NewsTrust - Privacy - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Tim Berners-Lee: demand your data from Google and Facebook

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Ian Katz, Tim Berners-Lee - Apr. 18 (Interview) - Exclusive: world wide web inventor says personal data held online could be used to usher in new era of personalised services Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the world wide web, has urged internet users to demand their personal data from online giants such as Google and Facebook to usher in a new era of highly personalised computer services "with tremendous potential to help humanity". Berners-Lee, the British born MIT professor who invented the web three decades ago, says that while there has been an explosion of public data made available in recent years, individuals have not yet understood the value to them of the personal data held about them by different web companies. In an interview with the Guardian, Berners-Lee said: "My computer has a great understanding of my state of fitness, of the things I'm eating, of the places I'm at. My phone understands from being in my pocket how much exercise I've been getting and how many stairs I've been walking up and so on." Exploiting ...

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Technology should help us share, not constrain us

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Richard Stallman - Apr. 18 (Opinion) - Companies like Amazon can control the way we use the ebooks we buy. Instead let's build a publishing model based on freedom I love the detective novel The Jehovah Contract , and I'd like everyone else to love it, too. I have lent it out at least six times over the years. Printed books let us do that. I couldn't do it with most commercial ebooks; it's not allowed. And if I felt like telling the publishers to take their evil rule and stuff it, the software in e-readers has digital restrictions management – malicious features that restrict access, so it simply won't allow it. And the books are encrypted in such a way to force you to use that malicious software. Many other habits that readers are accustomed to are not allowed for ebooks. With the Amazon Kindle, for instance, you're not allowed to buy a book anonymously. Kindle books are typically available from Amazon only, and Amazon doesn't accept cash so users must identify themselves. Thus Amazon knows exactly which books each user has read. ...

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Tracking Women: Now There’s Not An App For That

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Andrew Dowell - Apr. 01 (Opinion) - Score one small setback for creepiness. Location-based social network Foursquare Labs has cut off access to its technology for an application that made it possible for guys to pinpoint the location of nearby women on a map and view their personal data and photographs.

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The Supreme Court has a chance to keep Big Brother at bay

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - Nov. 11 (Opinion) -

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The fightback against TSA tyranny begins

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Jennifer Abel - Mar. 10 (Opinion) - At last, lawmakers are heeding the call of ordinary Americans to defend them from the TSA's invasive infringements of libertyBehold history in the making: in AD 2011, a mere 796 years after England's Magna Carta established that even kings must follow the law, American state legislators are starting to think mandates like "sexual assault is verboten" should apply to agents of the government, too.Of course, that was always the case until the TSA (actual motivational motto: "Dominate. Intimidate. Control.") decided "ritualised humiliation of travelers" made an acceptable substitute for "transportation security." Last year, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) started pushing nude scanners on the American flying public. These require travellers to adopt surrender-criminal body positions – feet apart, hands in the air, don't move – while potentially carcenogenic radiation generates nude images graphic enough to permit TSA agents to see travellers' genitalia (though not, apparently, clear enough to show guns smuggled in travellers' undies).If you refuse to be scanned – or if the scan shows a medical prosthetic, sanitary napkin or anything else that catches a TSA agent's eye – you must endure a groping that would land you on the sex offenders' register if you did it to anyone else. Last month, when Alaska state representative Sharon Cissna submitted to the scan, a TSA agent noticed her mastectomy scars and singled her out for a patdown. Cissna chose to miss her flight and take a ferry home rather than allow the "invasive, probing hands of a stranger" to invade her privacy.Last week, however, state legislators in Texas and New Hampshire introduced legislation identifying TSA behaviour as the criminal activity it is. (Similar bills have already been proposed in New Jersey, but are currently stalled in committee.) The Texas bill, co-written by a Republican and a Democrat with support from 20 other legislators spanning the political spectrum, would ban the scanners in state airports, and add TSA-style grope-downs to the list of "sexual assault" offences in the penal code. The New Hampshire bill would make "the touching or viewing with a technological device of a person's breasts or genitals by a government security agent without probable cause a sexual assault." The TSA has completely ignored those two words – probable cause – since its inception.One of the New Hampshire bill's co-sponsors, Representative Andrew Manuse, wrote an op-ed explaining why he supports it:"We have seen horror stories and personally listened to stories from people we know that tell of TSA agents putting their hands underneath people's underwear – or worse; we have heard about body cavity searches conducted without any cause. […] In the name of fighting terrorism, we have forgotten about our liberties and basic human decency."The TSA has also forgotten basic common sense, even while the agency metastasises out of airports and encroaches on land-based transportation, just as homeland security director Janet Napolitano threatened some months ago. Last month, agents went to an Amtrak station in Savannah, corralled travellers in a roped-off area and subjected all of them to grope-downs – after they'd completed their journeys and disembarked from the train. Amtrak's police chief, John O'Connor, said, "When I saw [reports of the incident], I didn't believe it was real." When he learned it was true, "I hit the ceiling" and banned the TSA from Amtrak stations.So, state lawmakers and even law enforcement officials are finally realising that the TSA has gone too far. But is even that enough to stop them?Since the scan-or-be-groped policy was implemented, Napolitano and her underlings have completely ignored classical American notions like "consent of the governed" or "public accountability". And the more outrageously TSA agents behave, the more vehemently its agents insist they're the victims whenever Americans complain about their behaviour.What happens in an ostensibly free, representative democracy, when unelected, unaccountable "public servants" completely disregard the wishes of the public they presumably serve? The consequences terrify me, if America has to find out.Transport policyUS domestic policyUnited StatesTerrorism policyAir transportUS constitution and civil libertiesCivil liberties - internationalJennifer Abelguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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The Constitution is dead. Long live the Constitution.

