NY Times picking your friends' noses

"You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends' noses," so an old saying goes. This notion has become largely obsolete in the age of social networking. For example, when you sign up with your Facebook account on a popular website they typically get not only your public profile, but also your friend list.

Imagine now doing real business, e.g. making a purchase or contacting customer service, using your social networking profile as a login. For the price of the transaction the other party gets access to your entire social graph, which (with a little bit of triangulation through other customer logins) provides an incredible wealth of marketing information. As a result, you give up a large chunk of your privacy for free, without even being aware of it.

We used to think about privacy as a trade-off: you get access to free content by giving up your right to stay anonymous, i.e. providing the content distributor with the information about what kind of content you like to read. If the current trend continues, people will be giving away for free not only their own privacy, but also their friends' privacy too.

tags: trade-off, trend, social, networking, composite actor, privacy, internet

Privacy is Dead, the Russian edition

The Russian Government has decreed that access to public Wi-Fi can be given only to those who submitted their passport data —name, address, DOB, etc. — to the service provider. The service provider is responsible for storing the personal information, including device identification and communications data, and forwarding it to the Russian Secret Service (FSB). 

Just imagine your local Starbucks or McDonalds tracking and recording their customers' personal info. That would be of great help to identity thieves. As if they need any.

tags: privacy, security

Lunch Talk: TEDx, the battle for power on the Internet.

Bruce Schneier talks about the problem of control over data on the Internet.



In chapter 22 ("Seeing the Invisible: The System behind the New Internet") of our favorite book, we discuss the mechanism of Control that Internet users delegated to private companies in return for subsidized devices and services. Essentially, the users traded their long-term digital futures for short-term economic and status gains. In economics, it is called Future Discounting. Paradoxically, the original idea that on the web everything is free AND there are no strings attached to the content turned into a familiar trade-off: "free stuff with lots of strings attached." As usual, a recipe for success became a recipe for disaster.

Faking it, the government style.

The new "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights" appears to be a successful attempt to lull consumers into believing that they can get privacy on the Web.

Feb 23, 2012. CNET -- Do Not Track technology .... applies to targeted ads only and not to any other forms of tracking.

Abine conducted a quick online survey of 500 Internet users starting on Wednesday and found that 80 percent of respondents believed that Do Not Track stops data collection or removed tracking technologies from their computers.

It shows that with a clever name you can get 80% of people believe what they would like to believe.

tags: internet, web, privacy, control, detection

Your social privacy is dead too.

Mobile apps freely access user contact information. Even if you personally take care of your private data, there's still a way to pierce you privacy veil through your friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.

Feb 14, 2012. VBeat -- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Foodspotting, Yelp, and Gowalla are among a smattering of iOS applications that have been sending the actual names, email addresses and/or phone numbers from your device’s internal address book to their servers, VentureBeat has learned. Several do so without first asking permission, and Instagram and Foursquare only added permissions prompts after the Path flare-up.

tags: privacy, information, control, social, networking

The latest numbers in the browser war of attrition.

Dec 16, 2011. CNet - ... numbers still show all versions of IE taking a total of 40.09 percent of the market, vs. 26.31 percent for all versions of Chrome. Firefox is at 25.07 percent, Apple's Safari is at 5.86 percent, and Opera gets 1.91 percent.

Today, browsers not only generate searches for Google and Microsoft, but, more importantly, track user online behavior.  We trust them with our passwords, messages, information habits, and much more. This intimate knowledge of users makes the internet giants fight the war of attrition over who is going to provide you with free software. It's scary even to think about how much the browser knows about you.

tags: security, privacy, battle

Is your toaster watching you?

CNet reports on Siemens buying eMeter, a big data utility metering software startup.

Note how the article confuses cause and effect. Imagine you are a power utility. When you collect user information once a month no big data processing capability is necessary. But when you collect it every 15 minutes - an almost 3,000 increase in frequency - all of a sudden you have a lot of data to process. Therefore, the reason for new challenge is not the need for improved billing, but the new ability to collect and analyze private information that generate an avalanche of data.

