Technology and Privacy

There is a TED talk Margaret Gould Stewart: How YouTube thinks about copyright which describes, in a general, way the state of technology. YouTube/Google is able to review an incredible amount of data in order to determine if the information is copyrighted - and if it is what to do about it.

If you're concerned about privacy use this video as a stepping to stone to comprehend the future. Computer processing speed is doubling every 18 months. In less than twenty years processing power will be 1000 times greater than it is today. What currently takes Google, YouTube, the NSA one year will take about 8.5 hours. Or, put in another way, what now takes 24 hours will take a little under 3 minutes.

Moore's Law and Privacy

Most people are not appreciating how fast technology is changing. They don't appreciate that we're in a period of exponential growth, and they don't put an thought into how these advances will change their life, politics, and employment in the very near future.

Of concern to me in this post is not the advances in screen technology, construction materials and medical advances but that of computer speed, data storage and data retrival and how these advances affect everyone's privacy.

Take a Second to Review Google's Privacy Policy

Take a second and think about what you have searched for, where you have gone on line over the last few years. Google will soon combine all the information it has collected about you. EFF (The Electronic Frontier Foundaton) has an article describing the steps you can do to "erase" this history

On March 1st, Google will implement its new, unified privacy policy, which will affect data Google has collected on you prior to March 1st as well as data it collects on you in the future. Until now, your Google Web History (your Google searches and sites visited) was cordoned off from Google's other products. This protection was especially important because search data can reveal particularly sensitive information about you, including facts about your location, interests, age, sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, and more. If you want to keep Google from combining your Web History with the data they have gathered about you in their other products, such as YouTube or Google Plus, you may want to remove all items from your Web History and stop your Web History from being recorded in the future.

ACTA will Suffer the Same Fate as SOPA

It looks as if ACTA is going down. Poland has rescinded it's vote. ACTA is now all but officially dead within the EU. This, for all practical purposes, kills ACTA. How long until the US and others signers also rescind their votes?

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said

that his government had made insufficient consultations before signing the agreement in late January, and it was necessary to ensure it was entirely safe for Polish citizens.

Although it is technically a trade agreement, ACTA is effectively an international treaty aimed at criminalising copyright infringement and associated activities.

...

Poland has seen the biggest protests against ACTA, with thousands demonstrating on the streets last week. Hackers believed to be associated with Anonymous attacked Tusk's website, as well as the European Parliament site, after the signing.

Critics of ACTA say it has insufficient safeguards for online liberties, particularly in signing countries that do not already have strong principles of freedom of speech and expression. In addition, the agreement negotiations, which took place without the contributions of civic groups or elected representatives, have been widely described as undemocratic.


ZD Net

As of now Germany and The Netherlands (among 5 other countries) have refused to sign ACTA. It's difficult to see ACTA working without Germany and The Netherlands unless other countries are exerting considerable pressure on them. Considering that none of ACTA's 31 signatories have ratified the treaty it seems that ACTA will die a very public and ignomious death.

Now all we need is for the US to rescind their agreement as well.

EDIT 2/16/2012

The government of Bulgaria, which had already signed ACTA, announced that it would not seek ratification of the treaty.

ACTA dissed in Bulgaria, too

ACTA - the New SOPA

Theft of intellectual property is a massive problem. But the solutions brought up by governments never seem to make any sense. Too many people, in too many places, prefer government control to individual choice - hence many of the dangerously silly proposals. Then, when we add the penchant for secretive decision making on such an important aspect of life - who can be surprised that these backdoor agreements never seem to work out well?

Although ACTA is primarily concerned with the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR), its designation as a trade treaty meant it could be negotiated behind closed doors. This lengthy process, led by the US and Japan, was exposed in a series of leaks — some via Wikileaks — that revealed what was going on.

The final version of ACTA is very different to earlier drafts, which would have forced countries to disconnect internet users if they were found to be repeatedly sharing copyrighted content. The EU rejected this proposal, and other ideas, such as criminalising the use of a mobile phone camera in a cinema, also fell by the wayside.
UK signs ACTA as activists urge resistance

Early drafts of ACTA "mandated that people unlawfully distributing copyrighted content online should have their internet connections cut off, and that people who record films in cinemas should go to jail." As much as I disagree with the provision regarding distributing copyrighted information (unless it is very carefully written and applies only to a very narrow definition of theft) I agree completely with the provision which calls for jailing those who record films in cinemas. There is no excuse for that.


What's Wrong With ACTA

SOPA - The End?

It looks as if SOPA and PIPA will not pass. SOPA has already been put on a backburner by the House leadership and it looks as if the outrage has reached critical mass. There is bipartisan opposition to both bills. Piracy and theft of intellectual property is a real problem but these bills seemed, to this observer, to be fatally flawed. Time for Congress to revisit the problem.

SOPA Track

From Mashable:

SOPA Track will tell you if your elected officials have expressly stated their support or disapproval of SOPA/PIPA along with the amount of money they’ve raised from pro and anti-SOPA organizations. An office phone number and links to each Congressperson’s social media profiles are also included.

