Privacy Is Dead

[johna]

Just seen the video "Privacy is Dead" by Steve Ramban, for those of you more PC savvy this will not come as a surprise, but its worth watching for those who only use PC for fun!

Google the title if you're interested.

[BigSnake]

Anybody that own a PC should know that there is NO Privacy on a PC, almost anyone with child like innocence can find most anything you have ever type on your PC, best burn the PC if no longer needed, this to is not fool proof, the IP may just have a record, hmmmmmmm!! I wonder?

[Daffy D]

Recent item on the UK Watchdog program where people were buying secondhand hard drives from E-Bay that were full of confidential information. One even had military launch codes on it.

Seems even companies that should know better don't wipe their old disks properly.

The ONLY way, according to the program, to be sure no data can be recovered is to open up the drive and physically destroy the platters.

[lopburi3]

Have you tried to open one of those monsters? Need an atomic blast!

But I agree - do your best - the value of a used drive is a small price to pay for a bit of security. Just to destroy the card would provide 99% less chance of anyone taking the time to try and extract anything.

[johna]

The movie is not about info stored on your PC hard disk, but info collected about you by google mail, google documents,hotmail,yahoo, twitter, facebook etc, and who has access to this info.

Every email you send has been stored on some ones database.

It goes on to explain how your GPS or skyhook enabled cell phone is being used to track you.

[webfact]

The movie is not about info stored on your PC hard disk, but info collected about you by google mail, google documents,hotmail,yahoo, twitter, facebook etc, and who has access to this info.

Every email you send has been stored on some ones database.

It goes on to explain how your GPS or skyhook enabled cell phone is being used to track you.

when it comes to Email - according to WIKI

DAILY

about 1.2 billion are sent from non-spam sources. if you count the span/phishing ones, it is about 75% more. that equals about 2 million a second. do the math!

So, how to search them later... lets say after 1 month of storage? Even at the providers site it would be difficult.

[johna]

The movie is not about info stored on your PC hard disk, but info collected about you by google mail, google documents,hotmail,yahoo, twitter, facebook etc, and who has access to this info.

Every email you send has been stored on some ones database.

It goes on to explain how your GPS or skyhook enabled cell phone is being used to track you.

when it comes to Email - according to WIKI

DAILY

about 1.2 billion are sent from non-spam sources. if you count the span/phishing ones, it is about 75% more. that equals about 2 million a second. do the math!

So, how to search them later... lets say after 1 month of storage? Even at the providers site it would be difficult.

I guess they are searched for key words or phrases, didn’t the UK government announce recently that they were going to do this.

[Crushdepth]

There was an interesting article by Bruce Schneier about large scale email scanning by governments. What he basically said was that massive automated scanning of email to identify 'terrorist threats' or criminal activity is a hopeless task because of the vast number of false positives generated. If you were scanning the 1.2 billion emails mentioned above, and we made the ridiculously conservative assumption that the scanner only makes one mistake per million emails, that would still leave you with 1,200 false alarms per day that need to be investigated and researched to figure out if they're real or not.

So why bother? The real value is probably just in having the email available and indexed when they want to do a targeted investigation of a particular individual.

[sometime]

Just seen the video "Privacy is Dead" by Steve Ramban, for those of you more PC savvy this will not come as a surprise, but its worth watching for those who only use PC for fun!

Google the title if you're interested.

Hi everyone.

Did you know??? if you use the BBC IPLAYER to listen to the BBC radio, or visit any BBC web site it monitors all the web sites that you visit, not to mention anything that you happen to download, videos, music etc are also noted, any cookies that the BBC put on your computer have been gifted to a company called visualscience a.k.a. omniture. This company is also allowed to use the guardian newspapers cookies to amass information.

And once the cookies are installed it monitors your actions every time you turn on your pc, if you have the local weather on your desktop it knows your post code, and can even work out where you live.

This information is being gathered by a behavioral targeting company in Washington, USA. None of which is mentioned in the site privacy policy, and none of which you'd reasonably expect from the BBC, particularly for domestic audiences.

I discovered this by using a program called peerguardian to block unwanted SPIES, ADDS, P2P, HTTP download from here http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2

How to setup and use the program, it can also be downloaded here http://www.gemini777.net/tutorials/pg.php

PeerGuardian is an open source IP filter that is designed to block the IP addresses of certain organizations and corporations that may wish to invade a users privacy while using the Internet and peer-to-peer networks.

While listening to the BBC from 9.40am to 1400 it blocked 140 intrusions

8 from visualsciences

2 from sun Microsystems

3 imported objects

1 double click

2 from netiq

124 from BBC

And the best bit is my internet speed has improved

[nikster]

Just seen the video "Privacy is Dead" by Steve Ramban, for those of you more PC savvy this will not come as a surprise, but its worth watching for those who only use PC for fun!

Google the title if you're interested.

Hi everyone.

Did you know??? if you use the BBC IPLAYER to listen to the BBC radio, or visit any BBC web site it monitors all the web sites that you visit, not to mention anything that you happen to download, videos, music etc are also noted, any cookies that the BBC put on your computer have been gifted to a company called visualscience a.k.a. omniture. This company is also allowed to use the guardian newspapers cookies to amass information.

I think we should rename this thread PARANOIA THREAD!!!!. How about that?

Cookies are used to "track" you but only impassively - they are used by any website to identify you when you come back, so that, basically you don't have to log in again on GMail, because GMail knows who you are thanks to the cookie they left on your machine last time you visited.

BBC and other sites track which of _their own_ pages you are watching - maybe to compile something like the "most read" articles.

