Dutch courts have decided that the ubiquitous tracking of every person in the nation is at variance with the right to having a private life and has to be stopped immediately.

Hopefully the NL Gov (of which the Justice department is very disappointed with the verdict, the house of commons less so) will not appeal this decision but instead make a different law that mandates the collection of this kind of data only after a judge has deemed it necessary on a case by case basis.

ECLI:NL:RBDHA:2015:2498, Rechtbank Den Haag, C/09/480009 / KG ZA 14/1575.

A Supreme Court decision handed down on Wednesday has given carte blanche to police forces to retain personal data they have collected for virtually any purpose and hold it as long as they like – even when the people targeted are not violent and have committed no crime.

via UK Supreme Court waves through indiscriminate police surveillance • The Register.

Stop de bewaarplicht » Eis dat jouw provider stopt met de bewaarplicht!.

via a piece of javascript, so using NoScript on Firefox negates it. Beware!

http://webwereld.nl/beveiliging/85263-webrtc-verklapt-je-verborgen-ip-adres

“If you do not enable Voice Recognition, you will not be able to use interactive voice recognition features, although you may be able to control your TV using certain predefined voice commands. While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it.”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/09/samsung_listens_in_to_everything_you_say_to_your_smart_tellie/

Where is the microphone so we can put a sticker over it?

How is it possible these muffheads running Europe didn’t realise this? If you put stuff in American cloud it is giving it away to the NSA FBI and any other 3 letter US acronym you can think of. And these dozy fuckers are surprised it’s going badly with the economy? And that people don’t like politicians?
Glad someone cottoned on to this, even if it is a few years late.
go install Kolab please.

http://webwereld.nl/overheid/85329-outlook-app-europese-politici-lekt-data-naar-fbi–nsa

He wants to use it to couple databases such as the license plate data they gather everywhere in NL with the tax database, creating huge centralised databases. Because centralised databases are great! Especially when everyone can access them. Do people never learn? Centralised databases are a very very bad idea.

Privacy volgende slachtoffer van Charlie Hebdo-aanslag – Webwereld.

Refuse to just let it die and give people some form of privacy. Does the US never learn?

House Dem revives major cyber bill | TheHill.

By installing a back door into encrypted communications and storage, they not only allow the government unfettered access, but also criminals. Although I’m not sure where the distinction lies, nowadays.

WhatsApp and iMessage could be banned under new surveillance plans – News – Gadgets and Tech – The Independent.

Ah the wonders of big data. Needlessly scaring twice as many people as guilty people you find with a valid search warrant and invasion of innocent people’s privacy is being lauded as a success by the NL Government and will result in 30000 people’s houses being needlessly searched next year.
30.000 onschuldige Nederlanders opgejaagd door overheid – Webwereld.

This site looks at surprisingly few browser attributes to see how unique you are. Currently you are being compared to 37753 other browsers, but as more people check on the site, the representation will be more accurate. It’s pretty scary to see how individual your browser settings are, even with javascript disabled.

via Am I unique?.

The fourth reich is inevitable!

GOP rep attempted late bid to kill spy bill | TheHill.

Egocentric cameras are being worn by an increasing number of users, among them many security forces worldwide. GoPro cameras already penetrated the mass market, and Google Glass may follow soon. As head-worn cameras do not capture the face and body of the wearer, it may seem that the anonymity of the wearer can be preserved even when the video is publicly distributed.We show that motion features in egocentric video provide biometric information, and the identity of the user can be determined quite reliably from a few seconds of video. Biometrics are extracted by training Convolutional Neural Network CNN architectures on coarse optical flow.Egocentric video biometrics can prevent theft of wearable cameras by locking the camera when worn by people other than the owner. In video sharing services, this Biometric measure can help to locate automatically all videos shot by the same user. An important message in this paper is that people should be aware that sharing egocentric video will compromise their anonymity.

via [1411.7591] Egocentric Video Biometrics.

The European Parliament has reached a deal with national ministers to introduce a mandatory “eCall” system for all new cars from April 2018.

However, although the system would automatically call the 112 emergency number in the event of a crash, euro lawmakers say that cars will not be continuously tracked.

“It will be illegal to use eCall to track a driver’s movements or to misuse location data, which must be sent only to the emergency services,” said Olga Sehnalova, the Czech politician who helped broker the deal.

The proposed rules would also follow the principle of data-minimisation, with only basic details such as the class of vehicle, the type of fuel used, the time of the accident, and the exact location given to the emergency services.

Nor is any of the data gathered allowed to be passed on to third parties without the explicit consent of the person involved.

via EU law bods: New eCall crash system WON'T TRACK YOU. Really • The Register.

