Salon.com > Privacy

Ann Coulter’s astounding gun control diatribe

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 16:40:00 +0000

In this video Ann Coulter discusses the Journal News gun map controversy. Also of note is the graphic Fox News chooses. Three weeks after the Newtown rampage, it's the gun owners they're worried about. What does Rupert Murdoch think about that?

Watch:

h/t HuffPo

Snapchat brings the goofy

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 21:30:00 +0000

Wait -- what? The video-and-pic sharing app Snapchat is suddenly, according to the Financial Times, "in the coveted but risky position of beginning 2013 as the most hyped app in Silicon Valley." How'd that happen?

Sneak attacks like Snapchat's -- the app was launched in September 2011, and exploded in popularity this past fall -- are most likely to happen when the target demographic is younger than the journalistic cohort that covers new technology. Smartphone-equipped high schoolers and college kids are the big Snapchat users, so the rest of us weren't paying much attention until the app blew up.

Or maybe you're just a jaded cynic like me, and responded to seeing the name Snapchat pop up with increasing frequency on Twitter by wondering why the heck the world needed yet another piece of software to help people share digital content. Haven't we shared enough, already?

Yes, probably. But the answer to why Snapchat is worth pondering is a couple of orders of magnitude more profound than I expected. Snapchat is the anti-Panopticon, an indigenous rebellion against the know-it-all, see-it-all, never-forget-anything networked world.

Celebrating Anonymous: The hackers’ big year

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000

"I love Anon."

The comment, written by a teenage boy at Berkeley High School a few days after the Sandy Hook shootings, came in response to a Facebook post made by my own 15-year-old son.

My son was passing along the word that the hacker collective Anonymous had declared war against the Westboro Baptist Church, that clan of deranged religious fanatics who routinely seek to turn the misery of others into their own grandstanding opportunity.

Outraged at WBC's plans to protest at the funeral of Sandy Hook Elementary's principal, Dawn Hochsprung, on Dec. 19, in order "to sing praise to God for the glory of his work in executing his judgment," Anonymous proceeded to expose the personal information of WBC members -- home and email addresses, phone numbers, etc. -- and started acting as a coordinating center for anti-WBC counter-protests. For teenage boys at Berkeley High, Anonymous' direct action was the epitome of cool.

Netflix now has the right to share your viewing habits

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 14:00:00 +0000

After nearly two years of intense lobbying, Netflix has won the reform it needs to integrate its services with Facebook. Ars Technica first reported that the Senate quietly passed a reform to the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) last week, giving video streaming companies the right to share your data for up to two years after asking for your permission once. (Mother Jones notes that "The Senate didn't even hold a recorded vote: The bill was approved by unanimous consent").

"But so many companies integrate their data with Facebook--so what?" you ask. So: this weakens what Mother Jones notes is one of the "the strongest privacy-related laws in the country" and has been for the last 24 years, ever since the VPAA was introduced in 1988. (Interestingly, the VPAA was created after failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's--now deceased--video rental records were obtained without his consent).

Facebook ruins Zuckerberg Xmas

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 18:13:00 +0000

It seems that even Mark Zuckerberg's older sister, Randi, has become a victim of Facebook's totalitarian privacy settings. Forbes "30 under 30" media honoree Callie Schweitzer tweeted the above photo of the Zuckerberg family, writing "@randizuckerberg demonstrates her family's response to Poke #GAH."

Zuckerberg responded, saying, "Not sure where you got this photo. I posted it only to friends on FB. You reposting it on Twitter is way uncool."

Online privacy’s new iconography

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:52:00 +0000

The online syndicate Disconnect has joined forces with Internet nonprofit Mozilla and a team of designers to demystify web privacy for the masses. Their weapon of choice? A visual rating system that pops up in your browser bar. Since reading the fine print on how your personal information gets used is time-consuming and confusing, which is why you don't do it. As a result, average web surfers (Hi!) has absolutely no idea what information sites are mining for, or how they use it. That's where the icons come in.

There are currently nine symbols representing different degrees of compliance with privacy standards. If a website sells your data to outside parties, it gets a dollar sign inside an orange circle with an upward pointed arrow. If it doesn't, it gets a plain old green circle around a dollar sign. Confused? You're not alone. The new set of icons is complicated, and that's pretty much by design. As Casey Oppenheim of Disconnect explains, Internet privacy is a hard concept to boil down to a visual language. "How do you convey data, intent, all these different things?"

I say too much too soon

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Hello Cary,

I did it again yesterday and I'm so disappointed in myself. My problem is I answer people's questions about myself without being able to stop, reflect and decide if it really is any of their business. It doesn't matter how personal the question is, you're guaranteed an answer from me. It isn't until I'm no longer in the situation that I gather my wits and realize the damage I've done to myself. These people have no right to this info.

I practice things to say to deflect the questions such as: Why do you ask? But, in the heat of the moment, I forget. I also understand that this lack of self-protection stems from no boundaries being allowed in my childhood. But I'm not a child anymore and I really must stop vomiting out this info.

The holidays are coming up and I will be around some pushy people who always ask questions that I would never dream of asking another. I need some strategies I can practice (although that doesn't seem to work). So I don't know what to do.

