Jan

26

Naked on the Net

Filed Under Privacy, Social | Leave a Comment

The typical response to a “OMG Users Don’t Have the Privacy They Think They Do” article is to never post anything online or just never visit web sites where you would post something.

These seem…. Paranoid. People have an expectation of privacy. People also inherently trust web sites unless they have been burned enough in the past. I know a few people who have lost their trust. However, its less than a dozen out of a few 300 people.

My mother in particular, read an article about bad web browser cookies years ago, so she set Netscape 4.5 to tell her about every attempt to set a cookie and was appalled at how many web sites tried to set them. Eventually, she realized not every cookie is malicious. Similarly, not every web site or company is out to screw their users. By contrast, a friend of hers installed Zone Alarm at home and discovered a ton of blocked connections which made him paranoid about the dangers online.

The place to be online is, I think, somewhere between paranoid privacy and complete openness. We should be open enough to generate conversations. However, we should not be giving away the kitchen sink.

Jan

12

Blog Delurking Week

Filed Under Privacy | Leave a Comment

The last day of Blog Delurking Week is today. Based on the web server logs, lots of people read. A few comment.

Its okay people don’t comment (aka lurk). If you have something to say, then I am sure you will. Otherwise, I am sure you will remain silent. :)

Jan

7

No More Public Anonymous Photos

Filed Under Interweb, Philosophy, Photography, Privacy | Leave a Comment

Early in the history of the WWW, people thought a document which did not have an inbound link, a link from some external location to the file, was private. Search engines looked for content on web sites in locations for which there was not a link already pointing. To truly respect the privacy of those sites, these search engines would have only index content from sites which asked to be index AND only indexed content which that web site pointed a link.

Just because SiteB links to a location on SiteA doesn’t mean SiteA wished it to found in a search, an example is deep linking. Note the court cases (1, 2) in which judges rule in favor of the SiteAs who go to court about SiteBs who make such links. Note I made deep links in order to demonstrate the deep links. :)

On Privacy and Polar Rose - Polar Rose Blog : On Privacy and Polar Rose

It should come as little surprise that we believe that Polar Rose adds tremendous value to the photo web. We think we’re as harmful to the photo web, as Altavista, Yahoo!, and Google have been to the text web. By sorting the text web, these search engines exposed the wonderful resource of public documents that web had already become. The side-effect was that information which was not meant for public consumption, but which was kept private by obscurity, was suddenly exposed and searchable.

By Polar Rose’s logic, because people acclimated in general to losing textual anonyminity, they will do the same for facial recognition. Just what does the lack of a label mean? The photographer may be protecting the identity of someone, a minor for example. The uploader may be lazy. The uploader may not know. The uploaded may not own the copyright to the photo.

On the whole, I think facial recognition is a good thing. The cases in which there are likely going to be privacy concerns are going to be more likely uncommon than common. Those who it affects are going to be most upset all the same.

If anything, then I think we have a tendency to underestimate how badly such things are going to violate the privacy of our lives. For example, look how often search engines exposed Social Security Numbers on web sites.

Dec

4

Your Cell Phone Is the FBI’s Bug

Filed Under Gov't & Politics, Privacy | Leave a Comment

For all my criminal wannabe friends. Where you can talk without being overheard is becoming smaller and smaller. Its starting feeling like a Sci-Fi novel. :(

FBI using cell phone microphones to eavesdrop:

Cell phones are capable of providing more information about us and our whereabouts than we usually realize. We are have long since known that cell phones can be used to track users’ locations, but now the FBI has begun using them for eavesdropping—even when they are turned off.

From the referenced article, the part that bothers me:

An article in the Financial Times last year said mobile providers can “remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner’s knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call.”

Oct

20

Spies Among Us

Filed Under Privacy | Leave a Comment

Every quasi-governmental organization needs their own spies. Why am I not surprised that the MPAA has spies all over the country? I am surprised that the Boy Scouts of America (BSA, not to be confused with the Business Software Alliance the software equivalent of the MPAA and RIAA) is are the spies. Though, the longer I think about, the more it makes sense that this was probably started by some dad whose kid is in the BSA and dreamed up this idea.

Be loyal, kind and don’t steal movies:

A Boy Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, etc., etc. He is also respectful of copyrights.

Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a merit patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music.

The patch shows a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a “C” enclosed in a circle.

May

19

Comment Spam Protected

Filed Under Privacy | Leave a Comment

Sorry… A comment spammer found my blog today. Wordpress did an okay job to moderate the ~150 it tried to post. Rather than see the emails from the spammer attempting to post, I decided that since I don’t get many comments anyway, to just require one to login to post a comment.

So, if you are interested in comment, then email me (you know where).

UPDATE: It doesn’t seem turning off comments did any good. The spammers must be hitting a vulnerability in WordPress.

Mar

10

Percentages

Filed Under Computers, Gov't & Politics, Interweb, Privacy | Leave a Comment

This is an interesting opinion piece. I kind of think of the Bank of America commercial where the CTO or CIO says their goal is not to get right almost every time but to get it right once and replicate it every time.

Wired News: Why Data Mining Won’t Stop Terror

Let’s look at some numbers. We’ll be optimistic — we’ll assume the system has a one in 100 false-positive rate (99 percent accurate), and a one in 1,000 false-negative rate (99.9 percent accurate). Assume 1 trillion possible indicators to sift through: that’s about 10 events — e-mails, phone calls, purchases, web destinations, whatever — per person in the United States per day. Also assume that 10 of them are actually terrorists plotting.

This unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month. Raise that false-positive accuracy to an absurd 99.9999 percent and you’re still chasing 2,750 false alarms per day — but that will inevitably raise your false negatives, and you’re going to miss some of those 10 real plots.

…

This is exactly the sort of thing we saw with the NSA’s eavesdropping program: the New York Times reported that the computers spat out thousands of tips per month. Every one of them turned out to be a false alarm.

…

Finding terrorism plots is not a problem that lends itself to data mining. It’s a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and throwing more hay on the pile doesn’t make that problem any easier. We’d be far better off putting people in charge of investigating potential plots and letting them direct the computers, instead of putting the computers in charge and letting them decide who should be investigated.

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