Mark Harrison and Andreas Oesterer in their spare time, can fly to specified GPS...

I don't want any trouble, and certainly not online. The trouble is, the Internet won't leave me alone. Websites are constantly tracking me with little files called cookies, criminals are trying to swipe my digital identity with spam, and online information brokers are selling the story of my life to anybody with a valid credit card. No wonder there's a ready market for online privacy protection tools. I've gone over four of the coolest, including browser plug-ins that block tracking cookies, a subscription service that helps conceal your possibly embarrassing past, and a...

Bobby Brown is pleading for privacy as he and daughter, Bobbi Kristina, cope with Whitney Houston's death. Brown and Houston divorced in 2007 after 14 tumultuous years together, and it's up to the Roxbury-bred singer now to take care of their only child. Soon after her mother's body was discovered Saturday in a hotel room in Beverly Hills, 18-year-old Bobbi Kristina was treated at a hospital for an emotional breakdown. But she's since stabilized, according to Brown. "My daughter Bobbi Kristina is doing much better," Brown said in a statement yesterday.

WASHINGTON — Facebook rode more than enthusiasm to its $100 billion stock offering Friday, children's advocates say. A crucial propellent was investors' belief that lawmakers will not ban such social networks from selling troves of excruciatingly private details from the lives of teenagers. For months, legislative attempts to expand and refine a children's online protection law have moved at the speed of a dial-up connection. The law — itself a teenager, passed before the advent of Facebook, app-enhanced smartphones, and the vast apparatus of data-collection technologies — demands...

The city of Cambridge paid nearly $4 million to settle a workplace discrimination case with two former city employees, according to documents released by the city. The settlement agreement, signed in October, shows that Mary Wong, formerly executive director of the Cambridge Kids' Council, and Linda Stamper, a former lawyer for the city, agreed to accept $3.85 million from the city to resolve the discrimination suit brought by the women. Neither the city nor the employees should claim victory or vindication in the case, the agreement said.

A German data protection official has warned Facebook investors that the social networking site's $38 starting share price is based on practices that breach European privacy rules. Thilo Weichert, the data protection commissioner for the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein says shareholders should be aware that if European privacy authorities have their way, "Facebook's business model will implode. " Weichert was quoted by German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Friday saying Facebook could be ordered to stop transferring user information to the United States.

European officials who met this week with imprisoned former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said Thursday that authorities are impinging on her privacy. Mailis Reps and Marietta de Pourbaix-Lundin, rapporteurs for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, visited Tymoshenko this week in the hospital room where she is being treated for a chronic back condition. They told reporters that there are three cameras in Tymoshenko's room and that guards are present at all times, making Tymoshenko uncomfortable.

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration and the nation's chief privacy regulator pressed Congress on Wednesday to enact online privacy legislation, saying new laws would level the playing field between companies that already had privacy policies and those that lacked them, and thus escape regulatory oversight. Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces limited Internet privacy laws, and Cameron F. Kerry, general counsel for the Commerce Department, said at a hearing of the Senate commerce committee that writing new laws and giving the FTC the power to enforce...

WASHINGTON - Continuing its crackdown on privacy violations, the Federal Trade Commission charged Myspace on Tuesday with violating federal law by breaching its promise not to share users' personal information, including their Web browsing habits, with advertising companies. Without admitting or denying the charge, the social media Internet site agreed to a tentative consent order that requires it to obey its stated privacy policies, to establish comprehensive privacy controls and procedures, and to submit to audits of its actions every other year for 20 years.

BRUSSELS - The European Commission proposed sweeping reforms yesterday to protect the confidentiality of personal data online including a "right to be forgotten," which would let people have information about themselves deleted if there was no legitimate reason to retain it. The EC said the proposal would safeguard people's privacy and save companies money, but some business interests have already said they will lobby for changes. If the directive is ultimately adopted, it would update one from 1995, when fewer than 1 percent of Europeans used the internet.

The mother of Lauren Astley, the Wayland High school graduate allegedly killed by her former boyfriend, spoke out yesterday about the loss of her only child. In a statement released through Middlesex prosecutors, Mary Dunne said she wanted to thank the Wayland community and the friends of her daughter for their support since Monday, when her daughter’s body was found in marshy land off Water Row. “I want to thank the media for respecting my privacy and thank our friends, family, and community for their support during what has been, and continues to be, an excruciatingly difficult...

THE DEAL: Myspace settled a privacy investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. THE CHARGE: The government says that despite telling users it would not share personally identifiable information with others, Myspace gave advertisers users' "Friend ID" numbers. That allowed advertisers to find users' publicly available personal information, often including full names, and could even lead advertisers to discover users' Web-browsing activity. TERMS: Myspace agreed not to misrepresent its privacy policies.