The critical question is: At what level will the American public be comfortable with Google sharing information with NSA?
[via Bruce Schneier]
Wake me up when this nightmare is over… wait, that won’t work…
Sometimes, however, you may not be able to get in touch with a site’s webmaster, or they may refuse to take down the content in question. For example, if someone posts a negative review of your business on a restaurant review or consumer complaint site, that site might not be willing to remove the review. If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.
- Managing your reputation through search results
by Susan Moskwa
2009-10-15
Plain English Translation
If there is any material bearing your name on the ‘net that you do not agree with… good luck.
Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.
“When they first did it, it was absolutely striking – we said, ‘Oh my God – you can actually put some computation behind that,’ ” said Hal Abelson, a computer science professor at MIT who co-taught the course. “That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information – because you don’t have control over your information.”
. . .
Facebook spokesman Simon Axten could not respond to Jernigan and Mistree’s analysis, since it is not public, but pointed out that it is something that happens every day.
- Project ‘Gaydar’ by Carolyn Y. Johnson
Boston Globe
2009-09-20
Oops! Your sexual preference is showing.
Keep in mind that the research performed by these students is far from “high-tech” – their research isn’t published but it is safe to assume that they put together something possibly as simple as counting each individual’s connections and, where an individual with an unknown sexual preference was connected to another individual with a known sexual preference, added to that individual’s homosexuality indicator.
This would be a highly iterative process, however, knowing the actual sexual preference of only a small percentage of individuals and then extrapolating upon connections from unknown to unknown based upon what is known would allow the data mining program to indicate with better-than-random probability the sexual preference of everyone with a connection.
Take it a few steps further and start analyzing the other information provided – favorite books, movies, musical acts, their addresses, the content posted by users on eachothers’ profile pages, content posted in online journals, the content of sites linked from each user’s profile, even their names… you can build a statistically-probable representation of an individual down to his or her ideology.
So, who wants to be first up against the wall?
More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday.
Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web users, and they are not controlled through the cookie privacy controls in a browser. That means even if a user thinks they have cleared their computer of tracking objects, they most likely have not.
- You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again
by Ryan Singel for Wired.com
Ironically, Wired.com revised the article when it came to light that it uses Flash cookies, too…
Thanks to the ever-interesting Bruce Schneier for yesterday’s Flash Cookies article – my only disappointment with Bruce and Wired.com’s articles is that they neglect to direct users to the Adobe Macromedia site for access to the tools which allow Flash cookies to be deleted and disabled (as they should be).
If you are interested in learning how to change all aspects of your Flash configuration, check out the Flash Player Documentation – if you just want to banish the specter of hidden tracking cookies from your life forever, use the settings controls:
Military organizations consider social networking sites’ core features (and persistent vulnerabilities) to be an unacceptable risk:
“These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” reads a Marine Corps order, issued Monday. “The very nature of SNS [social network sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts OPSEC [operational security], COMSEC [communications security], [and] personnel… at an elevated risk of compromise.”
- Marines Ban Twitter, MySpace, Facebook
by Noah Shachtman for Wired.com
What level of risk have you decided to bear by frequenting social networking sites?
… and have you considered the wide range of possible reprecussions?
George Orwell’s Big Brother represents the totalitarian rule of the party: a figure of dubious veracity imbued with absolute authority and control whose omniscient watch over its subjects is permanent and unquestionable.
Surveillance underpins the efforts of any totalitarian state – the power of an authority is limited to the information upon which it may act, therefore comprehensive information collection must occur (or the illusion of comprehensive information collection must be fabricated) to quash the suggestion of rebellion and create actionable knowledge for the orchestration of continued control.
It is no secret that increased surveillance is a prerogative in government. The management of large populations is facilitated and, oftentimes, made convenient with the introduction of electronic eyes and database repositories for review and data mining.
William Orville Douglas, the longest-running Associate Justice to the United States Supreme Court, hinted at the present state of surveillance (and its future) in the United States with a cautionary advisement:
We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.
- Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations #1529
Justice WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS, dissenting
Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 341 (1966).
Can freedom of speech, an underpinning of democracy itself, exist despite the chilling effect of surveillance?
What does it mean to be a citizen in a state which furtively aspires to Total Information Awareness?
How much time will pass before FBI spyware, facial recognition technology, biometric and vehicular tracking, social network / “Human Terrain Mapping” data mining, and other intrusive technologies are trained on private citizens?
What other measures may the government of the United States presently be developing (in the name of public health, prevention of terrorism, copyright enforcement, prosecution of illicit activity, et cetera) to eliminate privacy?
If invasive marketing spyware, the prying eyes of employers seeking information beyond résumé contents, medical and health information blackmail, and other abuses of privacy at the hands of individuals and private entities were not concern enough, what can a private citizen do to ensure that he or she does not experience the ultimate abuses of surveillance at the hands of government?
… and watch your back, because you won’t be the only one …