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Denver Post - By David Harsanyi - Jan. 05 (Opinion) - Every patriotic fiber of my body tells me that reading the Constitution aloud at the commencement of congressional sessions is a good idea. Heck, a pop quiz might even be in order.

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2010 in Review: The Year the Internet Went to War

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By David Kravets - Dec. 28 (Editorial) - It was a year without parallel. Threat Level’s bread-and-butter themes of censorship, hacking, security, privacy, copyright and cyberwar were all represented in tug-of-war struggles with unprecedented outcomes. Google defeated China’s censors, but caved to corporate censorship in the United States. The largest computer-crime case ever prosecuted ended in the nation’s longest prison term. A small-time Xbox modder who advertised his services online beat the federal rap. And a mysterious computer virus called Stuxnet finally put proof to decades of warnings that malware will eventually be used to kinetic effect in the real world.

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WikiLeaks Exposes Internet's Dissent Tax, not Nerd Supremacy

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Zeynep Tufekci - Dec. 22 (Opinion) - Jaron Lanier's recent lengthy essay about Wikileaks is not really about Wikileaks; thus, it is unsurprising that he misses the central lesson of this affair. From the beginning, he makes the fundamental conceptual mistake of conflating individual human beings and powerful institutions, like governments and corporations; he then takes off on a dystopic vision of a world dominated by an imagined "nerd supremacist" ethic of complete transparency, collapse of private life, and unrestricted information flow, in which humanity is the slave of the machine.

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US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Simon Jenkins - Nov. 29 (Opinion) - It is for governments – not journalists – to guard public secrets, and there is no national jeopardy in WikiLeaks' revelations Is it justified? Should a newspaper disclose virtually all a nation's secret diplomatic communication, illegally downloaded by one of its citizens? The reporting in tomorrow's Guardian of the first of a selection of 250,000 US state department cables marks a recasting of modern diplomacy. Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing's snake-oil salesmen claim. No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms. Anything said or done in the name of a democracy is, prima facie, of public interest. When that democracy purports to be "world policeman" – an assumption that runs ghostlike through these cables – that interest is global.

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Newly published "modesty survey" for Christian youth lays bare evangelical fetishes

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Baltimore Examiner - Jul. 30 (Opinion) - The youth movement Rebelution has published the results of an in-house survey that is meant to be a 128 question guide for Christian women on how to best live and dress in a godly fashion. In actuality it's a rare peak beneath the veil of Christian rock "worship" services and their desperate grab for modern relevancy, revealing a deep seated sexual insecurity, waiting to be harnessed patriarchy and the rolling back of sixty years worth of women's power.

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Add a link to Google Reader

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

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Watch Out: Check-in Apps Share Your Location With More People Than You Think

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Forbes - By Nick Saint - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - Jesper Andersen, the developer behind anti-social networking app Avoidr, discovered a security flaw in Foursquare that allowed him to monitor 875,000 check-ins in San Francisco over the past three weeks, Wired reports.Venues' pages on Foursquare's website display the users who have checked-in their most recently. Until Jesper alerted the company of the problem, these users were displayed regardless of a user's privacy settings. So Jesper built a scraper that monitored these web pages for changes to these lists; whenever a new user appeared on one of these pages, his scraper could infer that the user had just checked-in at that location.

