Technology Impacts

Much has been made in recent years of the so-called Facebook generation, which supposedly consists of 20-somethings who like to go online and spill their guts without regard for privacy. The reality is more complex.

Yes, social network users post a lot of personal information. But they’re sharing it within a circle of online “friends.” And they fiercely resist outsiders’ attempts to get a peek.

Last summer, city administrators in Bozeman, Mont., began requiring job applicants to provide usernames and passwords to their social networking accounts, as part of the background check. The new requirement caused such an uproar, the city manager held a press conference to apologize.

Is Your Facebook Profile As Private As You Think? : NPR.

Citizen spies will be given the chance to win up to £1,000 by watching CCTV cameras on the internet and reporting people they suspect of committing crimes.

The new scheme, called Internet Eyes, involves web users scouring CCTV cameras installed in shops, businesses and town centres across Britain looking for offenders.

The cameras’ owners will be charged a fee for putting live footage from their cameras online, while members of the public who help catch criminals can win cash prizes.

The project will be trialled in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warks, next month, but the consortium behind the idea hopes that it will eventually attract a global audience of viewers monitoring Britain’s 4.2 million security cameras.

However, it has already provoked criticism from civil liberties campaigners, who claim that it will create a “snoopers paradise” and erode people’s privacy. Read the rest of this entry »

The days of being able to walk through airport security checkpoints while wearing shoes and a jacket could return if an experimental program proves successful, some Department of Homeland Security officials say.

Project officials hope various sensors, such as this one that tracks eye movement, can help security screeners.

The Homeland Security-funded project is Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST. Instead of focusing on whether you have hidden explosives or whether you’re carrying a weapon, sensors and cameras located at security checkpoints would measure the natural signals coming from your body — your heart rate, breathing, eye movement, body temperature and fidgeting.

Those physiological signs, measured together, will indicate whether you might have the desire or intent to do harm, project manager Robert Burns said.

“There’s been a large field of research that ties your physical reactions to your mental state, your emotional state. We’re looking for those signals that your body gives off naturally,” Burns said. Read the rest of this entry »

From FireEagle to iPhone apps that use your current location, everyone it seems is racing to get on the geo-aware software bandwagon. So far most geo-aware features have been opt-in and offer reasonable privacy controls (FireEagle is a good example of this), but Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 plans to offer developers location tools at the operating system level and the company doesn’t seem to think users care about control or privacy.

Before you freak out at the thought that Redmond will soon be tracking your every move, keep in mind that the new features will be disabled by default. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that if you turn the geo features on, there are very few controls available and, yes, Microsoft could easily track your every move. Now you can freak out.

Windows 7 Will Let Microsoft Track Your Every Move - Webmonkey.

A surveillance state, with cameras on every street is commonplace but now Big Business is also turning to Big Brother.

Face recognition, behaviour analysing surveillance cameras, biometric profiling and the monitoring and storing of our shopping patterns has made snooping into our habits, movements and private lives ever easier.

Dismayed at its shrinking power to market to us via traditional media or even the internet, the private sector is now proposing to reach potential customers in ways that critics say should have us all concerned.

“There is an enormous pent-up demand for personalised location advertising, whether it is on your cellphone or PDA, on your radio in your car, or on the billboards you walk by on the streets and inside stores,” says Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer of BT.

“This is yet another technological intrusion into privacy. And like all such intrusions, it will be taken as far as the owner of that intrusion finds it profitable.”

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Big Brother is watching you shop.

A California federal judge has ordered Google to temporarily de-activate a Gmail account after a bank mistakenly sent sensitive data to the account.

U.S. District Judge James Ware also ordered Google to disclose the identity of the Gmail account holder.

The Rocky Mountain Bank of Wyoming sued Google to obtain the account holder’s name after a bank employee erroneously e-mailed an attachment to the account containing sensitive information on 1,325 individual and business bank customers. The attachment contained customer names, addresses, Tax ID and Social Security numbers and loan information. Read the rest of this entry »

The Daily Telegraph has a disturbing report about an alleged compulsory plan to insert RFID microchip transponders in all dogs in the UK, and Yet Another National Database of human names, addresses and telephone numbers, which will not solve the underlying problems, and which will pose a Privacy and Security risk to millions of innocent people.

All dogs to be microchipped with owner’s details to ‘help track pets’

All dogs in Britain will be fitted with microchips which contain their owner’s details, under cross party plans designed to track family pets.

By Andrew Hough
Published: 7:00AM BST 28 Sep 2009

Owners will be forced to install the microchip containing a barcode that can store their pet’s name, breed, age and health along with their own address and phone number.

barcode ? Surely not ! How exactly do you read one of those opticaly, when it is implanted under the skin and fur ?

Presumably the author means an implantable RFID transponder chip

This sort of glass encapsulated RFID transponder chip implant, designed for animal tagging, uses a low frequency of around 125KHz, with a reading range of about a metre. High or microwave frequency, faster data rate, longer range RFIDchips etc. are of no use for implants, as those radio frequencies are strongly absorbed by living tissue.

The barcode’s details would then be stored on a national database which local councils could access in a bid to easily identify an owner’s pet.

What is the justification for this being a national database ? Read the rest of this entry »

Back in 2002, science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer wrote an essay about the trade-off between privacy and security, and came out in favor of less privacy. I disagree with most of what he said, and have written pretty much the opposite essay — and others on the value of privacy and the future of privacy — several times since then.

The point of this blog entry isn’t really to debate the topic, though. It’s to reprint the opening paragraph of Sawyer’s essay, which I’ve never forgotten:

Whenever I visit a tourist attraction that has a guest register, I always sign it. After all, you never know when you’ll need an alibi.

Since I read that, whenever I see a tourist attraction with a guest register, I do the same thing. I sign “Robert J. Sawyer, Toronto, ON” — because you never know when he’ll need an alibi.

Schneier on Security: Robert Sawyer’s Alibis.

WHEN Elaine Cioni found out her married boyfriend had other girlfriends she turned to YourHackerz.com.

For $US100, the website provided Cioni, then living in northern Virginia, with the password to her boyfriend’s AOL email account. For another $100, she got her boyfriend’s wife’s password. And then the password of another girlfriend and the boyfriend’s children.

Cioni began making harassing phone calls to her boyfriend and his family, using a ‘’spoofing” service to disguise her voice as a man’s. This attracted the attention of federal authorities, who prosecuted Cioni, 53, last year for unauthorised access to computers, among other crimes. She was convicted and is serving a 15-month sentence. Read the rest of this entry »

THE proposed national bushfire warning system would enable authorities to track anyone’s movement in a declared disaster area by their mobile phone, opening up broad uses for the technology and raising privacy concerns.

Tender documents for the warning system to be built at the behest of all Australian governments reveal it could be used during disease epidemics, sieges, cyclones, terrorist attacks, locust plagues and heat or smog alerts.

The scope of the system has led civil liberties groups to warn of a need for tight privacy guidelines to prevent release or misuse of data on people’s movements.

The proposed model will deliver real-time, location-based warnings. It will follow the imminent first stage of the system that will deliver warnings to landlines and mobiles based on people’s billing addresses. In addition to warning people, the technology could help locate survivors in the aftermath of a fire. And it has the potential to identify looting suspects or suspected arsonists who continue lighting blazes once a bushfire has begun. Read the rest of this entry »