Internet Privacy

Why not give the gift of safer computing habits this year? This articles outlines how you can give someone the gift of secure computing with very little effort:
“Internet use can be far safer for most home computer users through the use of free tools and services that help protect computers from malicious code that can […]

Talk about a chilling effect. This blows “privacy” right out of the water, shoots it a few dozen times, then chops it into itty bitty pieces and uses the pieces to make fish food.
“People of the Internet, I have a story to tell. A story with a few morals to it and a dire warning […]

Sometimes we take for granted that “anonymous data” is actually anonymous, but is it really anonymous? According to this article from Wired, no:
“Last year, Netflix published 10 million movie rankings by 500,000 customers, as part of a challenge for people to come up with better recommendation systems than the one the company was using. The […]

UFOs (ubiquitous-findable-objects) are coming.
The term ‘ambient findability’ describes a world at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the internet, in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at any time. It’s not necessarily a goal, and we’ll never achieve perfect findability, but we’re surely headed in the right direction.
A clear sign of progress […]

Aunty does not know this company personally, but they claim to have figured out a way to protect your identity from identity theft, and they offer a money-back guarantee. Their program is only $10/month, or $100 per year.

According to a survey done by AdultMatchmaker.com (which begs the question, are there sites out there devoted to matchmaking for children?), as many a third or more of all online daters will do a Google search of their intended before going out on a first date. And who knows what they may find?

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened their online National Sex Offender Public Registry for business. The controversial registry collates information from all of the online state registries, allowing for people to search all of the online databases at once to determine who and where are the registered sex offenders. At least those […]

We’ve had lots of stories on identity theft lately. That’s because it’s happening to a lot of people. People whose credit card information has been stolen (ChoicePoint, Lexis Nexis). People whose college admissions and academic records have been hacked (Stanford, UCSD).

This is an interesting concept, although Aunty’s not sure how this differs from just getting online and searching for your information yourself, other than that you have to pay for one, and the other is free.

What’s that old line about “who’s watching the watchers?”? America Online (AOL) actually pays people to watch over their chat rooms, to make sure that nothing untoward happens to any of the underaged who like to hang out in the chat rooms and..you know..chat. This is all part of AOL’s efforts to […]

Identity theft insurance? It’s obviously an idea whose time has come. In fact some would say that identity theft insurance is an idea whose time is long overdue. Just ask anyone whose personal data has recently been compromised by either the hacking of ChoicePoint’s data or the Scamming of Lexis Nexis’ data. […]

Aunty has been talking about RFIDs to track people since last year, and the natural extension, implanting RFIDs or other miniature technology (or ICT, as it’s often known in Europe) in people, is not a new concept.

Ever wonder how someone on the Internet is able to tell where you are located when you visit their site? (You did know that people can tell where you are located, right?) It’s done by geolocation - geographic location - of your IP address.

It is now possible to track and identify a computer anywhere it goes on the Internet by using its clock skew as a method for fingerprinting it. Clock skew is what a computer thinks the time is as compared to other time-keeping with which it is interfacing. And when measured against other quantifiable […]

Some of you will remember that just before Christmas Aunty wrote about the Ellsworth family, whose son was slain in combat in Iraq, and who were subsequently trying to get Yahoo to let them have access to their son’s email account. Yahoo had staunchly refused, citing their privacly policy.
Well, it’s happened again, to another […]

There are just so many facets and angles to this story, it’s almost impossible to determine if there is a right and a wrong, let alone who is which.
Justin Ellsworth, of Wixom, Michigan, was killed last month while on foot patrol in Iraq.
John Ellsworth, the grieving father of the 20-year-old Marine, asked Yahoo to please […]