How to browse the web anonymously | Digital Crave - Yahoo! Think your online activities are private? Think again. Not only are your surfing sessions tracked by websites, search engines and social networks, but often your Internet service provider (ISP), web browser, government and potentially hundreds of online tracking companies. Whether it's to collect valuable (read: sellable) marketing data or prevent terrorist activity, movie piracy or kiddie porn, everything you think you're doing privately in the comfort of your home is anything but private. But just because you want to spend time online anonymously doesn't mean you're a cybercriminal or have something to hide. Not only do regular folks want privacy, but remaining anonymous can also protect yourself from malicious types out to steal your identity for financial gain — from spammers and scammers alike.
And so there are a few things you can do to reduce the odds every click is tracked, archived and shared. Smart software USB sticks, too Browser tweaks 'Do not track' tools, plug-ins Yahoo!
You Can't Keep Your Secrets From Twitter. When you tweet--even if you tweet under a pseudonym--how much do you reveal about yourself? More than you realize, argues a new paper from researchers at the Mitre Corporation. The paper, "Discriminating Gender on Twitter," which is being presented this week at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Scotland, demonstrates that machines can often figure out a person's gender on Twitter just by reading their tweets. And such knowledge is power: the findings could be useful to advertisers and others. To conduct their research, the Mitre folks--John Burger, John Henderson, George Kim, and Guido Zarrella--first had to assemble a corpus of Twitter users whose gender they were confident of. Since Twitter doesn't demand that users specify gender, they narrowed their focus to Twitter users who had linked to major blog sites in which they had filled out that information.
How is this possible? It's fun to imagine these two characters on a date. Three Ways to Thwart Identity Theft. When it comes to protecting your credit from identity theft you have a variety of options. You can do nothing. You can pay to monitor your credit reports. Or, you can freeze your credit reports. Each has their pros and cons, as more fully described below. Do Nothing I didn’t include “do nothing” to be funny, even though I like my writing to have some sense of humor. Even people who do nothing enjoy significant protections under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), the Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA) and the Electronic Fund Transfer Act (EFTA). Credit Monitoring Credit monitoring is a service offered by the credit reporting agencies and a small number of other companies.
Credit monitoring is often referred to as being a “reactive” approach to identity theft protection because something bad has to happen to your credit reports before you’re notified. Monitoring services look for credit report changes or additions that could be indicative of fraud. Credit Freezes. How computer hackers do what they do ... and why | Technology. The only entrance requirements for becoming a hacker are an inquiring mind and plenty of time. These are things that young teenagers - especially, though not exclusively, boys - tend to have. The classic - and outdated - picture of the hacker is of a teen sitting in his bedroom, obsessively coding something impenetrable on his own, waiting to unleash a terrible virus that will wreak havoc on computers around the world.
In fact modern hackers are a gregarious bunch, who have grown up in a world where instant messaging and video chatting makes it possible to be connected to people at all times. Hacker conferences are often friendly events: Eric Corley, published of the hacker underground 2600 magazine (who styles himself Emmanuel Goldstein, after the figure of hate in Nineteen Eighty-Four), is a watchful but otherwise outgoing person. Hacking knows no national boundaries: China, the former Soviet states and eastern Europe all have produced dangerously effective hackers. How News of the World Hacked Everybody's Phones.
Think file-hosting sites guard your private data? Think again. High performance access to file storage Academic researchers say they've uncovered weaknesses in dozens of the most popular file hosting sites that allow people to gain unauthorized access to data that's supposed to be available only to those selected by the user. The services, which include sites such as RapidShare, FileFactory, and Easyshare, allow users to upload large files and make them available to anyone who knows the unique URI (or Uniform Resource Identifier) that's bound to each one. Users may post the link on websites or forums available to the public or share it in a single email to prevent all but the recipient from downloading it. RapidShare, for instance, says it can be used to “share your data with your friends, colleagues or family.” The researchers said they trained web crawlers on the file services and uncovered hundreds of thousands of private files in less than a month. Another common weakness involved the use of pseudorandom URIs for each uploaded file.
How to wipe personal data from your smartphone. So you bought a new phone and you want to sell your old phone, but you're worried about the buyer finding personal information on your phone. You can never be too careful, so it's important to know how to remove all that personal data before a stranger has the phone. Before doing this, remember to back up all your data and transfer important files to your new phone. This includes pictures, documents, apps and app logins and media (music, videos and e-books). Some platforms and carrier networks provide some kind of backup service. Next, make sure to delete everything from any storage media. Usually, this just means formatting the microSD card if your phone has one. Most phones have an option somewhere in the settings menu to format the memory card.
The final and most important step is to perform a factory data reset, also known as a factory wipe or hard reset. Android phones A factory data reset can be done by going to Menu > Settings > Privacy > Factory data reset. iPhones Windows Phone 7. Fridge | private social networks. RainMaker API. “Hey Smitty, I got this guy’s email address. Can you do some digging and tell me more about ‘em? How much does he make? What are his hobbies? Oh, and I want to see pictures of his pet dog too. Can you do it?” “Yea boss, I’ll get you your information, buckets full of it. This is the imaginary old timey gangster context I imagine around the idea behind Rainmaker, its contacts service and Rainmaker API. One of 13 identity APIs in our directory, Rainmaker is possibly the most simple and powerful. Rainmaker pulls together all that information that you thought was spread around through different social networking sites and puts it all in one place. Rainmaker is a RESTful API returning results in both JSON and XML formats.
Both comments and pings are currently closed. What Does the "Track" in "Do Not Track" Mean? There is a lot of discussion about Do Not Track at the moment. The FTC has announced support for the idea; Mozilla has added a Do Not Track header option into Firefox betas, and Congresswoman Jackie Speier has introduced a Do Not Track bill. Other proposed privacy legislation, such as Rep. Bobby Rush's bill, could also achieve similar objectives. And yesterday, EFF submitted comments urging the Federal Trade Commission to defend online privacy by supporting the header-based Do Not Track feature.
