Germany's highest court on Friday
said security services had too much unfettered access to people's online data
and ordered legislation to be revised to set higher hurdles.
Since last year, Germans have been able to measure their mobile network connection through a broadband-measuring app created by Germany’s Federal Network Agency. Now, the first results of the mass experiment are in.
Millions of records belonging to patients worldwide, including X-Rays, mammograms and MRI scans, were long freely accessible online without basic security measures, German authorities said Tuesday after a media investigation.
Tech giant Microsoft said Wednesday
it had detected hacker "attacks" ahead of European Parliament and national elections in the EU, in a warning to civil society groups, politicians and
campaigns.
Facebook users should be asked for consent before data collected by the group's subsidiaries Whatsapp and Instagram and on third-party websites is combined with their social network account, Germany's competition authority said Thursday.
Germany is the latest country to demand answers from Facebook after it emerged data from 50 million users was used to inform targeted election campaigns. German Justice Minister Katharina Barley on Thursday called such methods "a danger to democracy."
US tech giant Microsoft has put new data centres in Germany under the control of Deutsche Telekom, the companies said on Wednesday, in a move that will keep privacy-sensitive Germans' customer data in the country.
One-fifth of Germany’s major companies has been attacked by hackers within the past three years, but companies are also not taking cyber security as seriously as they should, according to a study released on Monday.
More than half of Germans want greater state control over websites, but about the same share are worried about surveillance of their own online activity, a survey on Tuesday revealed.
German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich is demanding that security services have access to data from autobahn toll collection services according to a media report on Wednesday.
Hackers have stolen the details of two million Vodafone customers in Germany, company bosses said on Thursday. These include bank account numbers and addresses.
Germany's three biggest email providers announced on Friday a partnership to bolster the security of messages sent between them in the wake of revelations of US online surveillance scandal.
Serious security flaws in a number of Vodafone internet routers could mean hackers could easily tap into customers' online data, Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) said on Tuesday.
Data thieves targeting customers at cash point machines caused €8 million worth of damage in the first six months of this year, according to figures out on Wednesday.
The sensitive medical data of thousands of patients has disappeared from a hospital in Baden Württemberg, southern Germany. Police are now investigating, although there are no obvious signs of theft.
Germany’s upper house of parliament has halted a new law affecting citizens' data privacy that caused a scandal earlier this year, when it was passed by the lower house in just 57 seconds.
A hacker attack which infiltrated Germany’s federal police computer system using Trojan programs and a system of routes via Russia last summer was due to a row about internet usage between a top cop and his daughter.
The German government is riven over whether telecom companies should be allowed to keep customers' data indefinitely. Critics say easier police access to data could have helped solve recently-revealed Neo-nazi murders.
Facebook has offered a special exemption from its data handling practices to Schleswig-Holstein after the northern German state's data protection commissioner complained about the online social network's popular "like" button.
A leaked government report has revealed that police servers were only protected by cheap software, making a recent hack on databases much easier. Police were forced to shut down several servers with data on serious criminals.
German authorities were alerted to a terrorist plot in Düsseldorf by US authorities using airline passenger data, the <i>Rheinische Post</i> newspaper reported Friday.
