Articles about Privacy

Twitter is rarely out of the headlines, but this week two legal cases surrounding the social network slash micro-blogging service brought it to attention for slightly different reasons than normal. On one side of the Atlantic a couple fell foul of the law for using Twitter to make threats to a feminist campaigner, while on the other a celebrity managed to avoid prosecution for libel after managing to plead ignorance about the falsity of a claim made online.

For a court case victory, it was announced in a very restrained, quiet way... particularly when you consider that the victor was none other than Courtney Love. The celebratory tweet reads simply "I can't thank you enough Dongell Lawrence Finney LLP, the most incredible law firm on the planet. We won this epic battle. #justiceprevails", and the decision to use Twitter was slightly ironic considering the fact that the court case stemmed from a previous tweet made by Ms. Love.

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The idea of being monitored, spied upon, surveilled, call it what you will, is something we are gradually becoming used to. CCTV cameras abound, we now know that our private communication could be intercepted at any time, and god only knows what else is going on unbeknownst to us. The plots of Person of Interest look positively tame compared to what is actually happening. Look, a whole introductory paragraph about modern-day surveillance and not one reference to Big Brother, 1984 or George Orwell. Oh ... damn.

But it seems that it is not just potential terrorists, criminals and other ne'er do wells who might feel concerned about who is reading their emails and monitoring their online activity. Hundreds of schools up and down the UK are actively monitoring the online communication of pupils using methods not too far removed from those employed by the NSA on a global scale.

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As data theft goes, it has to go down as one of the largest and most audacious acts in history. The numbers may not be the highest -- although it's still a very hefty figure -- but looked at in terms of percentage of population, it is staggering.

The work of a single person led to the credit card details of an incredible 20 million South Koreans, or almost half of the country's population, being stolen and sold onto marketing companies.

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Unless you have been living under a rock for many months, you couldn't help but be aware of the activities of the NSA. They certainly knew what you were up to, even when you were hiding under that rock. Campaigners have been calling for reform ever since Edward Snowden blew the lid off previously secret surveillance of telephone calls and web activity of millions of users in America and around the world. In an address at the Justice Department, President Obama gave details of some reforms to surveillance, but at the same time remained defensive of the National Security Agency.

Referring to surveillance (or spying, if you will) carried out in the 1960s, Obama said: "In the long twilight struggle against communism, we had been reminded that the very liberties that we sought to preserve could not be sacrificed at the altar of national security". The speech continued, making the obligatory nods to terrorism, "weapons of mass destruction" and September 11th; all very emotive stuff. This heartstring tugging was cited as the reason the intelligence community in general -- including the NSA -- needed to up its game. They "suddenly needed to do far more than the traditional mission of monitoring hostile powers and gathering information for policymakers."

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Google recently made an interesting change to Gmail, making it possible for users to send messages to anyone in their Google+ circles. If the prospect of receiving emails from people you don’t know concerns you -- they don’t even need to know your email address -- you might like the idea of locking down your account. Thankfully, Google has made it quite simple to put restrictions in place. So if you'd like to avoid a possible influx of unsolicited emails, here's how to go about it.

Before we get started, it's worth pointing out that you may not see these settings in Gmail yet. This means that the feature has not been enabled for your account yet -- which means you don’t need to worry about receiving messages in this way anyway!

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When I bought my iPad Air at Target on December 13, 2013, it was supposed to be a happy moment. People that know me, know that I am extremely frugal. The old adage is that a fool and his money are easily parted. Well, I am certainly no fool in this regard. With that said, Target had a really good deal on the tablet and and I uncharacteristically decided to treat myself for Christmas. I took my new Apple device home and I was in heaven -- until I heard about the Target breach.

Truth be told, I wasn't too worried, as I paid for it with a credit card and not a debit card. In other words, my money was safe as long as I paid attention to my credit card bill for any oddities. While Target initially said 40 million people were affected, and that is a lot, I accepted it as something that happens and didn't hold any grudges with the retailer. The hack was acknowledged on December 19th and I have shopped there since. However, my forgiveness and understanding may be short lived. Today, Target announces that it wasn't 40 million customers affected -- it was 70 million! Not only that, but more types of information was stolen than originally reported.

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Assuming you're a Gmail user you'll be aware that there's rarely a need to type out an email address in full. Once a contact is in your address book, you can start typing a name into the To field and suggestions will pop up as you type. But what about those people whose email address you don’t actually have? You may have connected with someone on Google+ but start to type out an email and you suddenly realize you don’t have an address to send to. D'oh! However a new feature that's rolling out could see this frustration becoming a thing of the past.

What’s the solution? Google is keen on integrating Google+ with as many products and services as possible, and now this is spreading to Gmail. You've probably got a large number of contacts on Google+ (well… maybe you have some... Google+ isn't that unpopular!), but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have their email address. Over the next few days, when you start to type the name of a recipient in the To field, Google+ contacts will be displayed as suggestions in addition to entries from your address book.

