The recent News of the World phone hacking scandal illustrated how easy it can be to access poorly protected information. The investigators who hacked into the phones were not IT geniuses; they just exploited basic flaws in the caller ID and PIN systems. A few years back, a default PIN was provided for access to mobile messages – with the onus on the user to change it if they wanted to. Needless to say, many people never bothered to change this default PIN. Even when they did, it was often to an easy to guess number, like 1234 or 3333. While things have improved with mobile message security

The internet has led to an increasing clash between personal and professional lives. Once upon a time it was only your CV or application that counted when trying to win a job interview, but one new trend is to vet perspective employees using their online presence. It’s well publicised that many employees have got into trouble at work due to comments they’ve made on social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook. A lot of organisations now have strict internet usage policies, and it’s estimated that 8% of companies have dismissed staff due to their online actions. What is less well known is

Advances in technology have made it easier to collect and organise information than ever before. Companies like Google and Facebook store billions of details from websites and online accounts, and make good money from the services they provide to people. Governments have also been developing information-centric systems, from the laudable data.gov initiatives both in the UK and the US to the more questionable collection of personal data. Once information is collected and organised electronically, it’s much easier to share and exploit. One problem this poses was illustrated by the recent release

Social networking has been a major part of the rise of ‘Web 2.0’, a phrase coined to represent the move towards greater information sharing and collaboration on the internet. While MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin and others have played their part, Facebook dominates social networking. As of July, 500 million people around the world use Facebook actively. As people increasingly share information on the internet there have, however, been growing concerns about the privacy. Earlier this year, Facebook came under increased pressure over poor privacy controls and a lack of transparency about how it used