With a free Chip & PIN card reader, Swedish mobile payments company iZettle is lowering the threshold for small companies to start accepting card payments.The Card Reader Lite, released Tuesday, connects to tablets or smartphones via an audio cable and it is meant to lower the cost barriers small merchants face when setting up their businesses, iZettle said.Startup costs weren’t that high to begin with though. Businesses only pay €49 (about US$55) for iZettle’s wireless Bluetooth card reader, which it will continue to offer, and similar readers from competing services such as Payleven and SumUp cost only a little more at €79.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s now an easier way to discover whether the U.K. intelligence services illegally obtained your information from their U.S. colleagues—but you’ll have to tell a U.K. campaign group as well as the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters your details to find out.Civil rights group Privacy International has launched a website to allow anyone in the world to ask whether GCHQ has illegally spied on them. If you’re curious to find out you can sign up by giving the group your name, email address and, optionally, your phone number, and granting its legal team permission to share the data with GCHQ and the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Dutch government’s proposed revision of the country’s data retention law is not enough to bring it into compliance with a recent European Union court ruling, the Dutch privacy watchdog said Monday.An effort by the Dutch government to adjust a law requiring telecommunications and Internet companies to retain their customers’ location and traffic metadata for investigatory purposes should be dropped, as the infringement of the private life of virtually all Dutch citizens is too great, the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) said on Monday.The Dutch government is looking to change data retention obligations for telephone and Internet communications operators following a decision last year by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The court invalidated the European data retention directive, on which the Dutch law is based, because it violates fundamental privacy rights.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Despite privacy concerns and doubts over its usefulness, a plan to track passengers entering or leaving the European Union in a series of national databases is likely to become reality by the end of the year.The call to build national databases of so-called passenger name records (PNRs) has become louder since the recent terror attacks in Paris in which 17 people were killed. EU countries have argued that storing data about who has flown where, and when, would help law enforcement with the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of terrorist offenses and serious transnational crime.The plan is for airlines to send data collected during reservation and check-in procedures, including travel itineraries, ticket information and contact details, to an authority of the relevant country. That authority would be responsible for analyzing the data and sharing its analysis with other competent authorities, including those in other countries.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After years of legal trouble, the once-popular online file storage and sharing company Rapidshare is closing up shop.In a message posted to its website Tuesday, Rapidshare said it will stop active service on March 31. "We strongly recommend all customers to secure their data. After March 31st, 2015 all accounts will no longer be accessible and will be deleted automatically," the message said.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 12 Free Cloud Storage options
It did not say why it is shutting down. However, legal troubles related to copyright infringement have plagued the company for years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Loek Essers