Do Not Track is important because it creates a policy mechanism to augment the privacy enhancing technologies that we currently have. Some other anti-tracking technologies have also been discussed a lot recently, including Microsoft's IE 9 Tracking Protection Lists, and AdBlock Plus with EasyPrivacy. Do Not Track is a technically simple proposal: add a header to the messages that browsers and other HTTP clients send when they fetch web pages. What is Tracking? Not necessarily. Making Sure Net Advertisers 'Do Not Track' You. Stanford Law's Ryan Calo on Privacy Harm and Education - Technorati Family. Welcome to the (R)evolution, a new series that connects you to the people, trends, and ideas defining the future of business, culture, and media.
There's a poignant observation by Gabriel García Márquez I'd like to share with you, “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.” Which do you broadcast? The social web is not powered by technology as much as it is by people. While it is the responsibility of social networks and services to ensure that privacy settings are in our control, as well as easy to understand and manage, the consequences of our actions ultimately fall on us. And as a result, what we say, share, and do online is there for others to discover. Ryan Calo, runs the Consumer Privacy Project at Stanford Law School. he joins us on (R)evolution episode 14 to discuss privacy and his research on privacy harm and human interface design to move technology, and interaction, toward a more productive and collaborative social landscape.
Flaws in Tor anonymity network spotlighted. At the Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin, Germany on Monday, researchers from the University of Regensburg delivered a new warning about the Tor anonymizer network, a system aimed at hiding details of a computer user’s online activity from spying eyes. The attack doesn’t quite make a surfer’s activity an open book, but offers the ability for someone on the same local network—a Wi-Fi network provider, or an ISP working at law enforcement (or a regime’s) request, for example—to gain a potentially good idea of sites an anonymous surfer is viewing.
“Developers have to be aware of this kind of attack, and develop countermeasures,” said Dominik Herrmann, a Regensburg PhD student studying profiling and fingerprinting attacks. “But that proves to be very difficult.” Tor is essentially an online mask, rather than a tool that hides the fact or content of communication itself. Herrmann and his fellow researchers say there’s a partial flaw in this arrangement, however.
FTC Backs a 'Do Not Track' System for Internet. How to Verify an Email Address - Ping It! Learn how you can easily verify any email address without even sending a test mail. You can ping the mail server to check the email. How do you verify if a given email address is real or fake? The obvious solution is that you send a test mail to that email address and if your message doesn’t bounce, it is safe to assume* that the address is real. [*] Some web domains may have configured a catch-all email address meaning that messages addressed to a non-existent mailbox will not be returned to the sender but in most cases, such email messages will bounce.
When you send an email to someone, the message goes to an SMTP server which then looks for the MX (Mail Exchange) records of the email recipient’s domain. For instance, when you send an email to hello@gmail.com, the mail server will try to find the MX records for the gmail.com domain. If the records exist, the next step would be to determine whether that email username (hello in our example) is present or not.
Step 1. Step 2. Step 3. Facebook's 'Like This' button is tracking you | THINQ.co.uk.
Escaping the ‘Scrapers’ - Digits. Microsoft, Comcast, Yahoo: no zombie cookies here, Congress! Representatives Edward Markey (D-MA) and Joe Barton (R-TX) are probing the online privacy policies of major Web content providers, and the responses are in: leading website operators all assure Capitol Hill that they either use Flash cookies in a limited context, or they don't use them at all. But the replies from Microsoft, Verizon, Comcast, MySpace, Yahoo! , and six other companies don't seem to have made Markey, or even the more conservative Barton, very happy. "While the responses that Rep. Barton and I received cite privacy policies and opt-out choices to enable consumers to preserve their privacy, these policies can be complicated and laborious to navigate," Markey noted after disclosing the letters.
"In some cases, a list of all third party affiliates is not readily accessible, keeping consumers in the dark. " The inquiry was launched in response to a Wall Street Journal investigative piece on consumer Web tracking. Here's what these companies say they do or don't do. Microsoft Yahoo. Settings Manager - Global Privacy Settings Panel. Note: The Settings Manager that you see above is not an image; it is the actual Settings Manager. Click the tabs to see different panels, and click the options in the panels to change your Adobe Flash Player settings. Use this panel to reset the privacy settings in Flash Player: If you select Always Deny and then confirm your selection, any website that tries to use your camera or microphone will be denied access. You will not be asked again if a website can use your camera or microphone. If you previously selected Remember in the Privacy Settings panel to permanently allow or deny access for one or more websites, selecting Always Ask or Always Deny has the effect of deselecting Remember for all those websites.
After you select either Always Ask or Always Deny (or instead of doing so), you can specify privacy settings for individual websites that you have already visited. For an overview of issues relating to privacy, see What are privacy settings? How to avoid sharing personal info online | Workers' Edge - CNET News. Honesty is the best policy--unless you're dealing with someone you can't trust. The sad fact is, you can't trust anyone on the Web. Just ask the millions of people who signed up for Sony's PlayStation Network and who now must protect against possible hack attacks on their bank accounts and other private data lost due the recent data breach. CNET News reporter Erica Ogg explains the company's response to its customers in her Circuit Breaker blog. Sony claims the credit card information was encrypted and did not include the cards' security codes; the company also encrypted PSN users' passwords, but Sony still recommends that its PSN customers take precautions as an added level of safety.
Unfortunately, there's not much you can do to protect your personal information once you've volunteered it to some organization's Web servers. The key is to ensure whatever data you provide can't come back to haunt you. The limit applies only to credit cards, not to ATM/debit cards.