The internet is full of opportunities that children and youth can discover and explore every day. There are new ideas, online friends, challenging frontiers, and a lot more. All these are accessible to them, at home, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As they surf different websites, children and youth become engrossed with what they are doing, and this results in mindless exploration. They do not realize that just like the real world, the virtual world can also be harmful to them.

It is here where parents have to play a very important role in maintaining the online privacy of their children. First of all, they should realize that web sites collect personal information from children. There are various ways of doing this. Web sites can ask them to register, join a club or enter a contest, fill out a questionnaire, and others. Having this information, web sites can put them together to make a personal profile. Children turn out to be targets of advertisements, or they end up on a customer list, which is sold to data marketers.

There is no guarantee that children will be harm-free in the virtual world. Even the advertised technology-based solutions are not foolproof because another new technology overrides the older one. The best guard against privacy exploitation of children can only be provided by parents and guardians. Parents must be actively involved in their children’s online experiences. This starts with parents spending time with their children and asking them to show their online activities.

Agents of the F.B.I. will soon be given more latitude to search the lives of those people who attract their attention. They can use the new powers to search databases or go through household trash. A surveillance team can also be used to look into the lives of people who behave abnormally. These changes will form part of the Bureau’s new manual called the Domestic Investigation and Operations Guide.

The new rules will enable F.B.I. agents to act with a greater degree of “freedom” to anticipate any criminal or terrorist activity. Additional authority will empower them to investigate people. At the back of these changes are some unfavorable reactions of concerned individuals, especially those who advocate privacy. One of them said that with the lessening of restrictions on agents’ powers was a risky decision. Some agents might use intrusive techniques even for those persons who are actually innocent. Abuses have occurred in the past, and can still occur. Problems regarding “national security letters” that allowed agents to obtain information without a court order were hot issues before.

To defend the F.B.I.’s action, a counsel said that previous problems involving national security letters have already been fixed and would not recur. There was an explanation regarding it, stating that changes in the Bureau’s manual do not require any consent. Sufficient studies were made concerning the risks and the benefits brought about by the changes. The counsel further stated that there was only fine tuning of the rules, and no major changes were made.

Recent incidents of medical record breaches are proof that it is difficult to completely put up a foolproof system for safekeeping this data. A large number of people’s personal medical records were stolen while under the custody of a record management company. In March of this year, nearly two million owners of personal information managed by a provider were informed that their records could not be located. Whether stolen or compromised, breaches against health records pose danger to the privacy of hundreds of millions of people.

The patient’s medical records should be handled with utmost care so as to preserve their confidentiality. These documents contain sensitive, personal information that spells out the owner’s privacy. Because of this, those who are found to commit breaches should face the consequences. Just last March, a general hospital in the U.S. was fined $1 million for its employee’s negligence. Paper records of 192 employees of a certain company were left by a hospital employee on a subway train.

One state representative said that there is not enough vigilance on the part of the health care industry. The HHS conducted an examination on the status of security measures at health care facilities across the U.S. It was found that the system that houses the patient’s records is vulnerable to intrusion. The investigations done at seven large hospitals, in different states, revealed a glaring truth. Unencrypted personal data of patients was stored on computers that can be easily accessed by unauthorized users.

The privacy and security of people’s health records might be at stake. The reported breaches of medical privacy have increased over the years. Included in the list of medical privacy breaches are nearly 300 hospitals, doctors and insurance companies. With the impending government efforts to shift to electronic health care records, these lapses might give the proponents a second thought.

The proposed conversion to electronic health records expects that medical errors will be lowered, cost will be reduced, and the quality of outcomes will be improved. To strengthen the effect of the conversion, the government is exhausting all possible means to enforce existing rules about medical privacy and security.

There are some apprehensions from some health care experts. They are wondering if the enforcement of existing laws alone would be enough. Some of them believe that there is a need for stronger laws, like making it a criminal offense when information is not obtained properly. On the part of the public, they are afraid that they could not get health insurance once their private information becomes known.

For the second time, Google suffered an attack. This time, it was in its email service – Gmail. The company said that email accounts of hundreds of its subscribers had their passwords stolen and their emails monitored. The victims included some senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, some Asian countries officials, journalists and military personnel.

Google pointed to an area in China to be the source of the secret attack. It would be recalled that China was also the suspected origin of the first attack. That incident led to the transfer by Google of its Chinese search engine base to Hong Kong. It said that the recent attack may not be as sophisticated in terms of technology as the first one, but the victims this time were “big names”. The perpetrators used phishing, which basically uses tricks to capture the email passwords of users.

Still, according to the search engine giant, the attack was masterfully coordinated. As shown from the profiles of the victims, it can be deduced that the targets were carefully selected. It appears that someone has “entered” into one email account and used its contacts in order to victimize some other targeted users.