Stealing Your Address Book by Dustin Curtis It’s not really a secret, per se, but there’s a quiet understanding among many iOS app developers that it is acceptable to send a user’s entire address book, without their permission, to remote servers and then store it for future reference. It’s common practice, and many companies likely have your address book stored in their database. Obviously, there are lots of awesome things apps can do with this data to vastly improve user experience. But it is also a breach of trust and an invasion of privacy. I did a quick survey of 15 developers of popular iOS apps, and 13 of them told me they have a contacts database with millons of records. One company’s database has Mark Zuckerberg’s cell phone number, Larry Ellison’s home phone number and Bill Gates' cell phone number. There are two major questions to ask about this behavior: First, why does Apple allow iOS apps to access a user’s entire address book, at any time, without permission? There was similar outrage last year, when Kik was outed.
Without a Trace: Turn Your Flash Drive into a Portable Privacy Toolkit @parabellum2000: Here, Here! While I might get frustrated from time to time with the limitations of web access at my school (I have to download a YouTube video from home and bring it in if I want to use it in a lesson), I understand why they exist and, frankly, I work too hard and too much to have time to putz around with tunneling through the firewall. Not to mention that I like my job, I like the IT guys, and they know I know what I'm doing. I wouldn't be surprised, if a student set up a SSH tunnel on a library computer, if they came to me to ask if I knew anything about it. Even when I worked behind a desk entering orders all day, there were ways to make it more interesting, and I was able to keep myself busy adding value for the company. (That is, after all, what they pay me for.) You want to play your own music in your office? @tchrman35: A CD Player?
70 Things Every Computer Geek Should Know. | Arrow Webzine The term ‘geek’, once used to label a circus freak, has morphed in meaning over the years. What was once an unusual profession transferred into a word indicating social awkwardness. As time has gone on, the word has yet again morphed to indicate a new type of individual: someone who is obsessive over one (or more) particular subjects, whether it be science, photography, electronics, computers, media, or any other field. How to become a real computer Geek? Little known to most, there are many benefits to being a computer geek. You may get the answer here: The Meaning of Technical Acronyms USB – Universal Serial BusGPU – Graphics Processing UnitCPU – Central Processing UnitATA- AT Attachment (AT Attachment Packet Interface (ATAPI)SATA – Serial ATAHTML – Hyper-text Markup LanguageHTTP – Hypertext Transfer ProtocolFTP – File Transfer ProtocolP2P - peer to peer 1. One of the best list of default passwords. 1A. 2. 3. 4.
Facebook working on 'simple' privacy settings | Politics and Law After one of the most tumultuous months in its young history, Facebook is planning to announce features intended to offer its hundreds of millions of users simpler privacy choices. The last few weeks have not been kind to the Internet's second most popular Web site, which has been pilloried by privacy activists and slammed by some members of Congress. The flap has spawned clever interactive graphics showing how Facebook has gradually exposed more user data, tools to fix your privacy settings, and reports of internal discord among employees who may fear that the negative attention would jeopardize a lucrative public stock offering. A Facebook spokesman on Friday confirmed that the changes will arrive "shortly," without elaborating. "The messages we've received are pretty clear," Andrew Noyes said. "Users appreciate having precise and comprehensive controls, but want them to be simpler and easier to use. The danger here lies, as it often does, in regulatory overreach.
Tracking the Trackers: Where Everybody Knows Your Username Click the local Home Depot ad and your email address gets handed to a dozen companies monitoring you. Your web browsing, past, present, and future, is now associated with your identity. Swap photos with friends on Photobucket and clue a couple dozen more into your username. Keep tabs on your favorite teams with Bleacher Report and you pass your full name to a dozen again. This isn't a 1984-esque scaremongering hypothetical. [Update 10/11: Since several readers have asked – this study was funded exclusively by Stanford University and research grants to the Stanford Security Lab. Background on Third-Party Web Tracking and Anonymity In a post on the Stanford CIS blog two months ago, Arvind Narayanan explained how third-party web tracking is not at all anonymous. In the language of computer science, clickstreams – browsing histories that companies collect – are not anonymous at all; rather, they are pseudonymous. A third party is also a first party, e.g. Web Information Leakage Methodology
La Freedom Box ou la petite boîte qui voulait que l'Internet restât libre Paradoxes apparents. Peut-on simultanément souhaiter la fermeture des données et l’ouverture d’Internet ? Peut-on se féliciter du rôle joué par Facebook et Twitter en Tunisie ou en Égypte tout en affirmant que ces sites sont à très court terme dangereux pour ceux qui les utilisent ? C’est cette double problématique qui est au cœur de la FreedomBox Foundation, le nouveau projet du brillant juriste de la FSF Eben Moglen qui fait régulièrement l’objet de billets sur ce blog. Et la solution qu’il nous propose est aussi simple que de brancher son chargeur de téléphone, à ceci près que c’est alors un mini serveur que nous mettons dans la prise (sous OS libre évidemment)[1] Il est ici question de nos données personnelles, de notre vie en ligne, de notre manière de communiquer et d’interagir avec les autres. Personne ne nous a obligés. Que se passe-t-il le jour où ces quelques sites sont rendus volontairement ou non inaccessibles ? Ils nous auront prévenus en tout cas…
Three Cool Tools for Restoring Your Facebook Privacy - PCWorld Well, it seems all this complaining about Facebook’s laissez faire attitude toward its users’ privacy has finally gotten their attention. According to published reports, the company called an “all hands meeting” to discuss the controversy last week. And what has come of that meeting? Apparently a lot of soul searching, rending of garments, and gnashing of teeth, per a report in the Wall Street Journal. So leave it to some clever entrepreneurs to do what Facebook has so far refused to do: Put back the privacy protections Facebook just took away. First up, there’s ReclaimPrivacy, which can scan your Facebook settings and let you know where you’re at risk. Of course, Scan for Privacy leaves it up to you to decide how to change your settings.
