NY seeks Wal-Mart records on alleged surveillance
602922
The New York City Comptroller on Tuesday demanded Wal-Mart Stores Inc. records dating from 2002 to determine whether the retailer performed illegal surveillance on shareholders who submitted proxy petitions.
506353
Lawyers for conservative Fox News  commentator Bill O'Reilly said on Tuesday they believe a fellow  employee accusing him of sexual harassment has recordings of  calls between them and they are seeking a court order to obtain  them.
672885
A Wal-Mart Stores Inc.  employee fired this week for allegedly intercepting and recording messages from a New York Times reporter and others said he felt pressured to uncover who at the retail giant was leaking embarrassing information to outsiders, The Wall Street Journal reported.
116856
Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world&#39;s No. 1 retailer, is talks with the US Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania to settle an investigation into whether it knowingly hired contractors
49907
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- The nation's largest drugstore chains say they are working to better protect patient privacy after an investigative TV report turned up sensitive information about hundreds of customers in trash bins in cities around the country.
576276
Investigators for Hewlett-Packard Co. sought private telephone records of board members while hunting for leaks to the media of confidential company information, the computer maker said in a regulatory filing Wednesday.
696381
The apparel retailer is using secrecy, but is there anything worth hiding?
125791
Lawyers for Fox News Channel  commentator Bill O'Reilly say they believe a fellow employee  accusing him of sexual harassment has recordings of calls  between them and they are seeking a court order to obtain them.
395362
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Monday it fired a systems technician who allegedly recorded phone conversations between the company's public relations office and a newspaper reporter. The case is now being investigated by federal authorities.
679026
A backup tape containing credit-card information from hundreds of U.S. retailers is missing, forcing the company responsible for the data to warn customers that they may become the targets of data fraud.GE Money, which manages in-store credit-card programs for the majority of U.S. retailers, first realized that the tape was missing from an Iron Mountain secure storage facility in October, said Richard Jones, a company spokesman. &quot;We were informed that one of the tapes could not be located. But at the same time, there was no record of it ever having been checked out,&quot; he said.The tape contained in-store credit-card information on 650,000 retail customers, including those of J.C. Penney, he said. GE Money employees are also affected by the breach.The missing backup tape was unencrypted.Although J.C. Penney was the only company that Jones would confirm as affected by the missing tape, that retailer accounts for just a small percentage of all accounts that were compromised. In total, 230 retailers are affected by the breach. &quot;Clearly that number includes many of the national retail organizations,&quot; he said.The tape also contained Social Security numbers of 150,000 customers. When matched with name and address information, Social Security numbers can be used to set up fraudulent credit-card accounts, a common form of identity theft.Jones said that following a GE Money investigation, there is no evidence that the tape in question has been stolen or that the data it contained was misused.After reconstructing the data that was on the missing tape, GE Money began sending out letters to those affected by the breach in December. The company has set up a toll-free number and is offering one year of free credit monitoring services to those affected by the breach.In 2006, retailer TJ Maxx discovered that thieves had&#160;broken into its computer networks, stealing an estimated 94 million credit- and debit-card numbers. Costs related to that breach are expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.GE Money is a division of General Electric.
