Identity & The End of Privacy Archives - Page 2 of 5

Opt out from Online Behavioral Advertising? Maybe not…

17 June, 2014 by sky Leave a Comment

Online advertising has “gotten personal” and can adapt itself so that the ads you see are related to what you’ve been viewing, or shopping for, online.

This means, for example, that when you are viewing a sleeping bag at REI.com, you might later on see an ad for REI—an ad featuring that same sleeping bag—at another web site later that week.

A friend recently mentioned this article in Huffington Post claiming you can opt out of this kind of advertising. They say you can opt out in 2 easy steps. Turns out you can’t really opt out of the tracking, just the advertising itself. [Read more…]

In the long run they’ll get you “in the code”

11 September, 2013 by sky Leave a Comment

Bruce Schneier says “Remember this: The math is good, but math has no agency. Code has agency, and the code has been subverted.” (read original)

What this means is that the theory behind something — in this case encryption using “hard” mathematics — may be very good, but the implementation can be full of “gotchas” — errors, omissions, faults — and that‘s what will get you in the long term. He was specifically commenting on Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US National Security Agency and whether they can read all encrypted messages, but it can apply to many other software endeavors.

If you’re thinking of writing some software whose function is critical, and especially if lives depend on it, you have to be extremely careful with your implementation. And Open Source is a big plus because other eyes can look at your code and spot mistakes that you, as author, are likely to overlook.

So whatever you’re working on, be very, very careful with the implementation.

Google and government requests for data or removal

24 September, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

Google receives requests, including court orders, from many countries, for data or for removal of information on the various services it provides (search, YouTube, etc.).

They’re experimenting with putting up a page that shows the number of requests they’ve received, and (partially) the action they took, for the most recent six months.

You can view their map and click the pushpins to see country-specific data. For China, it says

Chinese officials consider censorship demands to be state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.

Isn’t it interesting that rather than saying “removal requests” Google used the word “censorship” in this case?

To read more about legitimate (legal) requests and requests that do not have the force of law behind them and may simply be trying to intimidate a web site owner, visit the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.

The Open Net Initiative seeks to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance.

Secret courts, secret orders

27 May, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

Cory Doctorow posted a BoingBoing article about a recent National Security Letter requiring the Internet Archive to reveal user information to the FBI. In case you’re not familiar with this process, certain government agencies can issue these letters under the PATRIOT act, which require you to disclose information about your online users, and you can be required not to disclose even the existence of the NSL to anyone else – not your board of directors, not your employees, not even your dog. You can tell your attorney, otherwise this would violate due process of law because you would be denied legal representation. EFF stepped into this^[1] as legal adviser to the Internet Archive and Brewster Kahle. The legal grounds on which they contested this was that the Internet Archive is a library (recognized by the State of California) which is exempt from these requirements under US law. The provisions apply to providers of Internet communication services (such as ISPs, duh, by definition).

Regardless of how you feel about government agencies having unchecked access to this kind of information — If you ran an online service that promised “we never share your information with anyone else” – what would your reaction be to an NSL requiring that you give up something like IP addresses, or physical address, or other information about a user of your service, without informing anyone? Would you be happy telling your users that you never share their information?

[Read more…]

Reclaim your Facebook privacy

25 May, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

Neat idea – although ReclaimPrivacy.org has gone away, you still may want to scan your Facebook privacy settings to see exactly how private you might not be! Comparitech offers to guide you through this. Try it out.

Comparitech’s page also describes privacy issues you might want to address on google (gmail and google+) and suggestions on avoiding tracking in browsers. I thought I had most everything set pretty well on my Facebook account, but I was a bit surprised at my results (back in 2010). The old ReclaimPrivacy piece of code could fix the settings for you, but yes, you can do it all yourself if you just follow all the steps. [Read more…]