I’m very curious how the system knows you’re in a crash…

This site is a huge country and brand directory listing of surveillance cameras that are online and still have the default password or no protection set. It’s bizarre to see how many of them there are.

View net surveillance online cameras.

The addresses and domains you email to, your search terms, how often you use your Mac.

And this with a few hours of poking.

Apple keeps saying it’s leaving users alone, but really?
fix-macosx/yosemite-phone-home · GitHub.

The Dutch province Utrecht has signed a deal with City Wireless that allows people free wireless. They can log in with their Facebook profile, which is then harvested for information for marketing purposes. City Wireless has since changed its’ homepage, removing the grizly details, but the Dutch paper still has the screencaps.

Article in Dutch.
Gemeente Utrecht koopt Facebookprofielen burgers – Webwereld.

Thought about privacy? Hell no!

A recent AP survey of 10 leading voice biometric vendors found that more than 65 million people worldwide have had their voiceprints taken, and that several banks, including Barclays PLC in Britain and Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp, are in the process of introducing their customers to the technology.

via Banks harvest callers' voiceprints to fight fraud.

Because keeping people’s details without their knowledge or consent is fine, right? Not.

They found that if Friendster had used certain state-of-the-art prediction algorithms, it could have divined sensitive information about non-members, including their sexual orientation. “At the time, it was possible for Friendster to predict the sexual orientation of people who did not have an account on Friendster,”
[….]
The problem Garcia identifies lies in something called “shadow profiles,” and as a consequence, we all could be intimately profiled by the Facebooks and Googles and LinkedIns of the world—whether we agree to it or not.

Garcia says this kind of statistical analysis—essentially using machine learning to study the known tastes and relationships of one person’s contacts, and making a guess about who they are likely to be—could be used to build disturbingly detailed profiles of people who do not even use the social network
[…]
We learned about shadow profiles last year when security researchers at a company called Packetstorm discovered Facebook was maintaining its own files on users’ contacts. For example, if Facebook found two users were connected to a non-member—say, bob@wired.com—it would pool other information—different phone numbers, for example—into one master dossier.

via Not on a Social Network? You've Still Got a Privacy Problem | WIRED.

Adobe’s Digital Editions 4 ebook reader software is collecting detailed information about the reading habits of its users – and sending it back to the company in a format that’s easy for others to slurp.

An investigation by Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader blog showed that ADE 4 was collecting telemetry on which pages of ebooks were being read, and in which order. This included the title, publisher, and other metadata, which was then sent to the company’s mothership – a server called adelogs, no less – in plain text over the internet.

via Adobe spies on readers: EVERY page you turn, EVERY book you own leaked back to base • The Register.

So… In the last year, Adobe has lost account details to some 50 million users, has lost its’ source codes to hackers and still doesn’t understand the need for security and privacy?!

Nearly half of the people on the U.S. government’s widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group, according to classified government documents obtained by The Intercept.

Of the 680,000 people caught up in the government’s Terrorist Screening Database—a watchlist of “known or suspected terrorists” that is shared with local law enforcement agencies, private contractors, and foreign governments—more than 40 percent are described by the government as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation.” That category—280,000 people—dwarfs the number of watchlisted people suspected of ties to al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah combined.

via Barack Obama's Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers – The InterceptThe Intercept.

With privacy concerns being raised more and more about the use of cloud storage, tech giants are turning to the age old scare tactic of using child porn as an excuse to burrow through users data.

Google Spotted Explicit Images Of A Child In A Man's Email And Tipped Off The Authorities – Business Insider.

Microsoft tip leads to child porn arrest in Pennsylvania.

“to ensure users’ rights to privacy of their personal data and personal information, and information security for government agencies and corporate clients”

Google Translate.

In a court case in which the government (mr Plasterk) was taken to task for using NSA data – private information gotten through illegal means according to Dutch law – the NL courts have ruled that secret services can use this data freely, because “it’s important”. This is a bit like allowing evidence gained under torture. It may be illegal in NL, but hey – another person gave it to us and it’s really important, so let’s use it!
Another real problem is that this ruling allows the NL secret service to circumvent the checks and balances applying to the Dutch democracy by sending data to the US, or allowing the US to capture it, have it be analysed there and then returned to NL. In this way the AIVD can perform illegal data mining “legally”.

Rechter: Nederland mag NSA-data blijven gebruiken – IT Pro – Nieuws – Tweakers.

The Dutch organisation for small / medium sized businesses (MKB Nederland) has set up a quick scan for companies dealing with private data, to have a look at the risks of using this kind of data.

Privacy Quick Scan.