Giving Transportation Security Administration agents a peek under your clothes may soon be a practice that goes well beyond airport checkpoints.

Ministers must do more to stop internet service providers (ISPs) snooping on private e-mails without consent, an ex-cyber security minister has said. Some ISPs have trialled software that intercepts and scans e-mails to target ads.

They are meant to ask permission first - but former Labour minister Lord West says it is too easy to flout the rules.

How can anyone justify threatening rape victims with a Bad-Conduct Discharge if they dare to speak out about their assaults? I'm just dying to hear the argument, if you've got one!

Mozilla and Google, reacting to US government pressure, will add Do Not Track tools to their popular web browsers Firefox and Chrome to make it more difficult for advertisers to collect data on users and to personalize ads.

The feature, developed at Stanford University, would include a "header," a small piece of information transmitted by your computer when you click on a website. It will tell advertisers that you do not want them to gather information about where you have been or what you've done on the web.

"Mandatory data retention 'raises serious privacy and free speech concerns'

Advocacy groups have welcomed reports that the US government plans to boost the policing of online privacy with new laws and a new watchdog.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the Obama administration was set to unveil its new strategy in the coming weeks.

Satire-- but perhaps with more than a bit of truth...? (Turn on your speakers...)

Homeland Security has announced that body scanners will appear at virtually every major airport in the United States; however, not everyone is happy with what critics call a "virtual strip search," especially since a government agency has recently admitted to saving the images of …

Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty's computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny.The file consists of a single code— 4c812db292272995e5416a323e79bd37—that secretly identifies her as a 26-year-old female in Nashville, Tenn.

The code knows that her favorite movies include "The Princess Bride," "50 First Dates" and "10 Things I Hate About You." It knows she enjoys the "Sex and the City" series. It knows she browses entertainment news and likes to take quizzes.

Privacy could be enhanced if data was allowed to fade, suggests research. Dutch researcher Dr Harold van Heerde is looking into ways to gradually "degrade" the information that sites gather about visitors.

Slowly swapping details for more general information can help guard against accidental disclosure, he said.

It has not been a good week for Saudi Arabia's morality police, defenders of the kingdom's strict Islamic values and the scourge of young men and women who dare to meet in public out of wedlock.

Facebook looks likely to cave into pressure from users and simplify its privacy settings in the near future.

It follows criticisms of its privacy policy from US senators, the European Union and civil liberty groups.

EDIT: Since STDCarriers was spamming Newsvine, and hence removed from the site, links to that site have been removed from this article.

Yesterday I stumbled across a user account on Newsvine which had me wondering. The account is STDCarriers, and the name was immediately intriguing. So I followed the link to the website being described in the profile bio, and found STD Carriers Disease Control and Prevention Services.

The site explains itself as follows:

STD Carriers was founded as and still is the first public early warning alert system for identifying potential sources of incurable sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The International Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) Carrier Registry is database driven list of people with HIV/AIDS, Genital Herpes, HPV, Genital Warts, and Hepatitis C. Our automated content management system (CMS) utilized the power of modern information technology to provide a real time information storage and distribution service that is fully operational 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

So basically, the idea is that if you are thinking of having sexual relations with an individual you can type their name into the site to see if they are listed as suffering from any of the above diseases. This immediately raises some flags for me, so I thought I'd bring a discussion here to see what other people think.

So far in the As the WebCam Turns®, we've learned that: --They never informing the parents or students of the remote surveillance program --The Lower Merion School District first denied that the program existed

The Digital Due Process coalition is pushing Congress to modernize privacy laws in the United States. The coalition -- comprised of technology companies and special interest groups, including Microsoft, Google, EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), eBay, and others -- feels that existing privacy regulations do not adequately protect data in the digital era, and could stop businesses from embracing cloud computing.

It seems like vendors can't develop a new product or offer a new service these days without tacking the word "cloud" onto it. There are major players -- like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google -- backing the move to cloud-based services, and businesses are rushing to capitalize on the operational and financial benefits offered by cloud computing. However, businesses need to consider whether existing privacy law adequately protects data in the cloud.