428206
Sears Holdings is facing a class-action lawsuit after&#160;making the purchase history of its customers public&#160;on its Managemyhome.com Web site.The lawsuit seeks damages as well as an accounting by Sears to determine whether the Web site was misused by criminals. It was filed on Friday by New Jersey resident Christine Desantis, who is represented by KamberEdelson, a technology law firm. KamberEdelson is best known for its recent settlement with social networking site Facebook over its sending of unwanted text messages to recycled cell-phone numbers.&quot;It&#39;s a pretty simple case,&quot; said Jay Edelson, a partner with the Chicago-based law firm. &quot;Sears decided to put private information of its customers up on the Web site and make it publicly available. They did it without telling their customers that it was going to happen ... and they really did it for their own financial reasons.&quot;Manage My Home is a community portal where Sears shoppers can download product manuals, find product tips and get home renovation ideas. The Web site had a feature called &quot;Find your products&quot; that ostensibly was designed to help users look up past purchases.Last Thursday, researchers at security vendor CA pointed out that the feature could be used to look up the purchase history of any Sears customer, an apparent violation of the company&#39;s privacy policy.Manage My Home could easily have been misused by criminals, Edelson said. For example, a robber could gain access to a victim&#39;s home by posing as a Sears repair person, using the information available on the site. That could be incredibly scary, he said. &quot;They have a duty to keep that information away from the public.&quot;Sears disabled the &quot;Find your products&quot; feature&#160;on Friday, saying it would re-introduce the feature once the company figures out a way of ensuring that the information cannot be viewed by unauthorized third parties.However, the retailer was informed of the problem weeks before it took the feature off-line, Edelson said.In late December, CA researchers also criticized Sears for&#160;downloading invasive comScore Web tracking software&#160;onto the desktops of some members of its MySHCcommunity.com Web site without adequate disclosure.KamberEdelson is also investigating that matter, Edelson said.&#160;
747693
By Stephen Foley in New York  Hewlett-Packard is facing a federal investigation into whether the company broke the law when the computer manufacturer obtained directors' and journalists' phone records as part of its attempt to hunt down the source of boardroom leaks.
73863
A bomb threat that caused the evacuation of a Wal-Mart and led employees to wire $10,000 to the caller appears to be part of a broader scam targeting other businesses around the country, authorities said.
41774
Sears Holdings has come under fire from privacy advocates for making the purchase history of its customers publicly available on its Managemyhome.com Web site.Manage My Home is a community portal where Sears shoppers can download product manuals, find product tips, and get home renovation ideas.The Web site has a feature called &quot;Find your products&quot; that lets users look up past purchases. Ostensibly, this is designed to help customers keep track of items they&#39;ve bought from the retailer, but the site also lets them look up the purchase histories of other people.&quot;Sears offers no security whatsoever to prevent a Manage My Home user from retrieving another person&#39;s purchase history by entering that person&#39;s name, phone number, and address,&quot; wrote Ben Edelman, an assistant professor with Harvard Business School, in a blog posting.This is a violation of Sears&#39; own online privacy policy, which does not allow the company to share users&#39; purchase history with the general public, Edelman said.The information could be misused by scammers, said Benjamin Googins, a CA senior engineer who has also written about the issue. &quot;A potential burglar or scam artist could quite easily sit at home with a phone book, checking to see what people in a given neighborhood had purchased,&quot; he wrote.Googins said that he was able to track purchases as far back as 1978 on the site.One Sears customer said he was upset by the disclosure.&quot;It&#39;s pretty amazing that in 2008 a major corporation such as Sears Roebuck can show such blatant disregard for the privacy of its customers. It definitely will make me think twice before ordering from them again,&quot; said Doug Fuller, an Oakland, Calif., realtor. &quot;It&#39;s not like it is some rinky-dink company. This is a major corporation. And with all the identity theft going on, this is the best they can do?&quot; he said via instant message.A Sears spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. Sears Holdings, the owner of the Sears Roebuck and Kmart department stores, is the third-largest retailer in the United States.This is the second time Sears has come under fire for privacy concerns in recent weeks. In December and early January, Googins and Edelman blasted Sears for&#160;downloading invasive comScore Web tracking software&#160;to some users of its MySHCcommunity.com Web site without adequate disclosure.Sears has defended its use of the tracking software, pointing out that users are notified of the software&#39;s features before they download it.
403394
Federal and local authorities, under the auspices of the New York Asset Forfeiture Task Force, have recently served grand-jury subpoenas seeking testimony in the circulationscandals
362860
A review is said to cite illicit surveillance including an attempt to plant message-tracing software on a journalistÂs computer.
510737
Calling a federal settlement with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. a sweetheart deal, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said Wednesday he will ask other states to join in investigating allegations the world's largest retailer broke child labor laws.