Culture

Is Your Credit Card For Sale? Is TomTom Selling You Out? (PANIC!)

Mass hysteria.

Privacy Violations All Over The Place

So the Royal Wedding happened (our flimsy excuse for using the banner picture), but we’re not here to talk about that yet.   The PlayStation Network has been down since the 20th of April after being hacked. A group of hackers claim to have the credit card details of 2.2 million PlayStation Network members for sale to the highest bidders.  Sony has said the credit card data was encrypted, and they have no evidence the data has been stolen.  Sony has confirmed PSN members’ download history, friends lists, trophies, and settings won’t be affected by the outage and cloud saves will be restored.  Sony has also admitted the email addresses, home addresses, IDs, and passwords of 77 million members were not encrypted and have been stolen.  In other words, if you’re using “BieberFever4eva” as your PSN password, make sure it’s not also your password for everything else (also, what the hell dude?).

In other personal invasion news, TomTom NV, the largest manufacturer of navigation devices in Europe, has been caught selling user data of Dutch customers to the Netherlands government.  Dutch police have used the data to set up speed traps.  TomTom’s CEO issued an apology, claiming they believed the data would only be used by the government “to improve safety or relieve traffic bottlenecks” and that they had to sell the data because they had weak first quarter earnings.  Oh, well, that makes it just peachy.  I guess it’s just perfectly okay to sell private data without permission if your richass shareholders get a little skittish and you can pretend your intentions were good for an action that was fundamentally violating customer privacy regardless of intent. TomTom can BiteBite me.

With all this stealing and invasion of privacy, at least there’s some good news.  Matt Burns created a new site aptly titled “Stolen Camera Finder” which can help you find your stolen camera.  You load any picture you took with the camera into the website (nudes not necessary, send them to us instead), and the site finds the camera’s serial number from the EXIF data then searches the internet for other photos taken with the same camera.  It may lead you to the thief who stole your camera, or it may lead to all those pictures your cat took and loaded on kitty porn sites when you weren’t home.

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  • The Cajun Boy’s slideshow making fun of the Royal Wedding and Burnsy’s list of 50 actual items of Royal Wedding merch are worth a second look (or first). (picture via Arbroath)
  • Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to Newark schools, but now nydailynews is reporting some are angry that the money is being used to close schools in poor neighborhoods, open charter schools, lengthen the school day, and weaken tenure protections.
  • While MySpace Tom is selling real estate in Las Vegas, his former company is for sale again.  Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought it for $580 million five years ago.  Now they’ve set a minimum bid of only $100 million for the sale.  Well then, I guess we’ll have to withdraw our bid of “one baggie full of Kool-Aid points”. (Gawker)

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  • “The Royal Wedding Drinking Game” page on Facebook has 230,469 likes.  For comparison, the official Facebook page for the British Monarchy has 353,187 likes.  That’s almost one for every Corgi the Queen Mother has.  (More internet and social media related Royal Wedding stats at VisualLoop, picture via SofaPizza)
  • Recent Nielsen stats on social media sentiment show more people talking about the Royal Wedding than about the Japan earthquake or Egypt.  65% of the chatter is coming from the U.S.  (Mashable)
  • More than $70,000 worth of items related to the Royal Wedding were sold on eBay in April.  Enjoy the lead paint coating all of that stuff, guys. (TechCrunch)

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