Your guidance would be appreciated.

Don't ask -- Don't tell

Dear Don't Ask ...

Apps for kids are secretly collecting information

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:52:00 +0000

The Federal Trade Commission released a report Monday, which shows that most mobile apps for children are secretly collecting information and sharing it with third parties.

Of the Google Play and Apple Store apps reviewed, only 20 percent disclosed any information about the app’s privacy practices, while almost 60 percent of the apps were found to be transmitting information from a user's device to third parties, such as the app developers, advertising networks or analytics companies. Fourteen apps out of hundreds surveyed were also found to transmit the location of the device and the phone number, the FTC found.

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act requires online service operators for children under 13 to get consent from parents before collecting and sharing personal information. Based on its findings, the FTC announced Monday investigations to determine if certain mobile apps developers have violated COPPA.

FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz commented in a written statement:

The price of airline iPad freedom

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 18:00:00 +0000

Look, I get it. I understand why the twittering masses are so excited to learn that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski sent a letter last week to the FAA encouraging the agency to get its act together and allow airline passengers to play with their mobile devices during takeoff and landing. I have long wondered, along with everyone else, why we haven't seen any meaningful scientific evidence that the use of such devices interferes with the operation of an aircraft. Miles away from the airport, I still feel the pain for those parents of toddlers (and everyone sitting within earshot) who are denied the right to distract their spawn with the fabulous interactivity of the latest iPad. And I always die a little death every single time I have to stop checking for the latest Facebook status updates just so my Boeing 727 can get launched off the ground. Let Alec Baldwin play as much "Words With Friends" as he wants! We're talking about freedom here!

An online privacy invader gets caught

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:16:00 +0000

News from the privacy wars: The Federal Trade Commission and Epic Marketing, an online ad network, have settled charges that Epic was secretly and illegally gathering information on the browsing history of Web users, a practice known as "history sniffing" or "history stealing."

And not just any kind of history. Epic was specifically looking for people who had visited websites searching for information on "fertility issues, impotence, menopause, incontinence, disability insurance, credit repair, debt relief, and personal bankruptcy." Epic divided these people up into "interest groups" and targeted advertisements to them. So if, for example, you Googled "impotence" and visited a few Web pages with relevant information, the next time you checked out CNN.com you might suddenly be assaulted by a slew of Viagra and Cialis advertisements.

Senate committee votes to enhance email privacy

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:00:00 +0000

The Senate Judiciary Committee took a step today to bring email privacy laws in line with current technology, voting to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986. According to EPCA, law enforcement has far broader privileges to dip into private email than old-fashioned letters. According to The Hill:

Police only need an administrative subpoena, issued without a judge's approval, to read emails that have been opened or that are more than 180 days old. Police simply swear an email is relevant to an investigation, and then obtain a subpoena to force an Internet company to turn it over.

By this standard, emailed bank statements, health records and other supposedly confidential information is much more vulnerable than the same information sent through the postal service.

The amended law, written by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D.-Vt., requires a search warrant based on probable cause to access a citizen's private email. Leahy, an early adopter of a sort, also wrote the original 1986 act, which dates to almost a decade before the World Wide Web.

The “drone caucus” sped up domestic drone use

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 21:49:00 +0000

The proliferation of drones in domestic law enforcement and beyond has been boosted on Capitol Hill by a 60-representative strong, bipartisan "drone caucus," according to an investigative report by the Center for Responsive Politics and Hearst newspapers.

Pushing an agenda to hurry surveillance drones into the domestic market, even though many questions about the ethics and safety of their deployment remain unanswered, has earned members of the House Unmanned Systems Caucus $8 million in drone-related campaign contributions, the investigation revealed.

The report detailed how legislative efforts have ensured a speedy timeline for putting drones in the hands of local police departments as well as private corporations:

Domestic use of drones began with limited aerial patrols of the nation's borders by Customs and Border Patrol authorities. But the industry and its allies pushed for more, leading to provisions in the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, signed into law on Feb. 14 of this year.

The law requires the FAA to fully integrate the unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, into national airspace by September 2015. And it contains a series of interim deadlines leading up to that one: This month, the agency was supposed to produce a comprehensive plan for the integration, and in August it was required to have a plan for testing at six different sites in the U.S. Neither plan has been issued.

The surveillance state high school

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 22:10:00 +0000

Liberals and conservatives alike are up in arms about the story of Andrea Hernandez, a Texas high school sophomore who is refusing to wear a student ID card embedded with an RFID (radio frequency identification) chip. And, well, they should be; there is much cause for outrage. But most people seem to be missing the real story: Our pathetic national unwillingness to properly fund our public schools is the real root of this latest manifestation of surveillance state evil.

But first, some background. Officials in San Antonio's Northside school district are claiming that the ability to locate the exact whereabouts of students via RFID chips will boost attendance and enhance safety. A number of different schools have attempted similar schemes in recent years, provoking strong condemnation from groups across the political spectrum who argue that forcing human beings to carry electronic tracking devices constitutes a profound invasion of privacy.

