Careful! Changing your information could invalidate your cookies or even block access to certain sites or files. And who would you spoof?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=21995
Privacy Blocker app for Android spoofs your personal data
March 26, 2011 by Dissent
Cory Doctorow relays some comments by Brook Jordan on Privacy Blocker app for Android:
Basically what the app does is scans all the applications you have installed. It identifies what data the apps are requesting about your phone and sending. It then will “fix” the privacy issue by replacing that data inside the app with hard coded (bogus) data. So if an app is sending your phone number back to a server, Privacy Blocker will hard code your number as “55544433333″. You also have the option to override the default values and make it anything you want. [Like the phone number of your local Congressman? Bob]
Read more on BoingBoing.
If you’re using Android, you should probably check this app out to see if it will help protect your privacy. There are a number of forums where it is being discussed, and you can also read a review on DroidLife.
How else can you create a good “enemies list?” But seriously, isn't that what an Open Records law is for? Does a potential political impact negate the law? (Would someone suggesting a certain 'slant' send emails that were subject to this law rather than to a 'personal' account?)
Using the Open Records Law To Intimidate Critics
"On March 15, Professor Bill Cronon posted his first blog. The subject was the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council in influencing recent legislation in Wisconsin and across the country. Less than two days later, his university received a communication formally requesting under the state's Open Records Law copies of all emails he sent or received pertaining to matters raised in the blog. Remarkably, the request was sent to the university's legal office by Stephan Thompson of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, with no effort to obscure the political motivations behind it. In a recent editorial, the New York Times notes that demanding copies of e-mails and other documents is the latest technique used politically to silence critics."
Ignorance of the technology is no defense.
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=22010
Illinois Identity Theft Statute Partially Invalidated–People v. Madrigal
March 26, 2011 by Dissent
Eric Goldman writes:
People v. Madrigal, 2011 WL 1074427 (Ill. March 24, 2011)
Many state anti-identity theft laws are written very broadly. This loose drafting creates the possibility that they unintentionally restrict innocent–and indeed socially desirable–activity. Today’s case is a good example of sloppy statutory drafting. Fortunately, a vigilant Illinois Supreme Court fixed the legislative error.
The Illinois statute at issue said: “A person commits the offense of identity theft when he or she knowingly…(7) uses any personal identification information or personal identification document of another for the purpose of gaining access to any record of the actions taken, communications made or received, or other activities or transactions of that person, without the prior express permission of that person.”
Read more on EricGoldman.org.
[From Eric Goldman:
As one example, the court says:
doing a computer search through Google or some other search engine or through a social networking site such as Facebook or MySpace, by entering someone's name, could uncover numerous records of actions taken, communications made or received, or other activities or transactions of that person. Thus, the statute as it currently reads would criminalize such innocuous conduct as someone using the internet to look up how their neighbor did in the Chicago Marathon.
We have never stored scanned images and we won't release our stored images.
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=21985
EPIC Urges Court to Order Release of 2,000 Airport Body Scanner Images
March 26, 2011 by Dissent
From EPIC:
EPIC asked a federal court in Washington, DC to reconsider its earlier decision allowing the Department of Homeland Security to keep secret 2,000 airport body scanner images in EPIC’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The Court relied on a legal theory in its decision, “Exemption High b(2),” that was recently struck down by the Supreme Court in Navy v. Milner. In Milner, the Court held that FOIA exemption 2 only applies to records concerning employee relations and human resources issues. Milner overturns previous lower court decisions that applied the exemption to broader categories of records, allowing federal agencies to block disclosure of documents to the public. EPIC argues in its motion that the Department of Homeland Security is unlawfully withholding information about the airport scanners from the public. For more information, see EPIC-Milner v. Dept. of Navy and EPIC v. DHS – Body Scanners.
This could be an interesting debate...
http://www.phiprivacy.net/?p=6302
A Nuanced Understanding of Privacy
By Dissent, March 26, 2011
Brock N. Meeks of CDT writes:
A case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court has serious implications for how privacy protections are interpreted. But understanding the various risks posed in this case requires some careful unpacking of the ways in which “privacy” is—and is not—at issue here. CDT’s Health Privacy Project team has taken a look those risks and published an in-depth memo about its findings.
In this memo CDT focuses on two aspects of the case: First, an explanation of why it is important to recognize the valid distinctions between personally identifiable data and “de-identified” data. The paper explains that privacy could actually be harmed if the Court were to accept the claims, made in some briefs in the case, that there is no difference between identified and de-identified data.
The second aspect of the case the paper examines is the claim that doctors have a “privacy” right in their drug prescribing practices. CDT disagrees and explains here that, while the patient-doctor relationship is based on confidentiality and the trust it generates, it is not useful – and would undermine other health care goals – to speak of doctors as having a “privacy” right in their drug prescribing practices.
Note that I’m posting this without comment as I have not read through it yet and posting does not indicate any endorsement. Indeed, I suspect I will have more to say once I’ve read through it.
A quick “back of an envelope” (Okay, I used a spreadsheet) calculation shows that 35000 location records in 180 days equals 194 times a day or 8 times an hour. The argument is that this helps the telecoms identify locations where their cell phone towers need to be sited. Because, if they don't already have a tower there, they would get no signal... Did they really keep this data for 6 months?
http://www.pogowasright.org/?p=21989
Privacy backers balk at firms tracking people via cellphone
March 26, 2011 by Dissent
Noam Cohen of the New York Times reports:
A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: Services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.
But as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect so Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.
The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010 — Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.
Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones. Unlike many online services and websites that must send “cookies” to a user’s computer to try to link its traffic to a specific person, cellphone companies simply have to sit back and hit “record.”
Read more in the Star Advertiser.
Interesting idea. Perhaps it could replace the TSA body scanner...
Kinect's AI Breakthrough Explained
"Microsoft Research has just published a scientific paper (PDF) and a video showing how the Kinect body tracking algorithm works — it's almost as impressive as some of the uses the Kinect has been put to. This article summarizes how Kinect does it. Quoting: '... What the team did next was to train a type of classifier called a decision forest, i.e. a collection of decision trees. Each tree was trained on a set of features on depth images that were pre-labeled with the target body parts. That is, the decision trees were modified until they gave the correct classification for a particular body part across the test set of images. Training just three trees using 1 million test images took about a day using a 1000-core cluster.'"
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