(Dec 5, 2011. CNet) - By collecting data such as customer power consumption every 15 minutes, utilities can automatically read meters and get a better understanding of demand trends. Energy usage information can also be presented to consumers through a dashboard or dedicated device to help consumers lower utility bills. 

One of the challenges for utilities is that water, gas, and electricity meters create masses of data that has to be collected over different networks and then integrated into systems. Tying meter data into billing applications, for example, helps utilities streamline their operations. 

Last week, a lot of consumer wrath was directed at Carrier IQ collecting mobile data. The company was even accused of breaking federal wiretap laws. The case shows that the we are still in early stages of system growth, with most basic security issues unresolved. For example, enterprise use of smartphones  with unauthorized third party software is a huge security hole.

I would argue that, privacy-wise, the new big data capabilities of the utility companies is as invasive as Carrier IQ. By correlating your water, electricity, and internet use data, the utilities can figure out why, when, and how you use your home appliances.

tags: 10X, control,detection, energy, privacy, cloud

Trade-off of the Day: business opportunity vs privacy.

After watching yesterday's Lunch Talk video, where Jeremy Bailenson warned against posting high resolution personal pictures on the net, I find this trade-off described in a recent NYT article lacking in imagination:

But facial recognition is proliferating so quickly that some regulators in the United States and Europe are playing catch-up. On the one hand, they say, the technology has great business potential. On the other, because facial recognition works by analyzing and storing people’s unique facial measurements, it also entails serious privacy risks.

The trade-off is false. You may not lose your privacy in a lopsided commercial exchange, but you will definitely lose your money. For example, according to Bailenson, once advertisers know your unique facial measurements they can construct a highly convincing social networking ad that dramatically increases the probability of you buying their product or service. It's very concrete money in your wallet that are at risk, not some abstract privacy rights. Having access to private information is one thing. Manipulating the information to gain psychological and business advantage is another.

tags: privacy, commerce, control, detection

Lunch Talk: Jeff Jarvis on privacy vs information tech.

tags: trend, information, social, privacy

 

Eisenstadt (a Gutenberg scholar): the book did not take on its own form until 50 years after it was invented by Gutenberg. Printing was originally called "automatic handwriting." [horseless carriage]

Ultimate cloud computing

Wired writes about a new supercomputing intelligence device in the skies above Afghanistan:

It’ll be floating 20,000 feet above the warzone, aboard a giant spy blimp that watches and listens to everything for miles around.

The idea behind the Blue Devil is to have up to a dozen different sensors, all flying on the same airship and talking to each other constantly. The supercomputer will crunch the data, and automatically slew the sensors in the right direction: pointing a camera at, say, the guy yapping about an upcoming ambush.

The goal is to get that coordinated information down to ground troops in less than 15 seconds.

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Besides military and law enforcement applications, can we use this technology for improving wireless data communications for mobile devices, e.g. during large public events? Probably, yes. Unlike drones, a blimp in the sky would work better as a local network hub than a communications satellite, just hang a bunch of antennas and solar panels on it. Even better, make the whole thing out of a solar power-generating fabric.

tags: cloud, computers, communications, military, privacy, video, mobile, dynamic, system, control, drones, energy

e-mail should die

In the age of social networking, e-mail has become a giant security hole. PC World reports:

George Bronk, 23, was arrested in late October after police found evidence that he'd hacked into more than 3,200 e-mail accounts. He used the same technique that Sarah Palin hacker David Kernell used to break into the former U.S. vice presidential candidate's Yahoo account: He scoured his victims' Facebook accounts for answers to the security questions used by Web-based e-mail services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

Forget about pranksters and perverts. Now, that banks, brokerages, and other financial institutions switch from paper to electronic statements, hacking somebody's e-mail account is going to become an even more profitable enterprise.

tags: privacy, security, information, finance, control, payload, packaging, 10x