I'm not too certain about the accuracy of SOPA Track regarding their allocation of contributors to "For SOPA" or "Against SOPA." Even if it is not as accurate as we would all like it to be it is a great start and kudos to Randy Meech for the idea and taking the time to develop it.

For more see an earlier post: An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the United States Congress and see the discussions at Slashdot.

EU Cookie Compliance Regulations Remain

The UK continues to double down on their foolishly implemented cookie law.

You must provide clear and comprehensive information about any cookies you are using.

I completely respect the quest for privacy but asking people to sign off on cookie laws each time they come to a website is as foolish as to have people sign a form each time they enter a store that has a security camera. As mentioned in earlier posts one solution would be for consumers to digitally sign once and have it apply to all sites OR, more importantly, allow cookie use for basic site analytics and functions but restrict more invasive use that allows for the tracking of users across multiple domains.

For more read ‘Must try harder’ on cookies compliance, says ICO

An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the United States Congress

Once again the US Congress, in all its wisdom, is trying to solve a problem - copyright infringement and piracy - but doing it poorly. I applaud the effort but rise in opposition. I quote from an open letter dated yesterday written by some of the greats (Vint Cerf, Esther Dyson, Alexandre McKinsie and 80 others)

If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties' right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.

Read the entire Letter at eff.org.

EDIT 12/20/2011

Here's an excellent article on the topic: Don't Break the Internet published by the Stanford Law Review On-Line.

Directing the remedial power of the courts towards the Internet’s core technical infrastructure in this sledgehammer fashion has impact far beyond intellectual property rights enforcement—it threatens the fundamental principle of interconnectivity that is at the very heart of the Internet.

...

Court-ordered removal or replacement of entries from the series of interlocking databases that reside in domain name servers and domain name registries around the globe undermines the principle of domain name universality—the principle that all domain name servers, wherever they may be located across the network, will return the same answer when queried with respect to the Internet address of any specific domain name. Much Internet communication, and many of the thousands of protocols and applications that together provide the platform for that communication, are premised on this principle.

Indeed, this approach could actually have an effect directly contrary to what its proponents intend: if large swaths of websites are cut out of the Internet addressing system, those sites—and the users who want to reach them—may well gravitate towards alternative, unregulated domain name addressing systems, making it even harder for governments to exercise their legitimate regulatory role in Internet activities.

Google+ and Privacy

Love what I see from Google+. The problem I see from Google all revolves around the issue of personal privacy. Can we make on-line information private? There are, different definitions of privacy. Some/all information will be kept in corporate databases - but who will access this information and how? I don't care about advertising/market research. I do care on "unauthorized" people being able to search or query the data for my personal information.

There are several levels of privacy:
1. Companies using the data for market research
2. Companies advertising goods and services
3. Individuals researching you and finding "unauthorized/private" data
4. The government researching you / keeping dossiers.

All I have to say is:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated ...
4th Amendment to the US Constitution

This YouTube video is an excellent introduction to Google+.

Reputation Systems

A talk presented by Randy Farmer, co-author of the O'Reilly book Web Reputation Systems. I highly recommend the book and this video, from a Google Tech Talk seminar, is an excellent introduction.

Randy Farmer explains the pitfalls behind creating reputation systems. At issue is how people interact on-line; how they become "known" and rated as "trustworthy." In a very short time reputation and privacy will be considered two sides of the same coin. Anonymity has its use, but of greater value would be to have anonymity AND reputation. This way people will be able to communicate w/o fear of retribution AND be able to separate the troll from the avatar.

We can see that a future world, where people are better known by their avatars, may lead to problems. I can't begin to foresee those issues - that will be discussed and analyzed a decade from now.

Cheap, functional, reliable things unleash the creativity of people who then build stuff that you could not imagine. There’s no way of predicting the Internet based on the first transistor.”

George Whitesides: Toward a Science of Simplicity

The ICO and Cookies

The ICO (the UK agency which is concerned with the cookies and privacy) still uses Google Analytics but they include a warning label.

If companies simply write, as did the ICO below - and users automatically click to accept as they want access to the data then of what use was the law?

The ICO would like to use cookies to store information on your computer, to improve our website. One of the cookies we use is essential for parts of the site to operate and has already been set. You may delete and block all cookies from this site, but parts of the site will not work. To find out more about the cookies we use and how to delete them, see our privacy notice.

EU, the UK and the Ongoing Cookie Fiasco

The EU law regarding cookies is quite confusing and it will be interesting to see what will happen. Will the EU and member governments enforce or clarify their laws?

There is an interesting portion from a UK document from the Information Commissioner's Office: Changes to the rules on using cookies and similar technologies for storing information

Some of the things you do will have no privacy impact at all and may even help users keep their information safe. Other technologies will simply allow you to improve your website based on information such as which links are used most frequently or which pages get fewest unique views. However, some uses of cookies can involve creating detailed profiles of an individual’s browsing activity.

