Your local mall could be monitoring your cell phone signal this holiday season. This Black Friday some malls in the US will be rolling out a new technology that allows retailers to track customers' cell phone signals while they're shopping. more ›

The city council of Lancaster just approved a program that will allow a Cessna to weave through the airspace of Antelope Valley for 10 hours a day while a camera rolls. The film will be sent to the sheriff's station on the ground and reviewed in real-time for people doing hilarious shit in the privacy of their own backyards crime, according to The Los Angeles Daily News. more ›

Police are investigating the creepy possibility that a sexual assailant used Twitter to find his next victim. On Halloween afternoon, a man jumped out of the bushes and sexually assaulted a woman finishing up a stroll through Elysian Park. She managed to escape and the suspect fled. more ›

UCLA is now warning 16,000 patients that a burglar made off with their personal medical records two months ago, according to the Associated Press. When the doctor's home was burglarized, the thief swiped the hard drive with the medical records — and the scrap of paper right next to it with the password. Whoops. more ›

If you ever feel like you're being watched while you try on clothes in the department store dressing room, well, maybe you are. A CBS2 undercover op reveals that the doors of several area department stores are deliberately designed so that store employees can see in. Oh, but don't worry, it's not because they're pervy, it's because they think you're a thief. more ›

Southern California Medical-Legal Consultants, a firm that represents doctors and hospitals seeking payment from patients receiving workers' compensation, uploaded the medical files of nearly 300,000 Californians to an unsecured website. Owner Joel Hecht said the company "believed only employees could use" the website; however, the entire world had easy access, reports Press-Telegram. more ›

If you're a Sony PlayStation user, you probably noticed that you couldn't connect to the gaming console's online network for the past ten days or so. Most figured it was probably just a network outage. But as we learned Tuesday -- one week into the outage -- Sony deliberately pulled the plug on its online network as well as its streaming and on demand content services on April 20. PlayStation's unencrypted user database was breached, allowing hackers access to info entered by the network's 77 million users. If you are one of the 77 million Sony Playstation users with a PlayStation Network or Qriocity account, a class-action lawsuit was filed on your behalf Wednesday. more ›

Do you like being watched? In one part of North Hills, pedestrians and motorists won't have much choice. The Los Angeles Police Department has set up a set of nine wireless surveillance cameras that will beam real-time footage of the area back to LAPD HQ 24/7, according to CBS2. The cameras, located in the Safer Cities Initiative Area, are part of a larger plan to fight crime in North Hills. more ›

Andrew Hyde sold all of his worldly possessions last August and began a trip around the world. He makes no secret of this -- its detailed on his website. We're well aware that personal information becomes vulnerable whenever we agree to the terms of service of yet another fun geo-location mobile app as it typically utilizes information from the phone's positioning to track real-time location. But this week, geodata geek and author Pete Warden released an open-source iPhone application that exploits a file in iPhone 4 (or iPad 3G) containing all recorded geographic data in the phone's history. more ›

The computer, reported stolen on Feb 24 from Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, housed names, D.O.B. and diagnostic information for at least 667 patients. Michael Wilson, the County Department of Health Services spokesman, said the records were not encrypted and that patients were sent letters about the theft. more ›

Our society can now be characterized with the phrase TMI (too much information), according the Daily Breeze. Facebook, status updates, Twitter, and other social media sites all share a part in this trend toward “oversharing” and privacy disregard. more ›

Jason Calacanis, famous blogger and founder of Santa Monica-based Mahalo, joined the ever-growing movement to quit Facebook and deleted his account around noon today. Calacanis blogged saying, “simply put, I no longer trust Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook) with my information”. He pointed out that even when you delete your account you can log back in at any time, which means Facebook still has all your information stored. more ›

Among the various laws signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger yesterday was one strengthening an already existing law aimed at paparazzi. more ›

I can't tell you where or how I first learned of Damon Packard, but his experimental-nostalgic-acid-horror-collage Reflections of Evil melted my brain forever. Packard excels at melding "borrowed" footage from '70s TV, science fiction & God knows what else with his own paranoid fantasies for pure cinematic psychosis. more ›

The California Department of Public Health today announced a quarter-million dollar fine given to Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Hospital after "the hospital compromised the privacy of a patient when 21 employees and two physicians improperly accessed records." That patient was "Octomom" Nadya Suleman This is the first time a penalty has been assessed under new patient privacy laws went into effect last year when it was signed by Governor Schwarzenegger. "Medical privacy is a fundamental right and a critical component of quality medical care in California,” said Dr. Mark Horton, director of CDPH, in a news release. “We are very concerned with violations of patient confidentiality and their potential harm to the residents of California.” more ›

The latest round is the Tolkienian shitstorm that has kicked up over Eightmaps.com, an invasive little enterprise that reveals, city by city and neighborhood by neighborhood, just who put their money where their gay-rights-hating mouths were and gave said money to the yes on Prop 8 Campaign. What Eightmaps does is combine publicly available donor disclosure information (which you can find here), with the subtle brilliance of Google Maps, to create an easy to use map pinpointing the location of practically everyone who donated in support of Proposition 8. Thanks to the requirements of said Donor disclosure, a surprising amount of information is provided - Full name, job title, employer and the amount of donation are all displayed in glorious technicolor. While it paints an interesting portrait of conservative California (that, among other things, indicates large number of retirees among the Prop 8ers¹), it also sparked considerable debate about civic responsibility and the right to privacy. more ›

For the past few months we've noticed our friends randomly appearing in sidebar ads on Facebook and thought, "ZOMG Zuckerberg, are we all being used so you can pick up all of our friends for your third-party app-monkeys? more ›

Unconfirmed reports of a mountain lion on the loose in Eagle Rock have authorities on the move, searching house to house on the 5000 block of College View Ave. more ›

The first question should be, "who the hell still uses AOL?" With DSL being advertised for $20 or less for new users, and cable providers doing more to use that fat pipe, LAist finds very little sympathy for modern-day web surfers who pay the Virginia company $28 a month for the wonders of dial-up. And we have even less sympathy for those whose social security numbers ended up on an AOL-generated web site recently... more ›