If you’re a system administrator, then keeping an eye on your employees’ email and PC usage is a fairly common task, allowing you to monitor productivity, as well as ensure no dangerous files enter your network. The same applies to parents and teachers, too, who might wish to keep an…

What if someone just around a corner could see what you’re looking at on your computer screen without using a physical or wireless connection and without ever being in your system?

UPS trucks are equipped with a dizzying array of technology – including 200 telematics sensors – that UPS is using to spy on drivers. According to UPS, the driver surveillance is used to optimize delivery and the company’s bottom line. From knowing when a driver buckles their seatbelt, to every time the driver opens and closes the door (using a remote keyfob because using a key takes too long), to the exact moment each time the driver starts or stops the engine, to how often and for how long a driver backs up, UPS is monitoring every little detail of their drivers’ day.

LG Smart televisions have spyware that is spying on their owners, and the LG spyware is sending data back to LG, including the filenames of unrelated files that are stored on the users’ drives! That is the stunning discovery made by a developer and self-professed Linux enthusiast going by the name of Doctor Beet.

There has been a lot of speculation that the new Microsoft XBox One (XBox 1) will essentially be spying on its owners. Well, ‘spying’ may be too strong a word but, at least, that it will have the potential to spy on its owners when combined with the required Kinect motion-detecting web-cam, an ever-vigilant watching and listening device connected to the Internet. These concerns arose after rumours started spreading that the new XBox One required a near 24/7 Internet connection and requires the Kinect.

It is one of the sleaziest, creepiest uses for a webcam and the Internet: spying on your room mate while they are having a close encounter of the intimate kind, and broadcasting the fact on Twitter and sharing it through iChat. But it is not a hate crime, even when you announce that you “saw him making out with a dude.” That is the finding of New Jersey Judge Glenn Berman, in sentencing Dharun Ravi to 30 days in jail following Ravi’s actions, and the subsequent suicide of his roommate Tyler Clementi.

Researchers have discovered that Apple’s newest operating system, iOS4, is literally spying on iPhone and iPad 3G and iPad 2 3G users’ movements, using geolocation to create a file that records every place that the user carrying the device passes through. At least as bad, the file, called “consolidated.db”, not only is on your iPhone or iPad, but is unencrypted, meaning that anybody who can access the file can read your every move.

Has Microsoft been spying on the Google searches of Internet Explorer users in order to use the data to enhance their own Microsoft Bing search engine, to make it more competitive with Google? According to Google, who claims to have caught MS watching their own IE users, tapping their Google searches and using the information gleaned from those searches to make their Bing searches more accurate.

More information is coming to light about the situation with Google and David Barksdale, a Google engineer who used his access to the massive stores of data that Google has gathered about its own users to spy on the private lives (and data) of several Google users, who also happened to be minors. That’s right – Google employee David Barksdale was spying on children, even cyberbullying them, using the access that his position with Google afforded him to look at the private information of children. What’s more, it was going on for months.

The court in the case of the Lower Merion School District in Pennyslvania that was spying on its students – in their homes – via webcams and software installed in the students’ school-provided laptops – has been ordered to let the students see the photos that the school surreptitiously took of them. As it turns out, the photo of Blake Robbins was just the tip of the iceberg; according to reports, there are nearly 58,000 photos taken by the school district, all by remotely accessing the webcam in the students’ laptops while spying on their students in the students homes and in other places off the school premises.

One of the burning questions of the entire “school spying on a student in his own home through the webcam in the school-provided laptop” fiasco – which was followed closely by the “school accuses student Blake Robbins of improper behavior in his own home based on photos taken through the webcam” debacle – is just what was the improper behavior with which they confronted Blake? Read on… (Hint: It has to do with his friends, Mike and Ikes. Yes, it’s true.) P.S. Folks in the area are already calling this “WebCamGate”.

The Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania is being sued by Holly and Michael Robbins, along with their son Blake Robbins, over the discovery that the school district was spying on their son via the webcam in the school-issued laptop which their son received from the school district. The Robbins and others discovered that school administrators were remotely accessing the webcams in the students’ laptops when a student was disciplined by the school for “improper behaviour in this home”, with the school’s assistant principal producing as evidence a photo taken with the webcam, of a scene in the student’s home!

Holy privacy and security issue! A Palm Pre user who is also a securitygeekstud has discovered that Palm Pres (or should that be Palm Pri? Palm Prie? What is the plural of “Pre”?) are spying on Palm Pre users and on how they are using their Palm Pre, and reporting back to Palm!

Oh goody. The anti-privacy folks at Flexi Spy, who brought you cell phone tapping software for Nokia 60, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile phones back in 2007, have just announced a new iPhone cellphone spying software version of FlexiSpy. Whee!