Children of today have access to the internet, which is full of opportunities they can discover and explore every day. They can find new ideas, online friends, challenging frontiers, and a lot more. All these are accessible to them anytime, and to some, anywhere. There are times when they become so engrossed with what they are doing that it results in mindless exploration. This exposes them to the dangers of the virtual world, much like the real world.

Parents should not forget their responsibility of maintaining the online privacy of their children. Only very few websites do not collect personal information from children. Information is gathered in various ways, depending on the purpose. Most often, web sites ask them to register, join a club or enter a contest, fill out a questionnaire, and others. Having this information, web sites can use it to identify a person and make something more out of it. Children become innocent targets of advertisements, or they end up on a customer list and become commodities of data marketing.

Children will always be easy targets of privacy invasion in the virtual world. It is a fact that technology-based solutions are not sufficient to put an end to this problem. Only parents and guardians can provide the best guard against privacy exploitation of children. Parents should not be too permissive of their children’s online activities. This starts with parents spending time with their children and actually seeing their online activities.

Beijing considered as “unacceptable” Google’s action of blaming China for the hacking attacks that the search giant suffered. After a year, Google was again attacked; the first one also pointed to China as the source of the perpetrator. Google said that there was a concentrated Chinese campaign to steal the personal email accounts of some senior government officials of the U.S. and Chinese activists. The company said that both the first and the second attacks were both traced to Jinan, China.

Google explained that the concerted attack used targeted emails that were sent to hundreds of recipients. To the users’ dismay, the emails led to a fake log in page created by some unscrupulous individuals, and not by Google. The recipients were willing to give their passwords because these emails appeared to have been sent by a known sender.

According to a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman in a news briefing, blaming the crime on China is improper. He further mentioned that hacking is an international problem, and China is also a victim. China has always declared that it does not condone hacking. It did not deny that hacking remains a popular hobby in the country, but it is not supported, by any means, by any public agency or entity.

F.B.I. agents will soon be given more leeway to scrutinize the lives of those people who attract their attention. The new powers can be used to search databases or to go through household trash. They can even use surveillance teams to look into the lives of people who behave unusually. These changes will be incorporated in the Bureau’s new manual called the Domestic Investigation and Operations Guide.

The new rules are expected to give agents a greater degree of “freedom” to foresee any criminal or terrorist activity. It is said that there will be additional authority to investigate people. However, there have been unfavorable reactions posed by several concerned individuals, especially those who advocate privacy. One of them said that easing up on the restrictions on agents’ powers was an unwise decision. There is a possibility of using intrusive techniques even for those persons who are actually innocent. Abuse can still occur, like those “national security letters”, that allowed agents to obtain information without a court order.

An F.B.I. counsel stood on the Bureau’s side, saying that previous problems involving national security letters have already been fixed, and would not recur. An explanation was made regarding it, stating that changes in the Bureau’s manual do not require any permission. The risks and the benefits brought about by the changes were carefully weighed. The counsel further stated that there were not actually major changes, but more of a fine-tuning.

There are an increasing number of reported breaches of medical privacy. This means that the privacy and security of people’s health records is sometimes compromised. This is evidenced by the breaches committed by nearly 300 hospitals, doctors and insurance companies. There is an impending government effort to shift to electronic health care records. However, this negative information might make it difficult for its proponents to gain public support.

The proposed switch to electronic health records expects less medical errors, reduced costs, and improved quality of outcomes. To support the effect of the conversion, the government is putting its best foot forward to enforce existing rules about medical privacy and security.

There is some hesitation from several health care professionals. They are not sold on the idea that the enforcement of existing laws alone would be enough. Some of them see the need for stronger laws, like making it a criminal act when information is not obtained properly. Members of the community are afraid of not being able to get health insurance once their private information becomes known.

Just very recently, Google’s email service, Gmail, has been under attack. This resulted in hundreds of subscribers’ email accounts being compromised. It was either that their email passwords were stolen or their emails monitored. The secret attack is the second one, after a similar incident happened last year. This time, the victims belong to high profile individuals – some senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, some Asian countries’ officials, journalists and military personnel.

Last year’s source of the attack, according to Google, was pinpointed to China. Not long after the incident, the internet giant decided to transfer its Chinese search engine base to Hong Kong. The technology used in the recent incident is not as sophisticated as that of last year’s. However, the latter involved high profile individuals, making Google suspect that this one was carefully planned. The criminals used phishing, which enabled them to obtain the passwords of their targeted victims.

Launching this kind of attack needed masterful coordination and not just a “hit-and-miss” strategy. The targets were carefully selected, as well as the contacts of these targeted individuals. There is a contention that one or several email accounts were successfully intruded upon and from there, the criminals were able to break into others.