Please stop posting that fake Facebook privacy notice

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 20:51:00 +0000

Even though news outlets yesterday reported that the Facebook personal privacy notice that recently went viral is fake, many Facebook users continue to post the note, incorrectly assuming that it protects their personal information. To drive the point home, College Humor has created a sketch called "Facebook Law for Idiots":

CollegeHumor's Favorite Funny Videos

Everybody thinks I’m lesbian!

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

Dear Cary,

I have a problem with my family, friends and co-workers. They all believe that I am a lesbian. I do wear my hair short and on many days, I can look softly butch. I'll admit that I do not date nor do I allow anyone to set me up. I do socialize mostly with women.

But I am uncomfortable when people try to bait me, such as admiring a woman and asking my opinion about her. My relatives preach to me about the sins of being gay but no one believes that I am not gay. My co-workers encourage me to come out of the closet. How do I change this perception of myself short of dating or other extreme actions?

Just Wanna Enjoy My Solitude

Dear Just Wanna Enjoy My Solitude,

Social progress often brings novel forms of rudeness.

We Americans want everyone to be a lesbian and we want it now.

Can you blame us for erring on the side of zealotry in our support of personal liberation? We have had in our history far too many closets, too many whipping posts and slave holds, too many hanging trees and burnings.

Viral Facebook copyright notice is false

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 17:03:00 +0000

You may have seen friends posting a personal copyright notice on their Facebook pages this weekend, meant to protect their information from being shared or used without their consent. Unfortunately, the notice, like others in the past, is fake. Mashable reports:

The idea behind the “notice” is that Facebook’s listing as a publicly traded company will negatively affect its users’ privacy, which is not true. Simply put, Facebook and its users are still bound to the same terms and conditions that are accepted by users when they sign up for the service, and posting a legal “talisman” of this kind on your profile does nothing to change that.

The note went viral in response to Facebook's recent decision to block users from voting on what the company does with personal information and how it manages privacy.

Read the note, below:

Paula Broadwell’s big mistake

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 12:45:00 +0000

The funny thing is, Paula Broadwell and David Petraeus thought they knew what they were doing. They were careful, more careful than the average American fooling around outside the bounds of marriage tends to be. When Broadwell wanted to warn off the other woman she suspected of messing with her man, she set up an anonymous email account and only used it away from home, usually on the Wi-Fi networks of hotels she was staying in. Broadwell and Petraeus also thought they could avoid having their emails intercepted in transit by technically avoiding "sending" them at all. Instead, they saved their messages to each other as "drafts" in a Gmail account to which they both enjoyed access.

But if they thought they were being smart, they were wrong. Broadwell and Petraeus were undone, says ACLU privacy and technology expert Christopher Soghoian, by their "lack of knowledge of operational security" and "poor tradecraft." "Draft" messages are stored in Gmail's server cloud just like all other sent and received messages. And the FBI turned out to be more than capable of correlating the Internet Protocol addresses that identified the origin of Broadwell's supposedly "anonymous" emails with hotel records that showed Broadwell as a guest at the same time the messages were sent.

Don’t be the next Broadwell

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 18:15:00 +0000

Call it Paula Broadwell blowback. If there's anything we've learned from the tawdry mess that has suddenly overwhelmed our nation's highest military and intelligence agency leaders, it's that it's far too easy for the government to pry into our email. Long-standing privacy concerns have reawakened with a vengeance. Last night, a correspondent amusingly writing Salon under the pseudonym "Fox Mulder" beseeched us to publish "an in-depth story (or stories) on how citizens can regain their privacy from the National Security State." We're working on that, but in the meantime, here are some quick and dirty tips for how you can start locking down your online life.

Remember, there are always going to be trade-offs for increased security , the more you encrypt your data to make it impossible for snoops to access, the more inconvenient it will be to get at your own information yourself. So be forewarned -- you can find an astonishing plenitude of information on the Web about how to secure your information, but complete privacy is never going to be hassle-free.

1) Your smartphone

Google reveals government surveillance on the rise

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:52:00 +0000

Since 2010, Google has periodically published statistics on the number of government requests the tech giant receives. Its most recent Transparency Report -- the sixth in two years -- was released Tuesday and, according to Google's official blog, "one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise."

"In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world. Those requests were for information about 34,614 accounts," wrote Google senior policy analyst Dorothy Chou. In the first half of 2011, by comparison, there were fewer than 16,000 such requests.

Skype hands over information on teen Wikileaks fan

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 21:55:00 +0000

Skype, the Microsoft-owned online calls site, has shown scant regard for protecting user privacy. According to Russia Today, the company handed over sensitive account data pertaining to a teenage WikiLeaks fan from Holland to a Texas-based private cyber-intelligence firm, iSIGHT Partners.

A 16-year-old Dutch teenager's user information was released to iSight without even so much as a warrant. RT reported:

The youngster was suspected of being involved in Operation Payback, an Anonymous-endorsed initiative that targeted the servers of PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and others after those companies blocked WikiLeaks from receiving online payment backs in December 2010. When hacktivists responded to the blockade by overflowing the servers of those sites with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, PayPal asked Dallas, Texas’ iSIGHT Partners Inc., a self-described“global cyber intelligence firm,” to investigate.