http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081214073237487
My Buddies App On Facebook: Privacy Extortion? (opinion)
Sunday, December 14 2008 @ 07:32 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
I recently received a series of notifications on Facebook alerting me that friends of mine had answered various personal questions about me. One notification claimed that a high school friend had just answered a specific yes/no question about my sexual orientation. Clicking on the link labeled “What did she say?”, I was invited to join My Buddies – a new Facebook application with an icon identical to the default running man on AIM, implying a connection to AOL that I doubt exists.
[...]
My Buddies asks sensitive questions about an individual, reports to that individual that the questions were answered by a friend in some way, and requires the individual to invite others to sign up before hearing the answer (or even who else can see the answer). My Buddies attempts in this way to strong arm user adoption. I reported this application to Facebook. I invite you to do the same.
Source - Ryan Calo, on CIS
Ditto? At least related.
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081215065220789
UK: BT to go ahead with Phorm ad-server deployment
Monday, December 15 2008 @ 06:52 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
BT expects to deploy the controversial Phorm advertisement-serving technology following a "brief" period of analysis of the results of its third trial.
Phorm said today, "Following the successful completion of analysis, both of the trial results and of any changes required for expansion, BT has informed the company that it expects to move towards deployment."
Source - ComputerWeekly.com
[From an earlier article:
The letter to the Commission added that a user profile should have a random identity, that Phorm did not keep a record of sites visited or search terms used, and that advertising categories and other information could not be used to track back to users. [Doesn't this defeat the whole concept of ad serving? Bob]
Perspective
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081215070136582
Issue Paper: Protecting the right to privacy in the fight against terrorism
Monday, December 15 2008 @ 07:01 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
Issue Papers published by the Commissioner for Human Rights highlight human rights aspects and concerns of highly topical themes. They present the main factual and legal data of those themes. They raise questions, propose pointers for any future work, contain suggestions and possible warnings. They aim to inform the public as well as authorities and members of non-governmental organisations working in the field of human rights and to contribute to debate. They cannot be construed as Recommendations or Opinions under the Commissioner's terms of reference. All Issue papers are available on the Commissioner’s web-site: www.commissioner.coe.int.
Source - Council of Europe Commissioner of Human Rights
[From the paper:
7. Conclusions
We are rapidly becoming a “Surveillance Society”. This is partly the result of general technical and societal developments, but these trends are strongly reinforced by measures taken in the fight against terrorism.
Might be interesting to survey these companies to see if they agree on a Privacy Strategy (or is the trust based on customer ignorance?)
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081215065415871
Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe Announce Results of Annual Most Trusted Companies for Privacy Survey
Monday, December 15 2008 @ 06:54 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
Privacy and information security research company Ponemon Institute along with TRUSTe, the most widely recognized Internet privacy trustmark, today announced the results of the Ponemon Institute's fifth annual survey of Most Trusted Companies for Privacy. The study asked 6,486 adult-aged U.S. consumers which companies they thought were most trustworthy and which did the best job safeguarding personal information. A total of 706 companies were named by consumers; 211 made the final list of most trusted companies.
American Express ranked as the Most Trusted Company for 2008 for Privacy, retaining its place from last year despite the current financial climate. eBay earned a ranking as the second most trusted company, while IBM, Amazon, and Johnson & Johnson rounded out the top five.
Source - MarketWatch press release
There are direct and indirect consequences. Not sure I can agree with their conclusions...
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081215063252228
Data Breaches: Ignorance Is Dangerous
Monday, December 15 2008 @ 06:32 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
Before 2003, companies weren't required to report a data breach to anyone, but a California law passed that year changed everything. Two years later, following the ChoicePoint breach, most of the other states jumped on the bandwagon, and now most states have notification laws.
[...]
Fred Cate, a law professor and director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University, agrees. "Research shows pretty clearly that there's very little identity theft that follows breached accounts. Security threats are all around us, but security breaches are like a little sideshow. I don't mean to suggest that they aren't a concern, but if you asked security experts to name the top 15 security risks, I doubt breaches would be on anyone's list."
Source - TechNewsWorld
...because...
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081215063132395
Data "Dysprotection:" breaches reported last week
Monday, December 15 2008 @ 06:31 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
A recap of incidents or privacy breaches reported last week for those who enjoy shaking their head and muttering to themselves with their morning coffee.
Source - Chronicles of Dissent
If the government publishes these names, it's a “Public Safety” issue. If they don't, is “Journalism” the only valid “defense?”
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20081214100931326
Swedish government watchdog investigates website naming sex offenders
Sunday, December 14 2008 @ 10:09 AM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews
A government watchdog in Sweden has started investigating a website that publishes the names of convicted sex offenders for potential breach of the country's privacy laws. ... The board will assess whether the publication has been done with a journalistic purpose or not.
Under Swedish law, material published with a journalistic purpose is excluded from the law on protection of personal information. [Would that cover the supermarket tabloids? Bob]
The website has been running since October and shows court documents, dates of birth and photos of convicted rapists.