Hundreds of websites share usernames sans permission High performance access to file storage Home Depot, The Wall Street Journal, Photobucket, and hundreds of other websites share visitor's names, usernames, or other personal information with advertisers or other third parties, often without disclosing the practice in privacy policies, academic researchers said. Sixty-one percent of websites tested by researchers from Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society leaked the personal information, sometimes to dozens of third-party partners. Home Depot, for example, disclosed the first names and email addresses of visitors who clicked on an ad to 13 companies. The report comes as US officials have proposed a mandatory Do Not Track option for all websites. In the report, Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford graduate student who led the study, argued against the claim that the online tracking is anonymous. “We believe there is now overwhelming evidence that third-party web tracking is not anonymous,” he wrote.
FreedomBox Foundation Why Facebook Must Get Serious About Privacy Dallas Lawrence is Managing Director of Burson-Marsteller’s Proof Integrated Communications. He is a Mashable contributor on emerging media trends, online reputation management and digital issue advocacy. You can connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence. The recent firestorm over Facebook’s approach to securing the privacy of its more than 450 million users continues to reverberate around the globe this week as thousands of news outlets cover the unfolding drama with almost breathless zeitgeist. And while traditional outlets are grappling with what it all means for the future of Facebook, online denizens have trumpeted their angst about the company’s most recent changes with more than 25 million blog posts. The current crisis of confidence leveled against Facebook once again centers on the core issue of how the social networking platform manages access to its users' information. The Lessons Facebook Can Learn from Google Transparency is Key to Facebook's Maturation
Web Browsers Web browsers are software on your machine that communicate with servers or hosts on the Internet. Using a web browser causes data to be stored on your computer and logs to be stored on the web servers you visit, and frequently transmits unencrypted information. Until you have understood the mechanisms by which this occurs — and taken steps to prevent them — it is best to assume that anything you do with a web browser could be recorded by your own machine, by the web servers you're communicating with, or by any adversary that is able to monitor your network connection. Controlling and Limiting the Logs Kept by Your Browser Web browsers often retain a large amount of information about the way they are used. For example, here are the stored data privacy settings pages for Firefox, the free web browser: Apple’s Safari browser also has an easy one-click option to clear everything. Controlling and Limiting the Logs Kept By Web Servers Web Privacy is Hard Cookies Managing Adobe Flash Privacy.
Petit manuel de contre-espionnage informatique » Article » OWNI, Digital Journalism GPS, téléphones portables, logiciels espions: les outils de la surveillance se démocratisent. Conseils utiles pour s'en protéger. Autrefois réservés aux seuls services secrets, les outils et technologies de surveillance, GPS, téléphones et logiciels espions, se “démocratisent” au point que, suite à un reportage de M6, Petits espionnages en famille, montrant comment de plus en plus de gens espionneraient les téléphones portables et ordinateurs de leur futurs (ou ex-) femmes (ou maris), enfants, nounous, Le Parisien/Aujourd’hui en France faisait sa “une”, début 2010, sur la question ( Votre portable devient espion), tout en expliquant qu’espionner les téléphones portables était devenu “un jeu d’enfant” (à toutes fins utiles, en France, leur commercialisation, mais également leur simple détention, n’en est pas moins punie d’un an de prison et de 45 000 euros d’amende). Nombreux sont les médias à s’être penchés sur la question, de façon souvent quelque peu sensationnaliste. Bon voyage . . .
Facebook must balance privacy with quest for information Posted: 05/02/2012 10:35:42 PM PDT0 Comments|Updated: about a year ago Congratulations! You found a link we goofed up on, and as a result you're here, on the article-not-found page. That said, if you happened to be looking for our daily celebrity photo gallery, you're in luck: Also, if you happened to be looking for our photo gallery of our best reader-submitted images, you're in luck: So, yeah, sorry, we could not find the Mercury News article you're looking for. The article has expired from our system. What next? You may also want to try our search to locate news and information on MercuryNews.com. If you're looking for an article that was published in the last two weeks, here are more options: News: Local news articles Entertainment: Entertainment articles from the past two weeks Sports: Sports articles from the past two weeks Business: Business articles from the past two weeks Opinion: Opinion articles Lifestyle: Lifestyle articles from the past two weeks
Some Facts About Carrier IQ There has been a rolling scandal about the Carrier IQ software installed by cell phone companies on 150 million phones, mostly within the United States. Subjects of outright disagreement have included the nature of the program, what information it actually collects, and under what circumstances. This post will attempt to explain Carrier IQ's architecture, and why apparently conflicting statements about it are in some instances simultaneously correct. The information in this post has been synthesised from sources including Trevor Eckhart, Ashkan Soltani, Dan Rosenberg, and Carrier IQ itself. First, when people talk about "Carrier IQ," they can be referring to several different things. For clarity, I will give them each a number. There is consensus agreement that layers 2–4 collect information that can include location, browsing history (including HTTPS URLs), application use, battery use, and data about the phone's radio activity.