If you are doing this, or allowing it to happen, on your website or across a range of sites, it is clear that you are doing something that could be quite intrusive – the more privacy intrusive your activity, the more priority you will need to give to getting meaningful consent.

Of course the devil is in the details and we're not getting much information. I have a feeling these laws may die on the vine - but I fear that it be pulled out in a later date and sprung on a company or a group of companies.

UPDATE: 5/28/2011

The following article is worth reading as well:
Enforcing the revised Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR)

Yahoo is Responsible for Illegal Downloads

There was a horrible decision from the Court of Rome. Apparently people could view pirated copies of a movie (About Elly) on line. The Court of Rome ordered Yahoo to remove any link to the unlawful copies of the movie.

The only reason the Court did not include Google and other SEs is because the Italian division of those companies did not have an active role in the management of the search engines and thus were outside the jurisdiction of the court.

If this decision stands then search engines would be responsible for the content found through their site. The court did say that it would be impossible for the SE to police the material themselves but was responsible for promptly acting when a copyrite holder makes a claim about pirated material. The court also took into consideration the fact that the illegal sites were ranked higher than the official site. SEO anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

The fact that a SE is, in anyway, responsible for the material on the web is a horrible precedence. Intentional or not this is the first step to shutting down commercial activity across the web; the first step to eliminated any non-approved site. This is a special concern to anyone who is interested in privacy rights and free speech.

I can't find an English translation of the case but if you can read Italian here it is.

Facebook Being Sued to Remove Data

Two years ago a woman was murdered in Staten Island, NY. The EMT who arrived at the scene took a photo of the murder scene and posted it on his Facebook page. The murderer was caught and convicted and the EMT lost his job and certification. Now the family is suing Facebook regarding turning over the photos in question and identifying the users who saw and downloaded the photos.

I'm not a fan of Facebook as it concerns privacy rights but in this case the family is in the wrong. The only thing that can be done is to remove the offending photo from the EMT's account (and, if it's in the TOS, to close the account). However, now the family is asking the courts to force Facebook to violate others' privacy by finding out who "viewed" and "downloaded" the photos. Assuming the data exists (unlikely) and assuming that the newspaper account of the suit is correct the family is asking something quite unreasonable.

EU outlaws cookies?

It looks as if, starting May 25, it will be illegal for websites coming under the jurisdiction of the EU to use cookies without prior explicit consent from the user. This will impact all sites that advertise or monitor their site usage with Google Analytics or any other such provider.

I'm still a little up-in-the-air about what is truly restricted. Some reports say that it only applies to client-side cookies whereas others seem to include server-side cookies as well.

Expectation of Privacy

A talk held by the EFF regarding the privacy of the information on your computer. It is a very interesting review of current US law regarding the 4th Amendment.

Was Internet traffic hijacked to China?

If you were at all interested in China hijacking the world's internet traffic take a look at this report from renesys.com

Did China's government really divert 15% of the Internet's traffic for eighteen minutes in April, effortlessly intercepting sensitive traffic in flight, and generally creating a massively embarrassing man-in-the-middle attack on vulnerable global communications?

Well, yes and no. Mostly no.

Yes, this event really happened. No, it probably wasn't a deliberate attack, or if it was, it wasn't a very effective one, compared to what might have happened, but that's where the story tends to bog down in technical detail and lose most readers.

It's far better information than what CNN and other major networks provided.

DuckDuckGo

As long-time readers of this blog know, I'm a strong advocate of privacy rights. The problem is two-fold: first people don't understand how much privacy they've given up and second the available privacy technology is too difficult, too complicate for the average person to use.

It looks as if that may be changing. Another privacy based search engine has come on the market. It has a silly name, DuckDuckGo but if it provides good results it may become an important tool in one's "privacy arsenal."

EDIT 9/27/2010:

If you're looking at privacy minded search engines don't forget to look at  Start Page.

Facebook and Privacy

Once again Facebook has added a feature which will share information beyond what most people will expect. There is a new privacy setting called "Instant Personalization" that shares data with non-Facebook websites and is automatically set to "Allow."

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kurt Opsahl notes, Facebook introduced this concept using the innocuous topic of "cooking." Who wouldn't want to be known as a fan of cooking? Unfortunately, the same rules apply to more controversial pages you might also like:

"Previously, you could list "cooking" as an activity you liked on your profile, but your name would not be added to any formal "Cooking" page. (Under the old system, you could become a "fan" of cooking if you wanted). But now, the new Cooking page will publicly display all of the millions of people who list cooking as an activity.

"Cooking is not very controversial or privacy-sensitive, and thus makes for a good example from Facebook's perspective. Who would want to conceal their interest in cooking? Of course, the new program will also create public lists for controversial issues, such as an interest in abortion rights, gay marriage, marijuana, tea parties and so on."
PC WORLD: Facebook Gets a Little Too Personal

Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > Instant Personalization and uncheck "Allow".

When you uncheck the box the following pop-up appears:

FWIW if your friends don't do this they will be sharing information about you.