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.
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”
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.
invisible.im is backed by some pretty big names in IT security. It’s not foolproof and it’s in the first stages, but it’s a start with great potential.
New Instant Messenger Plans to Leave No Metadata Worth Harvesting.
Basically the interpretation is that since the servers on which these services are hosted are in foreign countries, they are classed as “external communications”, which allows them to intercept them indiscriminately as opposed to needing a warrant. This also applies to webmail services and Google searches.
When you ask them for your own details, you also get all the personal details of the people who have interacted with your account!
This data should be anonymised.
Mag niet: Marktplaats deelt IP-adressen en NAW-gegevens – Webwereld.
A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union found that certain users can ask search engines to remove results for queries that include their name where those results are inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.
In implementing this decision, we will assess each individual request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the public’s right to know and distribute information. When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials.
The form in the link below starts out the process of removing links
via Legal Help.
If you have over 3000 daily visits, you have to register. You remove anonymity and you have to keep all your data in Russia for at least 6 months.
This after a few laws that ban 4 words from being used in the arts and allow the state to shut down websites – promptly used to silence state critics.
Well done freedom!
Russia Quietly Tightens Reins on Web With ‘Bloggers Law’ – NYTimes.com.
We crawl the web to find the companies that track people, then Disconnect blocks those companies’ tracking requests in your browser. Click the items below to learn more about Disconnect’s features.
via Private Browsing.
From a man who has done plenty wrong in privacy recently, this is a very very good idea. People who want the source code do have to sign a NDA. I don’t know what’s in the NDA, but this seems reasonable.
Plasterk geeft broncode Basisregistratie Personen vrij – Webwereld.
In the first half it was 714 accounts. In 2012 it was 1438 accounts. This is information from Office 365, Hotmail and Skype.
Nederlandse politie vordert meer klantdata bij Microsoft – Webwereld.