Entries Tagged "privacy"

Page 119 of 138

NSA Combing Through MySpace

No surprise.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology – specifically the forthcoming “semantic web” championed by the web standards organisation W3C – to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Posted on June 15, 2006 at 6:13 AM • View Comments

Privacy as Contextual Integrity

Interesting law review article by Helen Nissenbaum:

Abstract: The practices of public surveillance, which include the monitoring of individuals in public through a variety of media (e.g., video, data, online), are among the least understood and controversial challenges to privacy in an age of information technologies. The fragmentary nature of privacy policy in the United States reflects not only the oppositional pulls of diverse vested interests, but also the ambivalence of unsettled intuitions on mundane phenomena such as shopper cards, closed-circuit television, and biometrics. This Article, which extends earlier work on the problem of privacy in public, explains why some of the prominent theoretical approaches to privacy, which were developed over time to meet traditional privacy challenges, yield unsatisfactory conclusions in the case of public surveillance. It posits a new construct, ‘contextual integrity’ as an alternative benchmark for privacy, to capture the nature of challenges posed by information technologies. Contextual integrity ties adequate protection for privacy to norms of specific contexts, demanding that information gathering and dissemination be appropriate to that context and obey the governing norms of distribution within it. Building on the idea of ‘spheres of justice’ developed by political philosopher Michael Walzer, this Article argues that public surveillance violates a right to privacy because it violates contextual integrity; as such, it constitutes injustice and even tyranny.

Posted on June 9, 2006 at 7:11 AM • View Comments

U.S. Government Wants your Internet Data

In case you thought you had any privacy on the Internet:

Gonzales and Mueller asked Google Inc., Time Warner Inc.’s AOL and other companies to preserve the data at a May 26 meeting, citing their value to investigations into child-pornography distribution and terrorism. Internet companies typically keep customer histories for only a few days or weeks.

The Justice Department said Thursday that it was not seeking to have e-mail content archived, just information about the websites people visit and those with whom they correspond.

Note that the Justice Department invoked two of the Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse: child pornographers and terrorists. If they can figure out how to work kidnappers and drug dealers in, they can probably do anything they want.

Posted on June 7, 2006 at 7:24 AM • View Comments

Data Mining Software from IBM

In the long term, corporate data mining efforts are more of a privacy risk than government data mining efforts. And here’s an off-the-shelf product from IBM:

IBM Entity Analytic Solutions (EAS) is unique identity disambiguation software that provides public sector organizations or commercial enterprises with the ability to recognize and mitigate the incidence of fraud, threat and risk. This IBM EAS offering provides insight on demand, and in context, on “who is who,” “who knows who,” and “anonymously.”

This industry-leading, patented technology enables enterprise-wide identity insight, full attribution and self-correction in real time, and scales to process hundreds of millions of entities—all while accumulating context about those identities. It is the only software in the market that provides in-context information regarding non-obvious and obvious relationships that may exist between identities and can do it anonymously to enhance privacy of information.

For most businesses and government agencies, it is important to figure out when a person is using more than one identity Package (that is, name, address, phone number, social insurance number and other such personal attributes) intentionally or unintentionally. Identity resolution software can help determine when two or more different looking identity packages are describing the same person, even if the data is inconsistent. For example, by comparing names, addresses, phone numbers, social insurance numbers and other personal information across different records, this software might reveal that three customers calling themselves Tom R., Thomas Rogers, and T. Rogers are really just the same person.

It may also be useful for organizations to know with whom such a person associates. Relationship resolution software can process resolved identity data to find out whether people have worked for some of the same companies, for example. This would be useful to an organization that tracks down terrorists, but it can also help businesses such as banks, for example, to see whether the Hope Smith who just applied for a loan is related to Rock Smith, the account holder with a sterling credit rating.

Posted on May 31, 2006 at 6:52 AM • View Comments

Solzhenitsyn Quote on Data and Privacy

As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions . .. There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider’s web, and if they materialized as rubber bands, buses; trams and even people would all lose the ability to move, and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city. They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence…. Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads, naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads.

&#160&#160&#160&#160&#160—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, 1968.

Posted on May 30, 2006 at 10:55 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.