Digital Footprints
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If I were truly mischief and wanted to game the system, I would have named this article, "Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login, Part 2." If you're not familiar with the incident to which I'm referring: One of the most illustrative cases of the incomplete state of the Internet as an information system was in February 2010, when ReadWriteWeb itself happened to publish an article with "Facebook" and "login" in its headline. It soon found itself at or near the top of Google search results for the phrase "facebook login," with the result being that hundreds of Web users to this day happen upon this page when they're trying to reach Facebook itself.
Issues for 2012 #3: Who Gets to Define Your Online Identity? - ReadWriteCloud
Google collected e-mails, passwords, and URLs while the company was snapping images for its Street View service, it admitted in a blog post today. "In some instances, entire e-mails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords," Google's senior vice president of engineering and research, Alan Eustace, wrote in a blog post today. However, Eustace was quick to point out that "most of the data is fragmentary," and the company will delete the information "as soon as possible." Google's admission that it collected passwords and e-mails adds further detail to the comments it made back in May when it first announced it had been collecting data from Wi-Fi networks . At the time, the company said that it inadvertently collected "publicly broadcast SSID information and MAC addresses using our Street View cars ."
Google: We collected e-mails, passwords | The Digital Home - CNET News
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China Telecom sent incorrect routing information last April that resulted in Internet traffic to major corporate websites and U.S. military and government sites being sent through China for 18 minutes, according to a report by a congressional advisory group. The incident was one of several discussed by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Reuters obtained a copy of the draft report, which will formally be released on Wednesday. In the hijacking incident, the Web traffic, much of which originated in the United States and was directed toward U.S. corporate and government websites, should have gone the shortest available route and not through China. Some of the traffic was headed to sites owned by the U.S.
China telecom briefly hijacked U.S. Web traffic: panel | Reuters
Google must return wifi data: Privacy lobby
The Australian Privacy Foundation is still seeking confirmation that the personal information of local citizens collected by Google Australia through its StreetView cars is being stored in Australia. The organisation says if the personal data – including whole emails, bank account details and passwords – has been moved offshore it should be returned to Australia immediately. But having written to all parties involved last May – Google Australia, the Office of the Australian Privacy Commissioner, the Attorney General’s department and the Australian Federal Police – the APF has yet to be formally told whether the payload data will be kept, or where it is currently stored. Google Australia said as recently as last week at a Senate committee hearing on online privacy that it wanted to delete the payload data as soon as possible.Firefox extension Firesheep. Public wireless networks have always been perceived as generally safe. Surely, the odds of having your private details stolen out of thin air must be slim to none? And surely, the ability to steal those details must be restricted to the most knowledgeable and most evil of techies?
Firefox extension reveals Facebook and Twitter logins | Technology | guardian.co.uk
Twitter DM Insecurity, SEO Tips, Latest on Google, Yahoo & Bing - Search Week in Review for Oct. 9, 2010 @SEWatch
Your Twitter Direct Messages (DMs) are not private. It's quite easy to use the Twitter API to access your personal information and obtain all the DMs inside your Twitter inbox. When you allow access to log-in to some website or application, you're also agreeing to let the developer who created this log-in access all your direct messages, and opening yourself to potential abuse. Gary-Adam Shannon explains how this is possible in " Twitter Exploit Warning: How Anyone Can Easily Snatch Your Direct Messages ." Kristine Schachinger also provides more coverage in " Twitter: Take Better Care of Our Private Information!
"We screwed up," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in June. "Let's be very clear about that." Schmidt was referring to the "rogue data" controversy, a privacy fiasco that has embroiled the company everywhere from Germany to Spain to South Korea.
Google's 600 Gigabyte Privacy Fiasco, by the Numbers | Fast Company
Kim White Bloomberg Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the F8 developer conference this spring. Many of the most popular applications, or "apps," on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.
Facebook in Online Privacy Breach; Applications Transmitting Identifying Information - WSJ.com
On the Web, Children Face Intensive Tracking - WSJ.com
A Wall Street Journal investigation into online privacy has found that popular children's websites install more tracking technologies on personal computers than do the top websites aimed at adults. See more about children's privacy from the Wall Street Journal's series on Internet-tracking technology. The Journal examined 50 sites popular with U.S. teens and children to see what tracking tools they installed on a test computer. As a group, the sites placed 4,123 "cookies," "beacons" and other pieces of tracking technology. That is 30% more than were found in an analysis of the 50 most popular U.S. sites overall, which are generally aimed at adults. The most prolific site: Snazzyspace.com, which helps teens customize their social-networking pages, installed 248 tracking tools.
Infographic of the Day: How Your Favorite Websites Spy on You | Co.Design
We all know, vaguely, that the websites we visit are tracking us with cookies and whatnot, silently scraping data on how and where we surf. But when you see the facts all laid out for you, it's gobsmacking. The Wall Street Journal just published the results of an investigation they did into tracking habits at the Web's top 50 websites, and summed up the results in this superb infographic . Basically, the top half shows the Web's top 50 websites; the bottom half shows the tracking companies whose software can be found on those sites. When you click on one, it shows you the myriad linkages between them.Last week I gave a presentation at PII 2010 in Seattle where I tried to summarize what I had learned from my recent work on WiFi location services and identity. During the question period an audience member asked me to return to the slide where I recounted how I had first encountered Apple’s new location tracking policy: My questioner was clearly a bit irritated with me, Didn’t I realize that the “unique device identifier” was just a GUID - a purely random number? It wasn’t a MAC address. It was not personally identifying.