Essays in the Category "Privacy and Surveillance"
Page 11 of 16
The Difficulty of Surveillance Crowdsourcing
Internet Eyes is a U.K. startup designed to crowdsource digital surveillance. People pay a small fee to become a “Viewer.” Once they do, they can log onto the site and view live anonymous feeds from surveillance cameras at retail stores. If they notice someone shoplifting, they can alert the store owner. Viewers get rated on their ability to differentiate real shoplifting from false alarms, can win 1000 pounds if they detect the most shoplifting in some time interval, and otherwise get paid a wage that most likely won’t cover their initial fee…
Web Snooping Is a Dangerous Move
On Monday, The New York Times reported that President Obama will seek sweeping laws enabling law enforcement to more easily eavesdrop on the internet. Technologies are changing, the administration argues, and modern digital systems aren’t as easy to monitor as traditional telephones.
The government wants to force companies to redesign their communications systems and information networks to facilitate surveillance, and to provide law enforcement with back doors that enable them to bypass any security measures.
The proposal may seem extreme, but—unfortunately—it’s not unique. Just a few months ago, the governments of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia threatened to ban BlackBerry devices unless the company made eavesdropping easier. China has already built a massive internet surveillance system to better control its citizens…
Data Privacy: The Facts of Life
As networking sites become more ubiquitous, it is long past the time to look at the types of data we put on those sites. We’re using social networking websites for more private and more intimate interactions, often without thinking through the privacy implications of what we’re doing.
The issues are hard and the solutions to them harder still, but I’m seeing a lot of confusion in even forming the questions.
Social networking sites deal with several different types of user data, and it’s essential to separate them.
To start that conversation, here is my taxonomy of social networking data…
A Taxonomy of Social Networking Data
Lately I’ve been reading about user security and privacy—control, really—on social networking sites. The issues are hard and the solutions harder, but I’m seeing a lot of confusion in even forming the questions. Social networking sites deal with several different types of user data, and it’s essential to separate them.
Below is my taxonomy of social networking data, which I first presented at the Internet Governance Forum meeting last November, and again—revised—at an OECD workshop on the role of Internet intermediaries in June…
The Internet: Anonymous Forever
This essay previously appeared in Information Security as the first half of a point-counterpoint with Marcus Ranum. Marcus’s half is here.
Universal identification is portrayed by some as the holy grail of Internet security. Anonymity is bad, the argument goes; and if we abolish it, we can ensure only the proper people have access to their own information. We’ll know who is sending us spam and who is trying to hack into corporate networks. And when there are massive denial-of-service attacks, such as those against Estonia or Georgia or South Korea, we’ll know who was responsible and take action accordingly…
Google And Facebook's Privacy Illusion
These companies and others say privacy erosion is inevitable--but they're making it so.
In January Facebook Chief Executive, Mark Zuckerberg, declared the age of privacy to be over. A month earlier, Google Chief Eric Schmidt expressed a similar sentiment. Add Scott McNealy’s and Larry Ellison’s comments from a few years earlier, and you’ve got a whole lot of tech CEOs proclaiming the death of privacy—especially when it comes to young people.
It’s just not true. People, including the younger generation, still care about privacy. Yes, they’re far more public on the Internet than their parents: writing personal details on Facebook, posting embarrassing photos on Flickr and having intimate conversations on Twitter. But they take steps to protect their privacy and vociferously complain when they feel it violated. They’re not technically sophisticated about privacy and make mistakes all the time, but that’s mostly the fault of companies and Web sites that try to manipulate them for financial gain…
Spy Cameras Won't Make Us Safer
On January 19, a team of at least 15 people assassinated Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. The Dubai police released video footage of 11 of them. While it was obviously a very professional operation, the 27 minutes of video is fascinating in its banality. Team members walk through the airport, check in and out of hotels, get in and out of taxis. They make no effort to hide themselves from the cameras, sometimes seeming to stare directly into them. They obviously don’t care that they’re being recorded, and—in fact—the cameras didn’t prevent the assassination, nor as far as we know have they helped as yet in identifying the killers…
U.S. Enables Chinese Hacking of Google
Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn’t that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated—we knew that already—it’s that the U.S. government inadvertently aided the hackers.
In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access…
The Battle Is On Against Facebook and Co to Regain Control of Our Files
Our use of social networking, as well as iPhones and Kindles, relinquishes control of how we delete files -- we need that back
File deletion is all about control. This used to not be an issue. Your data was on your computer, and you decided when and how to delete a file. You could use the delete function if you didn’t care about whether the file could be recovered or not, and a file erase program—I use BCWipe for Windows—if you wanted to ensure no one could ever recover the file.
As we move more of our data onto cloud computing platforms such as Gmail and Facebook, and closed proprietary platforms such as the Kindle and the iPhone deleting data is much harder.
You have to trust that these companies will delete your data when you ask them to, but they’re …
Offhand but On Record
More and more people are using computers to chat with each other, but there's no such thing as a passing conversation on the Web
Facebook recently made changes to its service agreement in order to make members’ data more accessible to other computer users. Amuse, Inc. announced last week that hackers stole credit-card information from about 150,000 clients. Hackers broke into the social network Twitter’s system and stole documents.
Your online data is not private. It may seem private, but it’s not. Take e-mail, for example. You might be the only person who knows your e-mail password, but you’re not the only person who can read your e-mail. Your e-mail provider can read it too—along with anyone he gives access to. That can include any backbone provider who happened to route that mail from the sender to you. In addition, if you read your e-mail from work, various people at your company have access to it, too. And, if they have taps at the correct points, so can the police, the U.S. National Security Agency, and any other well-funded national intelligence organization—along with any hackers or criminals sufficiently skilled to break into one of these sites…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.