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Lives of others

Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - May. 20 (Opinion) - JENNIFER STODDART, Canada’s privacy commissioner, is furious with Facebook. In August 2009 the social-networking site struck a deal, agreeing to change its policies within a year to comply with the country’s privacy law. Now, says Ms Stoddart, the company appears to be reneging on an important part of that deal, which involved giving users a clear and easy-to-implement choice over whether to share private data with third parties. “It doesn’t seem to me that Facebook is going in the right direction on this issue,” she says, hinting that, without a change of course, the firm could soon become the subject of another formal investigation by her organisation. Facebook is not the only internet giant to provoke the ire of data watchdogs. Google endured withering criticism this week following news that it had recorded some personal communications sent over unsecured Wi-Fi data networks in homes and offices in some 30 countries. On May 17th Peter Schaar, Germany’s federal commissioner for data protection, called for an independent investigation into Google’s behaviour, claiming that it had “simply disobeyed normal rules in the development and usage of software.”

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Facebook's Gone Rogue; It's Time for an Open Alternative

Fri, 07 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Ryan Singel - May. 07 (Opinion) - Facebook's latest moves shows the company cares more about dominating the web than treating its users respectfully. It's time the web come up with an open alternative to return control to users.

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Sunshine online

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Washington Post editorial board - Mar. 28 (Opinion) - If government information is not posted online, Mr. Israel asserts, then it should not be considered truly "public." Or, in the words of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit good-government group that helped Mr. Israel with the legislation, "public equals online."

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With Buzz, Google takes another giant step towards turning into Microsoft

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By John Naughton - Feb. 14 (Opinion) - The search engine's answer to Facebook and Twitter is breathtakingly intrusive and takes astonishing liberties with your privacy

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Facebook Does Not Understand the Meaning of Privacy

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Derek Thompson - Jan. 12 (Comment) - It's a bit rich to hear CEO Mark Zuckerberg boast about his company's psychic mastery of users' privacy wishes one month after Americans went apoplectic about Facebook's privacy updates.

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The Story of 'Operation Orchard': How Israel Destroyed Syria's Al Kibar Nuclear Reactor - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:27:40 -0800

Der Spiegel - Nov. 04 -

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12 Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - Sep. 22 (Opinion) - Warning: The people's ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble.

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The Government and the Web

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Aug. 25 (Editorial) - The government must build robust privacy protections into any tracking technology used on government Web sites.

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The Importance of Free Speech Online in Iran, China, Kenya

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

PBS - By Mark Glaser, Kim Spencer, Scott Rosenberg, Cyrus Farivar, Danny O'Brien, - Jul. 10 (Interview) - In a crisis, governments will often curtail freedom of the press, censoring or shutting broadcasts and newspapers. But blocking websites, slowing the Internet or cutting off SMS messaging can be harder to do. Stopping the flow of information online can be a difficult task, as the Iranian government has learned over the past few weeks, as protesters have posted images to Flickr, video to YouTube, and running commentaries on blogs and Twitter. While the Iranian government would prefer to operate under a cloud, the Interent has proven to be a key distribution medium for spreading news to the rest of the world. This month's 5Across video roundtable focused on free speech online in various countries, from Iran to China to Kenya -- and even a mention of the U.S. government's attempts at curtailing speech online over the years. The discussion gave context to Iranian Internet use, its demographics and the way people there get information via satellite TV from Persian-language foreign news sources such as BBC Persian and Voice of America. Plus, we talked about how China uses psychology in making its millions of Internet users believe they are all being monitored.

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Put enough cameras on the police and even the serially deferential wake up

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Marina Hyde - Apr. 11 (Opinion) - If there is anything to feel optimistic about today, perhaps it is the hope that we are witnessing the flowering of an effective inverse surveillance society. Inverse surveillance is a branch of sousveillance, the term coined by University of Toronto professor Steve Mann, and it emphasises "watchful vigilance from underneath", by citizens, of those who survey and control them.

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Link by Link - As Data Collecting Grows, Privacy Erodes

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Noam Cohen - Feb. 16 (Opinion) - The way Mr. Rodriguez’s positive steroid test result became public followed a path increasingly common in the computer age: third-party data collection. We are typically told that personal information is anonymously tracked for one reason — usually something abstract like making search results more accurate, recommending book titles or speeding traffic through the toll booths on the thruways. But it is then quickly converted into something traceable to an individual, and potentially life-changing.

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Don’t sacrifice privacy when digitizing medical records

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

USA Today - Feb. 16 (Editorial) - For the first time since digital systems took off this decade, Congress has added some strong privacy safeguards in the measure Obama is expected to sign this week. But the fierce, down-to-the-wire battle between health care industry players who opposed many safeguards and privacy advocates shows how difficult it is to make patient privacy a priority. Failing to do so will leave patients vulnerable to many abuses:

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