EU-parlamentet röstade i dag ned det omstridda Swiftavtalet. Den konservativa gruppen försökte in i det sista få omröstningen uppskjuten – men nejsidan segrade. Välinformerade källor säger dock till DN.se att USA oavsett detta kommer att skaffa sig tillgång till sekretssbelagda uppgifter från europeiska banker.

...

Men EU-parlamentets skepsis mot Swiftavtalet ingår också dragkampen med ministerrådet och kommissionen om hur makten ska fördelas nu när Lissabonfördragets nya regler trätt i kraft. Fördraget ger parlamentet väsentligt mer makt, men hur det kommer att se ut på detaljnivå är inte klart.

En av dessa saker är argumentet om att den som har rent mjöl i påsen inte har något att frukta. Det är ett sånt där argument som 'vanligt hederligt' folk går med på, och kanske till och med använder själva lite då och då. Problemet med det här argumentet är dock att det inte är ett argument. Det är inte heller ett pseudoargument. Det är - och jag gör här ett noggrant och väl avvägt urval av de många begrepp jag har lärt mig använda under mina år på universitetet - ett skitargument.

Members of a European Parliament subcommittee dealt a blow to US-EU relations by voting to reject a proposed bank data sharing deal between the US and Europe in a preliminary vote on Thursday.

The agreement allows the US to access information gathered by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) about bank transfers within Europe. SWIFT manages global transactions between thousands of financial institutions in over 200 countries.

Members of the parliament's civil liberties committee voted by 29 votes to 23 to reject the SWIFT deal, arguing that the deal fails to protect the privacy of EU citizens.

US authorities say access to bank details is vital to counterterrorism efforts, but many in Europe object to the widespread invasion of privacy.

It is now compulsory for people selected for a scan to take part, or they will not be allowed to fly.

The new security rules have been introduced following the attempt to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day.

There have been concerns the scanners breach passengers' rights to privacy.

Transport Secretary Lord Adonis said in the immediate future only a small proportion of airline passengers would be selected for scanning.

In a written statement to the House of Commons, he said: "If a passenger is selected for scanning, and declines, they will not be permitted to fly."

Did you know that all websites that you visit can find out which fonts you have installed? It's also possible to find out if you have a range of programs installed. These include Adobe Reader, OpenOffice.org, Google Chrome and Microsoft Silverlight. Perhaps even which sites you have visited lately can be detected!

When you surf around the internet your browser leaves behind a trail of digital footprints. Websites can use these footprints to check your system. BrowserSpy.dk is a service where you can check just what information it's possible to gather from your system, just by visiting a website.

Google thrives where privacy does not. If you're like most internet users, Google knows more about you than you might be comfortable with. Whether you were logged in to a Google account or not, they know everything you've ever searched for, what search results you clicked on, what news you read, and every place you've ever gotten directions to. Most of the time, thanks to things like Google Analytics, they even know which websites you visited that you didn't reach through Google. If you use Gmail, they know the content of every email you've ever sent or received, whether you've deleted it or not.

...

GoogleSharing is a system that mixes the requests of many different users together, such that Google is not capable of telling what is coming from whom.

[...] we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.

...

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Kameror som gör det möjligt för flygsäkerhetspersonal att se igenom passagerarnas kläder ska införas även på storflygplatserna i Rom och Milano.

...

I USA används tekniken bland annat på ett 20-tal flygplatser.

The program would collect the name, gender and birth date of the approximately five million Canadians who fly through American airspace en route to destinations such as the Caribbean, Mexico and South America, even if their planes don't touch the ground in the States.

...

The council said this would force Canadian airlines to breach either Secure Flight or the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, a federal privacy law that applies to Canadian companies.

The guys at gravatar.com offer a nice service: for website owners, they let you automatically associate an avatar to your users, through the user's email address. The users who register to gravatars.com are able to change their gravatar and the change will be visible on all gravatar-enabled websites where they registered with the same email.

...

There is a piece of information which must be made public, though. It's this 32 char string which serves as a token for your web browser to retrieve the right image. How much information are we leaking to the bad people inhabiting the internet? Can that key be used to retrieve our email?