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Sharing things about yourself, whether information or photos, is a very personal thing. However, to share those things with an internet entity is not only personal, but potentially scary too. After all, you typically have to put trust into a faceless company. When you build a trust-relationship with a firm like Google, Facebook or Snapchat, you take a leap of faith -- hoping that not only are they are honest, but competent too. After all, a company with honest intentions, but lacking security is just as dangerous as a dishonest one.

Snapchat is particularly worrying because not only is it a relatively new service, but it is designed to keep images private. Once privacy is circumvented and users lose trust, it can be devastating. While the service can be used for clean things, let's be honest here -- many use it to share pictures of their weewees and hoohas. Nobody wants their body parts or usernames to be traced back to them. Sadly, that is exactly what happened, as a bug in the "Find Friends" feature allowed hackers to tie usernames to phone numbers. While Snapchat acknowledged the bug, it didn't apologize -- until now.

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It's inevitable that at this time of year tech companies and analysts like to try to grab headlines with their predictions for the coming 12 months. Security specialist Kaspersky Lab is no exception, and guaranteed to make waves is its forecast of the collapse of the internet as we know it.

This, it says, will be driven by pressure to break the web up into national segments. So far this has only applied to counties like China with its Great Firewall, but other nations including Russia have planned legislation to prohibit the use of foreign services. In November, Germany announced that all communications between the German authorities would be fully locked within the country. Brazil too has announced its plans to build an alternative internet channel so as not to use the one that goes through Florida.

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The NSA's indiscriminate collection of telephone data has been ruled as legal by a federal judge in New York. Judge William Pauley ruled that the National Security Agency's activities do not violate the constitution. Just last week, another federal judge suggested that the collection of phone records was likely to violate the US constitution and a White House review panel has already recommended that President Obama stops the NSA in its tracks.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had brought a case to court challenging the NSA program, but Judge Pauley's ruling put an end to this. It looks like there could be something of a battle ahead, and the latest ruling opens up the possibility that the matter will be settled by the US Supreme Court. Referring to the fourth amendment, Judge Pauley said that whether it "protects bulk telephony metadata is ultimately a question of reasonableness."

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At this time of year in the UK it is traditional for the Queen to record a message to the nation. Broadcast on TV at 3pm just as everyone is recovering from Christmas lunch, she looks back over the year in a speech which usually has a reflective tone. In recent years there have been numerous alternatives to the Queen's speech, with broadcaster Channel 4 giving a platform to the funny, the controversial, the meaningful and the strange. Whilst not necessarily anti-monarchy, it is a broadcast that is certainly non-monarchist, and frequently of a more left-wing bent. This year, Edward Snowden used it as a mouthpiece.

The 30-year-old former NSA worker who blew the cover off the secret surveillance that is being carried out on web users all over the world. He is currently living in Russia where he sought asylum having fled from the US earlier in the year after threats of espionage charges. The two minute long address makes reference to the book 1984, with Snowden saying that George Orwell had forewarned us of such dangers but said that the spying techniques described in the classic work were nothing compared to what actually exists now.

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Edward Snowden says (according to Reuters) that RSA Security accepted $10 million from the National Security Agency in exchange for installing (or allowing to have installed) a secret backdoor so the NSA could decrypt messages as it pleased. Hell no says RSA (a division of storage vendor EMC), stating in very strong terms that this was not at all the case. But then in a second day look at the RSA/EMC statement bloggers began to see the company as dissembling, their firm defense as really more of a non-denial denial. So what’s the truth here and what’s the lesson?

For the truth I reached deep into the bowels of elliptic cryptography to an old friend who was one of the technology’s inventors.

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The other day I chronicled the strange journey of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent site that is notorious for finding less-than-legal software, movies, TV shows, music…you name it. Sure, it’s wrong to steal content, no matter how you justify it -- people deserve to be paid for their work. After all, I don’t work for free, I fully expect to be compensated for my efforts. I have a wife and kids to provide for. I would guess you also do not labor for free.

However, that piece about the many domains the service has recently occupied, combined with something my colleague Mark Wilson brought up about the ridiculous porn filtering in the UK, got me thinking.

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There was a time when "activist investor" Carl Icahn actually owned and ran businesses, one of which was TransWorld Airlines (TWA), eventually sold to American Airlines. In an attempt to cut costs, TWA under Icahn outsourced reservation service to a call center built in a prison with prisoners on the phone. When you called to book travel you were giving your credit card number to a felon and telling him when you’d be away from home. Smart move, Carl, and very akin to what may have caused the post-Thanksgiving theft of 40 million credit card numbers from Target, the U.S. discount retailer.

Target used to do its IT all in the USA, then to save costs they moved IT to a subsidiary in India. Care to guess where the Target data breach came from? I’m guessing India. I’m also guessing that there will never be any arrests in the case.

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Privacy has been a hot topic throughout 2013 and it’s always worth taking a little time to make sure you’re not accidentally sharing more information with the world than you might want to. Microsoft’s tiled operating system comes with some handy privacy controls baked in that you should definitely take a look at if you haven’t already.

This feature won’t stop the NSA spying on you, but it can prevent apps from accessing personal details like your name, photo, location and account info, and prevent them from using your PC or tablet's camera and microphone without your knowledge.

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