Tag: Privacy

“I Invited hackers to investigate me & what they found is chilling” [Article]

Adam Penenberg is the Editor of PandoDaily and a journalism professor at New York University. He has written for The New York Times, Forbes, Fast Company, the Economist, as well as many others, and is the author of several books, including the critically acclaimed “Viral Loop.  He invited white-hat hackers to investigate him, and writes about the experience

My Life in Circles: Why Metadata is Incredibly Intimate [Article]

In light of NSA’s spying revelations, Matthew Harwood shows how incredibly intimate metadata really is:

Metadata, no matter what the detractors say, collected over time is an intimate repository of our lives–whom we love, whom we’re friends with, where we work, where we worship (or don’t), and whom we associate with politically. The right to privacy means our metadata shouldn’t be collected and analyzed without reasonable suspicion that we’ve done something wrong.

We want privacy from the government but are an open book on social media [Article]

Lindsey Bever explains:

Although there’s an important distinction to be made between information we voluntarily sign away and private data that’s seemingly subject to unwarranted searches and collection, many of us are inconsistent in our release of personal data. We’re quick to hand over our privacy rights to corporations, but we get touchy when the government tampers with our information – even when we might be the ones allowing it.

The participating Panopticon: The Internet of Things [Article]

Technology is the solution to the world’s problems, say many. Blind belief in technology may be our generation’s downfall, considering that we are blind to rest of the world’s beauty & its own coping mechanisms. Don’t get me wrong, I love this connected world. Bruce Schneier, writing in the Guardian, points out, Will giving the internet eyes and ears mean the end of privacy?.

The usual response to privacy is “Why worry if you’ve got nothing to hide?”. Here’s a few reasons

 Privacy involves the responsibility on the part of those who collect and use your data to keep it secure in order to prevent fraud and identity theft. We don’t say to an identity theft victim “don’t worry if you have nothing to hide.”

facebook’s graph search [article, links]

About a year or so ago, I decided to quit my experiment with facebook – for a variety of reasons that I wrote a post about at the time. It has grown surreptitiously from a tool that simply helped connect people to something more nefarious, (or so it appears to my reptilian brain) – but don’t take my word for it. 
Tech commentator Tom Scott, who is among those invited to test Graph Search, a new feature, demonstrated what he found using Graph Search on this page: .. [it] has served up lists of family members of people who live in China and like Falun Gong, people who like the extreme rightwing group English Defence League but also enjoy a curry, and Islamic men who are interested in other men and live in Tehran, where homosexuality is persecuted.  Other lists included Tesco employees who like horses, a reference to the discovery of horse DNA in burgers sold by the supermarket chain, and spouses of people who like Ashley Madison, a dating site for people already in relationships. 
Are you male, & interested in searching for single women in your area who are looking for men & ‘like’ getting drunk? Or some more insidious ones that I won’t even mention here? Easy peasy! How much information about you/ your kids do you want strangers to know?
The implications are far more serious than some harmless searches, but I will leave that to the newspaper headlines that will no doubt hit us soon enough. The Guardian & the Slate weigh in with their thoughts. 
This is how to change your privacy settings if you want to stay on facebook. Better still, this is how you delete your account.  And download a copy of your data before you do so.