Forget Street View, there is a far more subtle - and pervasive - invasion of your private life being carried out - this time through your mobile phone

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      By Pete Warren

      Appeared in Guardian - Thursday 2 April 2009

Each time you use your phone, data on your habits is stored and could be sold to advertisers. Photograph: Fancy/Veer/Corbis

When the furore about Google Street View washed across the UK last month, Google must have been pleased. For a much more sinister invasion of privacy had gone unnoticed. A week before, Google had, without any fanfare, released 11 software applications for mobile phones that spell a fundamental change in our lives.

Among the applications were functions such as text messaging, web browsing, a diary, Orkut - the company's social networking offering - and a program for Google Maps. Innocent enough, perhaps. But combined they would allow Google to know what you are doing all of the time. A truly Orwellian development that has been described by privacy campaigners as "a catastrophic corruption of consent".

Millions of mobiles are lost and discarded every year, yet their owners give little thought to the sensitive data they contain

Pete Warren
The Guardian, Thursday September 25 2008

Three years ago, Graham Clements – the European managing director of the UK subsidiary of the Japanese packaging multinational Ishida – decided to get rid of his BlackBerry and passed it on to his IT department for recycling. At the start of this month, that BlackBerry was one of the top items on the agenda at the first board meeting that Clements had called since his return from holiday - because it, and the data on it, had come back to haunt him.

Instead of being recycled, the BlackBerry, like millions of other mobile devices every year, had been passed on to a company to be sold. On Clements's device were business plans, details of customer relationships, information on the structure of the company, details of his bank accounts and details about his children.

And Clements isn't alone.

Pete Warren explains how a forensic specialist can retrieve data from your hard drive - even if you think you've deleted everything - that reveals a great deal about you

Pete Warren
The Guardian, Thursday August 14 2008

(appeared under the headline - 'Computer security: Snapshots of our secret lives')

The first time that I really became aware of computer forensics was around eight years ago when I arranged for some hard drives I had bought from a boot fair to be examined by Professor Neil Barrett, an expert in the field. The results were memorable. When Barrett rang me to say that he had found account details for a Paul McCartney - on a hard drive discarded by a merchant bank - I was prepared for the inevitable teasing.

"Sure, Neil, I suppose there must be quite a few Paul McCartneys." "Yes, I suppose there are," he replied. "Not too many called 'Sir', though."