Forever online: Your digital legacy. Your photos, status updates and tweets will fascinate future historians. Will these online remains last forever? In this special report, newscientist.com editor Sumit Paul-Choudhury reports on life, loss, memory and forgetting in the Internet age. It includes: The fate of your online soul: We are the first people in history to create vast online records of our lives. How much of it will endure when we are gone? Archaeology of the future: Future historians will want to study the birth of the Web using our digital trails — but how will they make sense of it all? Amateur heroes of online heritage: It’ll take more than money alone to preserve today’s Internet pages for posterity. Teaching the net to forget: We’ve begun to accept that the Internet cannot forget, but the power to change that has been in our hands for decades.
Note: To the list of “heroes of online heritage,” I would add Dr. What’s Your Digital Identity? « The Digital Footprint Project. Tracking How Mobile Apps Track You. Third-party apps are the weakest link in user privacy on smart phones. They often get access to large quantities of user data, and there are few rules covering how they must handle that data once they have it. Worse yet, few third-party apps have a privacy policy telling users what they intend to do. That was the message delivered at a hearing of the U.S. Senate committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held yesterday.
Companies and regulators are struggling to find ways to ensure that user data is handled properly by apps installed on smart phones, but the way apps are designed makes this difficult. Mobile privacy has come under extreme scrutiny since revelations that Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android software collect and store users’ location data. But all three companies run platforms that support thousands of third-party developers, and how to make sure those apps respect users’ privacy, and explain their rules, is a major question. An App to Stop Tracking. A company that makes security software for smart phones has released a new product that shows when and how an app is snooping on you.
Called WhisperMonitor, the new software gives some Android phone users additional control over what their apps are doing. Two prominent computer security researchers, Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson, founded Whisper Systems, the company behind the software. The new software is rolled into the latest release of its main product, WhisperCore, which, among other things, encrypts the data that a user stores on an Android device. WhisperMonitor joins a growing number of applications designed for privacy protection. These include Little Snitch, a Mac desktop application that intercepts applications attempting to connect to the Internet, and Lookout Mobile Security, which offers a premium version of its Android app that tracks what data apps can access.
However, Miller notes, WhisperMonitor will induce many pop-ups. Next week, a U.S. The search engine that can predict what you want. Social networking is about to get exponentially more annoying.