This has been reported by Alexandre Dulaunoy on Twitter: Google Talk keeps track of your SMS!

Goodiff, a service for automated tracking of semantic changes in web service policies, reported the following change: “When you send and receive SMS messages to or from Google Talk, we collect and maintain information associated with those messages, such as the phone number, the wireless carrier associated with the phone number, the content of the message, and the date and time of the transaction.”

This can lead to potential, involuntary data leak… SMS are too often considered as a secure way to transmit information (like temporary access codes).

Support forums are very popular on the Internet. Some help about any manufacturer or applications can be found for free and, often, performed by very competent people. But, when commercial products are involved), it can be dangerous to post official information coming from the manufacturer or the developer itself…

This is a bad story for an Orange employee. Orange (part of the France Telecom group) is a telecommunications operator (Internet, mobile and IPTV) which distributes the iPhone on the French market. This mobile phone is very popular and a lot of forums are dedicated to it. On one of them, iphonefr.com, an Orange employee was very active under the pseudo “Devax”. This guy was very helpful to the forum community and contributed to help a lot of users to fix issues or to choose the best offers. Of course, he made that for free, outside his work hours.

He was arrested by the Police and accused of disclosing confidential information! Why? He published on his blog the “new” communication rates not yet made publicly available by Orange (but already present on the Intranet).

The question which arise is: Is a document published on a company Intranet classified as non-confidential? Was the document correctly classified?

Here is a copy of an article in a French newspaper: Un salarié de France Telecom mis à pied pour ses indiscrétions sur un blog.

A good source of information for data breaches reports: datalossdb.org. The statistics page is impressive (in all sense of the term). Good job guys!

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Nymity, global privacy and data protection research services firm specializing in compliance and operational risk management, published interesting maps which give a decent overview of the legislative landscapes regarding the data breaches for United States, Canada, and the EU.
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Source: nymity.com.

Microsoft COFEE (“Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) has been leaked and is available for download via BitTorrent.

Source: slashdot.org, crunchgear.com.