The PC Informant » Privacy

New cookie controls in Chrome browser

Vic Laurie — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:57:36 +0000

All major Web browsers have some sort of controls for managing Internet cookies but some controls are more fine-grained than others. Google’s Chrome browser now has the ability to control cookies for individual sites. It also has a link to the site for controlling Adobe Flash cookies. The video below has some details.

More about the loss of privacy

Vic Laurie — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:28:36 +0000

The discussion of how the Internet acts to reduce privacy continues. Steve Lohr at the New York Times has written an article, How Privacy Vanishes Online, a Bit at a Time. Computers can assemble and analyze the various facts that people post about themselves to create a revealing picture. Lohr writes:

Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.

“Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete,” said Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy division. “You can find out who an individual is without it.”

It isn’t just the information you reveal about yourself but also what others say about you that can be used. Lohr goes on to say:

You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.

“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. “In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.”

Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive “social signature,” researchers say.

Privacy died and no one cared?

Vic Laurie — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:03:37 +0000

It is a commonplace observation that privacy in the modern world is dead. But what is also being said more often is that most people don’t care. Declan McCullagh of CBSNews.com has an article at CNET, Why no one cares about privacy anymore. He writes:

Norms are changing, with confidentiality giving way to openness. Participating in YouTube, Loopt, FriendFeed, Flickr, and other elements of modern digital society means giving up some privacy, yet millions of people are willing to make that trade-off every day. Of people with an online profile, nearly 40 percent have disabled privacy settings so anyone may view it, according to a Pew Internet survey released a year ago. The percentage is probably higher today.

Is the concept of privacy a generational thing? McCullagh writes:

If any of this concerns you, then you didn’t grow up with the Internet. It’s difficult to overstate how thoroughly today’s youth–call them Generation X-hibitionist–have adjusted to living in a world of porn spam and Viagra ads that utterly lacks quaint 20th-century conceptions of privacy.

Later he says:

Perhaps the real issue is not technology but psychology. Irwin Altman, a professor emeritus in the University of Utah’s psychology department, created one of the more widely cited theories of privacy before Facebook’s founder was born. “If one can choose how much or how little to divulge about oneself to another voluntarily, privacy is maintained,” Altman wrote, effectively blessing the social media of a generation later. “If another person can influence how much information we divulge about ourselves or how much information input we let in about others, a lower level of privacy exists.”

For a different point of view, there is another article at CNET. This one is by Chris Matyszczyk and is entitled Why people really do care about privacy. Among other things, he says:

People care about privacy because having a private life makes them feel like people, rather than billboards. It’s an essence of humanity, as we currently know it, that we only allow certain people to see more of who we really are, what we really do, what we really think, and how we really feel. There are many reasons for that. One of them is that we don’t really trust other people all that much.

If all of our information were made public, wouldn’t we all become just a little too predictable? This–remarkably coincidental–is exactly what algorithm worshipers would love: “We know who you are. We know what you think. We know what you like. So you’ll definitely buy this product, won’t you?”

Still another analysis is from a Microsoft researcher. AppScout reports:

Microsoft researcher danah boyd (she prefers no caps) presented a pretty bleak picture of how privacy and publicity is managed online today in her SXSW Interactive keynote. Targeting Chatroulette, Facebook, Google Buzz as examples, boyd says consumers have no idea what they are sharing online–and that the business that build social networks don’t either.

Are you concerned about the loss of privacy in general? Or is the bigger concern fear of what governments and big business can do with all the information they collect about individuals?

Google everywhere

Vic Laurie — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:06:02 +0000

No longer just a search engine, Google seems to be everywhere. In fact, the word “empire” is an apt description. Just how apt is described by the following video clip. It shows how Google has expanded into omnipresence:

Why your search results may differ from someone else’s

Vic Laurie — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:26:17 +0000

That search engines want to tailor your search results according to personal preferences is not news. They’ve been doing that through cookies for some time. But you may be surprised by the extent that searches are personalized. According to a post at the Register, Google says that it is using a combination of things to personalize about 20% of searches:

Speaking this afternoon at the search-obsessed SMX West conference in Santa Clara, Horling – a developer with Google’s personalized search team – said that up to one in five searches are tailored to the user’s particular location, web history, or online contacts. “As it stands today,” Horling explained, “between these three techniques, just about every user who’s engaging with Google search today is affected.”

Protecting privacy on the Internet

Vic Laurie — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:27:04 +0000

The Internet had already greatly reduced personal privacy and the social networks have now made privacy almost extinct for many. Various privacy policies have been used on the Internet from the beginning but the more recent developments have made new approaches necessary. At the New York Times, Steve Lohr writes about changing privacy policies:

On the Internet, things get old fast. One prime candidate for the digital dustbin, it seems, is the current approach to protecting privacy on the Internet.

