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Your Privacy Online - What They Know

Your Privacy Online - What They Know

There is no such thing as anonymous online tracking A 1993 New Yorker cartoon famously proclaimed, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." The Web is a very different place today; you now leave countless footprints online. You log into websites. You share stuff on social networks. You search for information about yourself and your friends, family, and colleagues. In the language of computer science, clickstreams — browsing histories that companies collect — are not anonymous at all; rather, they are pseudonymous. Will tracking companies actually take steps to identify or deanonymize users? Regardless, what I will show you is that if they’re not doing it, it’s not because there are any technical barriers. Here are five concrete ways in which your identity can be attached to data that was initially collected without identifying information. 1. Most of the companies with the biggest reach in terms of third-party tracking, such as Google and Facebook, are also companies that users have a first-party relationship with. 2. 3. 4. 5.

TRAFFIQ — Premium Advertising Marketplace Web 2.0 Suicide Machine - Meet your Real Neighbours again! - Sign out forever! Google Gets a Privacy Deadline Google has a fleet of camera-equipped cars prowling the streets of every major metropolis, snapping endless rounds of photographs for its Street View mapping service. The next time one rolls by, watch out--it could be "accidentally" capturing more than just the front of your house. Back in May, German officials launched a criminal investigation into the company's Street View cars, and found they had been scanning unsecured Wi-Fi networks and collecting private user data--small bits personal information, accessed websites, and email messages. Today, the government set a deadline: Develop new guidelines for data collection or face government regulation. "We need a charter guarding private geographical data and we need it drafted by December 7," de Maiziere told AFP. Google has made several attempts to hedge the controversy.

Who is Neustar? Brad Stone at the New York Times reports on an industry group working on a new platform for portable digital movie downloads: The [Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem or DECE] is setting out to create a common digital standard that would let consumers buy or rent a digital video once and then play it on any device... Under the proposed system, proof of digital purchases would be stored online in a so-called rights locker, and consumers would be permitted to play the movies they bought or rented on any DECE-compatible device. Most consumers have likely never heard of Neustar, yet the firm plays an important role in the telecommunications industry, and has built a highly profitable business faciliating the disclosure of information regarding consumers' communications to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. How many times a year does Neustar hand over information on individuals to law enforcement and intelligence agencies? On the firm's website, Neustar describes its LEAP service:

The Data Bubble The tide turned today. Mark it: 31 July 2010. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. It has ten links to other sections of today’s report. It’s pretty freaking amazing — and amazingly freaky, when you dig down to the business assumptions behind it. Here’s the gist: The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It gets worse: In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.The data on Ms. Two things are going to happen here. Improving a pain in the ass doesn’t make it a kiss.

The Intimate Social Graph October 14, 2010, 11:02 AM — For a number of years I have had a privacy concern that is just now beginning to peep into view on the Internet at large. Around 2001 I spent some time in a casual multiuser game hosted by PopCap. It featured a way that two players could chat in a private space while playing the game. The game was centrally hosted: each user's local Java applet talked with a PopCap server, so every keystroke typed in those private conversations was sent up to the server and back out to the other party's client. I wondered at the time: were those conversations being stored? The privacy of one-to-one communications in Facebook messages, LinkedIn InMail and Twitter direct messages is protected mainly under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Fast-forward to 2010. Of course the privacy of social networking data is dependent on security. Users of Facebook and LinkedIn can choose which information appears on their public pages for all the world to see.

Know Privacy UltraViolet shines light on locker in the cloud UltraViolet is the consumer brand for an ambitious initiative from the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, a cross-industry consortium including major media companies, consumer electronics manufacturers and digital rights management providers. It aims to provide a system to allow consumers to share digital media they purchase in a controlled manner. UltraViolet will provide a centralized licence locker that grants access to material on compatible devices registered to a household account. It sounds fine in principle but there could be problems in practice. The UltraViolet licensing programme for media, technology and service providers has now opened. The technical specifications include a common file format for downloads, designed to work with multiple digital rights management systems. The centralized UltraViolet license broker will be developed and operated by Neustar, a directory and registry operator for telephony and internet services. www.uvvu.com

Cookie Madness! I just don’t understand Julia Angwin’s scare story about cookies and ad targeting in the Wall Street Journal. That is, I don’t understand how the Journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business. It is the Reefer Madness of the digital age: Oh my God, Mabel, they’re watching us! If I were a conspiracy theorist — and I’m not, because I’ve found the world is rarely organized enough to conspire (and I found this to be especially true of News Corp. when I worked there, at TV Guide) — I’d imagine that the Journal ginned up this alleged exposé as a way to attack everyone else’s advertising business just as its parent company skulks behind its pay wall and surrenders its own ad business. But I’m not a conspiracy theorist. That’s why I’m confused. The story uses the ominous passive voice of newspaper scare stories: “…a Wall Street Journal investigation has found…” As if this knowledge were hiding.

Thoughts on the DOJ wikileaks/twitter court order The world's media has jumped on the news that the US Department of Justice has sought, and obtained a court order seeking to compel Twitter to reveal account information associated with several of its users who are associated with Wikileaks. Communications privacy law is exceedingly complex, and unfortunately, none of the legal experts who actually specialize in this area (people like Orin Kerr, Paul Ohm, Jennifer Granick and Kevin Bankston) have yet to chime in with their thoughts. As such, many commentators and journalists are completely botching their analysis of this interesting event. While I'm not a lawyer, the topic of government requests to Internet companies is the focus of my dissertation, so I'm going to try to provide a bit of useful analysis. However, as always, I'm not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt. A quick introduction to the law The order to twitter It is the second part of the order that is more interesting. Reading between the lines 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Crystal Ball - Google CEO Schmidt Rekindles Privacy Fears with AI Talk In what has become an all-too familiar rite of technological punditry, techperts are crawling all over the latest comments from Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the future of search being more predictive, pretty much telling people what they want before they know they want it. You know the story. Google has some Matrix- or Inception-like ideal that its search engine will become so personalized that people's behaviors will be guided by the search algorithms anticipating the human impulse and then acting on it. Schmidt recently sat down with Wall Street Journal editors and said (paywall warning): We're trying to figure out what the future of search is ... Here's the example Schmidt provided that raised hackles in many quarters: Let's say you're walking down the street. Later, Schmidt noted: "As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. Depends on your point of view.

internet4.org - internet4.org eXelate Raises $15 Million For Behavioral Targeting Data Marketplace eXelate, a New York-based provider of data management tools for online publishers and operator of an open marketplace for audience targeting data, has raised $15 million in Series B funding in a round led by Silicon Valley’s Menlo Ventures with participation of Israeli VC firm Carmel Ventures. The latter led the company’s initial $4 million financing round back in October 2007. Menlo Ventures partner Mark Siegel will join Carmel’s Shlomo Dovrat on eXelate’s board, which was recently expanded to include New York Times Company SVP Digital Operations Martin Nisenholtz and IPG’s Mediabrands Ventures CEO Matt Freeman. Since eXelate’s U.S. launch of the eXelate eXchange in May 2008, the company has expanded both its footprint of accessible audience data (to 150 million U.S. unique visitors presently) as well as its suite of solutions to enable efficient interactions between buyers and sellers of data.

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