Source - Canada East
Is it high comedy when we laugh at your “best argument?”
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F14%2F1346220&from=rss
Documentary Released On Canadian Fight Against DMCA
Posted by Soulskill on Sunday December 14, @09:38AM from the during-hockey-season?-they-must-really-be-upset dept. Government The Internet
An anonymous reader writes
"The ongoing fight against the Canadian DMCA is the focus of a new documentary film called Why Copyright? Produced by Michael Geist and available as a streamed version, OGG download version, or a torrent, the film features Red Hat founder Bob Young, sci-fi writer Karl Schroeder, the owner of Skylink Technologies (which fought the DMCA garage door opener case) and many other voices from across Canada."
Fact or fiction? Did the WSJ get it wrong?
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F15%2F0326211&from=rss
Network Neutrality Defenders Quietly Backing Off?
Posted by timothy on Monday December 15, @07:02AM from the but-you-said-earlier dept. The Internet Communications Google Politics
SteveOHT writes
"Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers. The story claims that Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon have quietly withdrawn from a coalition of companies and groups backing network neutrality (the coalition is not named), though Amazon's name is reportedly once again listed on the coalition's Web site.
Google has already responded, calling the WSJ story "confused" and explaining that they're only talking about edge caching, and remain as committed as ever to network neutrality. The blogosphere is alight with the debate.
[From the article:
In addition, prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject.
The contentious issue has wide ramifications for the Internet as a platform for new businesses. If companies like Google succeed in negotiating preferential treatment, the Internet could become a place where wealthy companies get faster and easier access to the Web than less affluent ones, according to advocates of network neutrality. [Interesting graphic showing petabytes per month Bob]
... Microsoft, which appealed to Congress to save network neutrality just two years ago, has changed its position completely. "Network neutrality is a policy avenue the company is no longer pursuing," Microsoft said in a statement. The Redmond, Wash., software giant now favors legislation to allow network operators to offer different tiers of service to content companies.
Worth reading, but a simple call for standards.
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/020065.html
December 14, 2008
New on LLRX.com: E-Discovery Update - My E-Discovery Holiday Wish List
E-Discovery Update: My E-Discovery Holiday Wish List - Conrad J. Jacoby's holiday wish is for the legal community to finally develop one or more judicially accepted standards that can be used to craft consistent ways of requesting and producing information. With baseline procedures in place, both producing and requesting parties, as well as judges, will be able to make more informed decisions about the need for discovery and the way in which such discovery should be conducted.
No tech surprises...
http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/020066.html
December 14, 2008
Pew Internet Survey: The Future of the Internet III
News release: "Some 578 leading Internet activists, builders, and commentators responded in this survey to scenarios about the effect of the Internet on social, political, and economic life in the year 2020. An additional 618 stakeholders also participated in the study, for a total of 1,196 participants who shared their views..."
The Future of the Internet III - "A survey of experts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, and the structure of the Internet itself improves. They disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives. December 14, 2008"
Do you believe?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10122752-71.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Does it matter if Google's search results are fixed?
Posted by Chris Matyszczyk December 14, 2008 12:03 PM PST
The fools, usually, are us.
We, the people, who switch off our critical faculties and happily barter our trust for the joy of convenience.
So will we ever make the effort to even raise an eyebrow when we read "Google this week admitted that its staff pick and choose what appears in its search results"?
These words, from the Register's Andrew Orlovski, ought surely to give one or two people pause for a small grunt of concern.
As Mr. Orlovski points out, Google News expressly declares that "the selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program." Except that, it appears, maybe they weren't.
He quotes Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, who suggested that Google will "make obvious changes- An example is if "thousands of people" were to knock a search result off a search page, they'd be likely to make a change.."
"Now what, you may be thinking, is an "obvious change"?" writes Mr. Orlovski. "Is it one that is frivolous? (Thereby introducing a Google Frivolitimeter? [Beta]). Or is it one that goes against the grain of the consensus? If so, then who decides what the consensus must be?"
Got smarts? (Or the ability to write great fiction?)
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/mahalo-answers.html
Mahalo Answers Pays Cash for Your Two Cents
By Chris Snyder December 15, 2008 7:52:34 AM
Mahalo, the human powered search engine, is launching a crowd-sourced Q&A feature Monday to compete with sites like Yahoo Answers and Wiki.Answers. But unlike those already out there, Mahalo Answers is creating a marketplace for your knowledge.
When you submit a question, you can offer a "tip" of a few bucks (using PayPal) to whomever can give you the best answer. The money makes responses more reliable and is an incentive to answer accurately and often.
There are point systems to rate members and Mahalo dollars that drive the economy. Each Mahalo dollar is worth 75 cents in real U.S. dollars. Once you have collected more than $40 Mahalo dollars, you can cash them in and Mahalo will send you a check, keeping 25 percent for themselves.
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