USA Today’s CyberSpeak columnist Kim Komando focuses on the issue of privacy and location-tracking services in an article. She explains the problems and she also gives tips on how to protect your privacy.

Geotagging adds GPS coordinates to your online posts or photos. You may be exposing this information without even knowing it. Geotagging is particularly popular with photos; many smartphones automatically geotag photos. [...]

Unless you have a stalker, these [location-based social-networking] services aren’t particularly dangerous on their own. You need to think about the layers of information you leave online. As you use more services, it’s easier for criminals to track you.

Let’s say you post a photo of your new house to a photo site. The photo is geotagged. You’ve linked your photo account to Facebook. And you use Foursquare or Twitter on the go; updates are sent to your Facebook account. Read more »

To recap: In February, the Robbins family filed a lawsuit — Robbins v. Lower Merion School District (pdf) — alleging that the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania misused the 2,300 Webcam-enabled laptops it issued to students in order to remotely peep into the students’ homes, take photographs and violate their privacy. The school district said it used the webcams only to track school-issued laptops that it thought were lost, stolen or inadvertently taken without permission.

In May, lawyers and computer experts hired by the district to investigate the case released a report (pdf) that said there was “overzealous and questionable use of technology by [Information Services] personnel without any apparent regard for privacy considerations or sufficient consultation with administrators.” Later that month, a federal judge “permanently banned the Lower Merion School District from using webcams or other intrusive technology to secretly monitor students through their school-issued laptops.” Recently, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the Lower Merion School District’s school board unanimously passed new policies “to govern the use and tracking of student laptops and other technology” to avoid a repeat of the recent controversy, which has cost the district “nearly $1 million in legal fees and expenses.”

Now, the FBI has announced that it has completed its investigation into the webcam  incident and federal officials would not be filing criminal charges. In a press release, United States Attorney Zane David Memeger said, “After a thorough review of the evidence in this matter by my office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office, the Montgomery County Detectives, and the Lower Merion Police Department, I have concluded that bringing criminal charges is not warranted in this matter.” Read more »

To recap: In February, the Robbins family filed a lawsuit — Robbins v. Lower Merion School District (pdf) — alleging that the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania misused the 2,300 Webcam-enabled laptops it issued to students in order to remotely peep into the students’ homes, take photographs and violate their privacy. The school district said it used the webcams only to track school-issued laptops that it thought were lost, stolen or inadvertently taken without permission. In May, lawyers and computer experts hired by the district to investigate the case released a report (pdf) that said there was “overzealous and questionable use of technology by [Information Services] personnel without any apparent regard for privacy considerations or sufficient consultation with administrators.” Later that month, a federal judge “permanently banned the Lower Merion School District from using webcams or other intrusive technology to secretly monitor students through their school-issued laptops.” (Wired had a story about security vulnerabilities in LANrev Theft Track, a remote-surveillance technology used by Lower Merion School District.)

Now, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the Lower Merion School District’s school board has unanimously passed new policies “to govern the use and tracking of student laptops and other technology” to avoid a repeat of the recent controversy, which has cost the district “nearly $1 million in legal fees and expenses.”

The measures, passed unanimously by the school board at its monthly meeting, spell out in detail when, how, and for what reasons school officials can access or monitor the laptops they will give to each of the district’s nearly 2,300 high school students next month. Read more »

The Washington Post reports on a new biometric identification system that the Montgomery County Department of Recreation plans to begin using this fall. County officials are making this change without holding any public information meetings, a department spokeswoman said; the new biometric ID system was announced in the Montgomery County Summer Guide for Recreation and Parks Programs.

Beginning in the fall, county officials plan to replace the plastic cards customers use to gain access to pools, weight rooms and community center programs at the Department of Recreation’s 33 facilities with biometric finger vein scanners. [...]

The scanners, which resemble a computer mouse, create a unique code for each person. The devices read vein patterns by reacting with hemoglobin in blood, said Michael Trader, president of Atlanta-based M2SYS Technology, a vendor of the scanners. Read more »

The Wall Street Journal continues its in-depth report, “What They Know,” about the state of surveillance in the United States and how these surveillance programs affect individual privacy. The Journal series has prompted more Congressional interest in online tracking of consumers. Today, Congressmen Ed Markey (Democrat) and Joe Barton (Republican) sent a letter to 15 companies identified in the Journal articles.

“We are troubled by the findings in this report, which suggest that the price of consumers’ unfettered use of the Internet increasingly is surrender of their personal information, preferences and intimate details to websites, data monitoring companies, marketers and other information gathering firms that seek to track them online and develop digital dossiers for a range of purposes, including marketing,” Markey and Barton wrote. “As Congress prepares to consider comprehensive privacy legislation, we request responses to the questions that follow to better understand your companies’ practices in this area.”

In the latest installment, the Journal discusses the problems of location data-tracking and how it can be exploited by stalkers or domestic abusers. I’ve discussed the problems that can arise from location tracking via mobile phones or other GPS-enabled devices. In June, the Washington Post reported on the use of text messaging by domestic abusers against their victims. In May, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on an unusual lawsuit in Wisconsin against a GPS company; the plaintiff claims the firm assisted a domestic violence abuser to harm his victim. A 2009 report about stalking from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics found: “Electronic monitoring was used to stalk 1 in 13 victims. Video or digital cameras were equally likely as listening devices or bugs to be used to electronically monitor victims (46% and 42%). Global positioning system (GPS) technology comprised about a tenth of the electronic monitoring of stalking victims.” Read more about the report here. Also, the National Network to End Domestic Violence has a paper about how abusers and stalkers use technology to control and harass their victims. Read more »

The Wall Street Journal has published an in-depth report, “What They Know,” about the state of surveillance in the United States and how these surveillance programs affect individual privacy. Full coverage is at: wsj.com/WTK. The Journal also has asked for questions from the public about online spying and privacy risks: “If you have questions for reporter Julia Angwin, other Journal reporters and editors or digital-privacy experts, leave a comment here, email digits@wsj.com or reply to @WhatTheyKnow on Twitter.”

Here’s the list of stories so far:

• The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets — This article explains the investigative series of reports. “A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers.”
• Tracking the Trackers: Our Method — This article details the methodology used by the Wall Street Journal to investigate Internet tracking technology. Read more »