Technology Impacts

China is the world’s most successful Internet censor. While the Great Firewall of China isn’t perfect, it effectively limits information flowing in and out of the country. But now the Chinese government is taking things one step further.

Under a requirement taking effect soon, every computer sold in China will have to contain the Green Dam Youth Escort software package. Ostensibly a pornography filter, it is government spyware that will watch every citizen on the Internet.

Green Dam has many uses. It can police a list of forbidden Web sites. It can monitor a user’s reading habits. It can even enlist the computer in some massive botnet attack, as part of a hypothetical future cyberwar.

China’s actions may be extreme, but they’re not unique. Democratic governments around the world — Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom, for example — are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.

Schneier on Security: Building in Surveillance.

A U.C. Berkeley report shows that most Internet users don’t understand web site privacy policies, and that major online businesses like Google Inc. freely gather data and share it with affiliated businesses via loopholes in those policies.

Using trackers called “web bugs,” third parties collect user data from many popular web sites, and sites often allow this, even though their privacy policies say they don’t share user data with others.

“Web bugs from Google and its subsidiaries were found on 92 of the top 100 Web sites and 88 percent of the approximately 400,000 unique domains examined in the study,” the authors found.

Sites with the most web bugs were for blogging - blogspot and typepad were No. 1 and No. 2 on the list in March, and blogger was No. 4. Google itself was No. 3. Read the rest of this entry »