Peter A Clarke

It began most spectacularly with geeks at Wired hacked into a Jeep Cherokee and stopped it cold on a highway.  It is reported amusingly with Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway—With Me in It. That sparked a flurry of stories on the internet of things and data security including by Forbes at  Five Lessons On The ‘Security Of Things’ From The Jeep Cherokee Hack and Bloomberg with Hacked Jeep Cherokee Exposes Weak Underbelly of High-Tech Cars.  The experiment was also covered on youtube here.  Breaching ineffective cyber security defences and accessing appliances and equipment pre dated this experiment.  And some potential hacks and breaches are far more serious, such as individuals with heart pacemakers which have been reported as being accessible as far back as 2012 and in Science in  Could a wireless pacemaker let hackers take control of your heart? Read the rest of this entry »

Privacy protection and regulation in the United States is regarded as being uniformly weak.  That is not correct.  A better description is that it is sectoral, strong in some areas, such as health, and extremely weak in others, such as with customer lists.  In the regulatory zone it is similarly a mixed report.  The Federal Trade Commission (the “FTC”) has been very active in taking action for privacy breaches, involving a claim of misleading and deceptive conduct.  Most recently the Federal Communications Commission is going to issue stringent, for the US at least, privacy protections which require strong privacy regulations on internet.  Read the rest of this entry »

Hulk Hogan has won his privacy suit against Gawker for publishing a video tape of him having sex with a friend’s wife.  It has been Read the rest of this entry »

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (“OAIC”) has announced the creation of a Consumer Privacy Network.  It is a forum of Read the rest of this entry »

Stay in one spot long enough and you will see Richard Ackland reheat an older article, add a paragraph here, lose one there and spruce it up with new photographs and hey presto another deadline met.  His latest Read the rest of this entry »

Data breaches by media and telecommunications companies are nothing new.  Particularly telcos.  In Australia, Optus and Telstra both have a dreadful record in protecting personal information.  Less often Read the rest of this entry »

The Standing Committee on Law and Justice has issued its final report relating to the serious invasion of Privacy in New South Wales.  The report is Read the rest of this entry »

The encryption debate did not begin or end with the FBI bringing action against Apple to compel it to crack open its operating system.  And it is not confined to that issue.  There have been Read the rest of this entry »

The Nasdaq reports, in Bosses Harness Big Data to Predict Which Workers Might Get Sick  that insurers and “Employee Wellness” firms are mining company employees’ data to predict whether and when they might be sick. That data includes the prescription drugs being used, where employees Read the rest of this entry »

Another example of the internet of thing being prone to privacy breaches is the story titled Hard-coded password exposes up to 46,000 video surveillance DVRs to hacking of up to 46,000 internet accessible digital video recorders which can be taken over and controlled by hackers.  As the story Read the rest of this entry »