It is an artifact of the 1990s, intended as a light-touch policy to nurture innovation in an emerging industry. And its central concept is “notice and choice,” in which Web sites post notices of their privacy policies and users can then make choices about sites they frequent and the levels of privacy they prefer.

But policy and privacy experts agree that the relentless rise of Internet data harvesting has overrun the old approach of using lengthy written notices to safeguard privacy.

The article continues:

So if the current model is broken, how can it be fixed? There are two broad answers: rules and tools.

Rules would mean new regulations. And Congress and the Federal Trade Commission are looking at further rules that could limit how personal information is used. For example, the government might ban the use of recorded trails of a person’s Web-browsing behavior — so-called click streams — in employment or health insurance decisions.

How to find out what they know about you

Vic Laurie — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:49:08 +0000

It isn’t just advertisers tracking you. There are a host of companies aggregating all sorts of information about many aspects of your activities. The companies then sell the information to whoever might be interested. The Consumerist has a list of the many reports on your life that are available. Here are some of the categories of information:

Tenant History Reports
Auto & Home Insurance Claim Reports
Credit Bureaus Reports
Full File Disclosure/Personal Information Reports
Check Writing History Reports
Health History Reports
Prescription Drug Purchase History Reports
Purchase Returns History Reports
Gaming Patron’s Credit History and Transaction Data
Utilities & Telecommunications Reports

Go to the Consumerist for a list of links and phone numbers.

Via The Blade

What do behavioral trackers know about you?

Vic Laurie — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:34:08 +0000

It’s no secret that advertisers want to track what you do on the Internet as much as possible. The more they know about potential advertising targets, the more they can tailor ads so they will attract interest. In fact, there are repositories of extensive data gleaned from tracking cookies. If you would like to check what is known about your surfing habits, one place to look is the database at the registry kept by Blue Kai. And who is Blue Kai? GigaOM explains:

To that end, you can find out exactly what cookies BlueKai — which says it’s the largest U.S. behavioral data provider, and just raised a third round of $21 million while kicking off its third year of existence — has on you. Head over to BlueKai’s registry and you can see, item by item, recent categories you’ve been slotted into based on your browsing history.

When I checked to see what Blue Kai had on me, I received the reassuring message that I was unknown. That’s because I take measures to block tracking cookies and I am gratified to see that the measures seem to be working. Over the years, I have written a number of times about how to control cookies. They are a little out of date but I’ll repeat some references below. (Note that some of these are at sites I no longer own.) I hope to get around to updating my thoughts on cookie control one of these days.

What Microsoft didn’t want you to know

Vic Laurie — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:23:12 +0000

What got Microsoft’s hackles up when Cryptome published the document, “Global Criminal Compliance Handbook,” that a previous post reports about? What was it that Redmond didn’t want us to know? It seems that the details of the information that Microsoft collects about us is a touchy subject. In fact, Microsoft may know more about us than we realize. At Computerworld, Preston Gralla details how much personal information Microsoft is gathering:

What is gathered and available about you is quite comprehensive, including your emails, detailed information about when you sign in and use the services, credit card information, and so on.

Google Buzz makes privacy advocates irate

Vic Laurie — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 21:46:52 +0000

Google’s venture into social networking that it calls “Buzz” is creating a different kind of buzz than Google intended. The New York Times reports:

When Google introduced Buzz — its answer to Facebook and Twitter — it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically selected by the company based on the people that each user communicated with most frequently through Google’s e-mail and chat services.

But what Google viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of angry critics. Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion of privacy, and they faulted the company for failing to ask permission before sharing a person’s Buzz contacts with a broad audience. For the last three days, Google has faced a firestorm of criticism on blogs and Web sites, and it has already been forced to alter some features of the service.

Update 02/14/10: Google has responded quickly to the criticism about privacy and has made changes in Buzz. The New York Times reports:

Google moved quickly to contain a firestorm of criticism over Buzz, its new social network, taking the unusual step of announcing changes to the product over the weekend to address privacy problems.

Late Saturday, Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, wrote in a blog post that Google had decided to alter one of the most vehemently criticized features in Buzz: the ready-made circle of friends that Buzz gives new users based on their most frequent e-mail and chat contacts. Now, instead of automatically connecting people, Buzz merely suggests to new users a group of people that they may want to follow or want to be followed by.

Google announced at the Google Blog:

We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear, and since we launched Google Buzz four days ago, we’ve been working around the clock to address the concerns you’ve raised. Today, we wanted to let you know about a number of changes we’ll be making over the next few days based on all the feedback we’ve received.