Privacy

You are currently browsing the archive for the Privacy category.

Full Body Scanners

December 30, 2009 in Privacy by Ezra S F | 1 comment

I was starting to be okay with this description of a whole body imaging  Transportation Security Administration plans to implement.

One, there’s technology that allows the body to be transmuted into merely a cartoon stick figure. So it’s not as if anyone’s genitalia or private parts are being revealed. Instead, it’s just an outline of the body. And then, as I say, anything odd attached to the body becomes readily apparent. (Op-Ed: Security Measures Should Be More Invasive : NPR)

Then I saw images online of what a TSA technician would see. Sadly, what I saw was not stick figures but naked bodies with obscured faces and lines where clothes hug the body. A blurred face doesn’t make me more comfortable. I don’t use dressing rooms in stores specifically because places are known to use cameras in the rooms. I’d rather take the item back than run across the possibility of being viewed in just my underwear, so being viewed naked is disconcerting.

Whether the distance of the person viewing me naked is 2 feet away or 20,000 miles makes extremely little difference to me. Not being able to see the expression of the person viewing raises the creepiness factor. Of course, I went to college at a time when really creepy guys would hang out in the back corner computer labs looking a pictures of naked women and disturbed everyone in the building. My bag was swabbed by one of those people the last time I flew out of that airport.

The images I saw were all older than April 2009, so it is possible new software absolves the nudity issue. This quote makes it sound like there are things which can be done to eliminate the nudity issue and may be what the first quote intended. I only found 4 different images and none matched my idea of a stick figure or stylized.

New software, however, eliminates that problem [nudity of minors is illegal] by projecting a stylized image rather than an actual picture onto a computer screen, highlighting the area of the body where objects are concealed in pockets or under the clothing. Dutch to use full body scanners for US flights

I’ve heard various things about how long the images are stored: not at all, 12 hours, and 3 days. So I fully expect in 2010 to hear about a scandal of pictures of people from these machines getting posted online. In Britain there was a question whether these images taken of minors violates the law despite government officials claiming the images being legal as they are not actually images.

One technology uses terahertz radiation which supposedly will detect the spectrograph of chemicals. Such a thing could detect explosives or illegal drugs.

More technology doesn’t help so much as passing along warnings about threats. This guy’s father told the right people his son was a threat. Yet he wasn’t put on the no-fly list. A 5 year olds are got searched for having the same name as someone on the no-fly list.

Helping?

December 16, 2009 in Privacy by Ezra S F | 1 comment

Saturday I didn’t go anywhere. Sunday, a piece of paper fell out of the door. All my neighbors had what appeared to be the same paper in their doors. The point of the note is to be careful about letting people know you are away from home for Christmas.

In a college town like here, lots of people left as soon as finals were done. In many cases, this was before this note was distributed to doors. These notes seem the perfect way for identifying who has left town early. Almost anyone who read it would think it helpful advice. The person leaving them could check out places for whether they are good marks. A week or days later like today, any places who haven’t removed the piece of paper have left early for the holidays. So I am tempted to walk around and trash any remaining.

Or maybe I am overly paranoid?

Trusting Social Networks

July 14, 2009 in Interweb, Privacy by Ezra S F | No comments

Sunday at brunch we had an interesting conversation about Facebook.

Establishing the appropriate privacy levels to the various constituents see appropriate material is hard. So hard it takes a long pages of text and screenshots to just paint a picture of what to review for the top 10 Facebook privacy settings.

We were discussing how to make the Facebook world we touched more private. How to keep those we supervise or those who supervise us at bay once accepted into our social circle. Few of us only post things our grandmothers would find acceptable, so how do we ensure grandma will never see that picture? This meant banning grandma from seeing the Wall or photo albums or tagged photos.

I had heard we would soon be able to change the privacy levels of individual posts.  This privacy granularity comes at a price according to the New York Times:

By default, all your messages on Facebook will soon be naked visible to the world. The company is starting by rolling out the feature to people who had already set their profiles as public, but it will come to everyone soon.

People like walled gardens. Taking a term from Seth Godin, interacting with just the handpicked few forms a tribe.

If sunlight is the best disinfectant, then social networking on Facebook will die should it be exposed to the world (or too hard to remain private). The most common criticism of blogging is the whole world is in your business. People like the faux-protection of participating online where Google cannot archive it for posterity. This is why Facebook experienced such explosive growth.

Hopefully users will be able to deal with keeping everything as private as they like. Otherwise, we’ll be looking for another walled garden. Maybe I’ll even end up back on my private Twitter account?

Stalking Students

July 13, 2009 in Education, Privacy by Ezra S F | 2 comments

On the BLKBRD-L email list is a discussion about proving students are cheating. Any time the topic comes up, someone says a human in a room is the only way to be sure. Naturally, someone else responds with the latest and greatest technology to detect cheating.

In this case, Acxiom offers identity verification:

By matching a student’s directory information (name, address, phone) to our database, we match the student to our database. The student then must answer questions to verify their identity, which may include name, address and date of birth.

…
The institution never releases directory information so there are no Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) violations.

However, to complete the course work the student is forced to hand over the information to Acxiom, an unknown and potentially untrusted party. Why should students trust Acxiom when institutions cannot be trusted?

Due to the decentralized nature of IT departments, higher education leads all industries in numbers data breach events. Acxiom’s verification capabilities were designed so that student and instructor privacy is a critical feature of our solution. Institutions never receive the data Acxiom uses in this process. They are simply made aware of the pass/fail rates.

In other words, high education institutions cannot be trusted to handle this information. No reason was provided as to why Acxiom can be better trusted. Guess the people reading this would never check to see whether Acxiom has also had data breaches.

This Electronic Freedom Foundation response to Acxiom’s claims their method is more secure was interesting:

True facts about your life are, by definition, pre-compromised. If the bio question is about something already in the consumer file, arguably the best kind of question is about something that is highly unlikely to be in one’s consumer file and even useless commercially–like my pet’s name.

Answering these kinds of questions feels like more of violation of than a preservation of privacy.

Naked on the Net

January 26, 2008 in Privacy, Social by Ezra S F | No comments

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.

Blog Delurking Week

January 12, 2008 in Privacy by Ezra S F | No comments

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. :)

No More Public Anonymous Photos

January 7, 2007 in Interweb, Philosophy, Photography, Privacy by Ezra S F | No comments

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.

Your Cell Phone Is the FBI’s Bug

December 4, 2006 in Gov't / Law / Politics, Privacy by Ezra S F | No comments

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.”

Spies Among Us

October 20, 2006 in Privacy by Ezra S F | No comments

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.

Comment Spam Protected

May 19, 2006 in Privacy by Big Eazy

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.

« Older entries