The point is that cookies are not tracking you actively. Gmail knows nothing about your BBC cookies and vice versa. And cross domain cookies are used by advertisers but can be blocked in any browser. You can actually also block all cookies in your browser, but the internet won't be much fun then because you will need to keep logging into webmail etc. It's just more inconvenient.

The interesting thing is that governments have tried to track any and all communications, only to find out that the sheer volume of data going over the wires is impossible to analyze.

Privacy is dead - who said anything about privacy on the internet? It was never intended for that. If you want to be private, there are VPN services who will do it for you, they are not expensive either. Here is how it works: You sign up with them, and connect to their server via an encrypted line. Then when you browse any website, it will look like it came from the VPN server (which is somewhere in the USA, usually) - there is no connection to you. Then the VPN service will delete all data on your doings on the internet as soon as they legally can, which varies from country to country. But even if they don't immediately delete it, they won't give it out without a court order, so it's as safe as anything, really.

So if you want privacy, you can buy it. For most of us it's unnecessary, we are safe in the enormous ocean of data floating about.

[webfact]

Just seen the video "Privacy is Dead" by Steve Ramban, for those of you more PC savvy this will not come as a surprise, but its worth watching for those who only use PC for fun!

Google the title if you're interested.

Hi everyone.

Did you know??? if you use the BBC IPLAYER to listen to the BBC radio, or visit any BBC web site it monitors all the web sites that you visit, not to mention anything that you happen to download, videos, music etc are also noted, any cookies that the BBC put on your computer have been gifted to a company called visualscience a.k.a. omniture. This company is also allowed to use the guardian newspapers cookies to amass information.

I think we should rename this thread PARANOIA THREAD!!!!. How about that?

Cookies are used to "track" you but only impassively - they are used by any website to identify you when you come back, so that, basically you don't have to log in again on GMail, because GMail knows who you are thanks to the cookie they left on your machine last time you visited.

BBC and other sites track which of _their own_ pages you are watching - maybe to compile something like the "most read" articles.

The point is that cookies are not tracking you actively. Gmail knows nothing about your BBC cookies and vice versa. And cross domain cookies are used by advertisers but can be blocked in any browser. You can actually also block all cookies in your browser, but the internet won't be much fun then because you will need to keep logging into webmail etc. It's just more inconvenient.

The interesting thing is that governments have tried to track any and all communications, only to find out that the sheer volume of data going over the wires is impossible to analyze.

Privacy is dead - who said anything about privacy on the internet? It was never intended for that. If you want to be private, there are VPN services who will do it for you, they are not expensive either. Here is how it works: You sign up with them, and connect to their server via an encrypted line. Then when you browse any website, it will look like it came from the VPN server (which is somewhere in the USA, usually) - there is no connection to you. Then the VPN service will delete all data on your doings on the internet as soon as they legally can, which varies from country to country. But even if they don't immediately delete it, they won't give it out without a court order, so it's as safe as anything, really.

So if you want privacy, you can buy it. For most of us it's unnecessary, we are safe in the enormous ocean of data floating about.

agreed!

... and the chances of being struck by lightning are about one in three million...higher than your chances of winning the jackpot in the Lotto...

Sorry I know I know...

Edited May 10, 2009 by webfact

[OriginalPoster]

Just seen the video "Privacy is Dead" by Steve Ramban, for those of you more PC savvy this will not come as a surprise, but its worth watching for those who only use PC for fun!

Google the title if you're interested.

I works in away, as most these days crave attention rather than privacy. No way to explain the popularity of Facebook, nor that some many uninteresting nimrods write blogs.

[johna]

When google collect info on you it becomes their info, freedom of information laws in the US can not get the info google collects about you released to you.

Google and all the others don't collect this info for fun they sell it on to anybody willing to pay for it.

As the movie points out, its not just police agency's investigating crime or company's interested in selling their products to you it's also divorce lawyers tracking your location via your cell phone's to prove an extramarital affair.

One of the things I found incredible is the amount of info people post on twitter or facebook, including their criminal activities (drug use)

[sometime]

When google collect info on you it becomes their info, freedom of information laws in the US can not get the info google collects about you released to you.

Google and all the others don't collect this info for fun they sell it on to anybody willing to pay for it.

As the movie points out, its not just police agency's investigating crime or company's interested in selling their products to you it's also divorce lawyers tracking your location via your cell phone's to prove an extramarital affair.

One of the things I found incredible is the amount of info people post on twitter or facebook, including their criminal activities (drug use)

I have set my browser not to accept 3rd party cookies.the bbc allows visualscience a.k.a. omniture to use thei cookies as a work around, any cookies put there to help the intended site is fine.

But I don't want my system to be slowed down to a crawl, the bloody internet here is slow enough

1. List of main bbc.co.uk cookies

This is a list of the main cookies that bbc.co.uk sets, and what each is used for:

HP

Used to store information about the customised layout of the bbc.co.uk homepage. This information includes the positioning of modules and feeds and whether they are minimised or expanded.

BBC-UID cookie

A unique identifier given to each computer to allow log analysis to determine the number of unique users for various parts of bbc.co.uk. Data is only used in aggregate.

BBCMediaselector cookie

Used to store your user preferences for Audio-Video content from bbc.co.uk - format (Real player or Windows Media player) and quality (narrowband or broadband).

mstouch cookie

Used if we have needed to reset your BBCMediaSelector cookie which stores your preference for the Audio-Video content from bbc.co.uk.

BBCPostcoder cookie

Used to store your user preferences for geographic specific content on bbc.co.uk - allows pages to present information for your local area, primarily on the homepage, but also in other areas like bbc.co.uk/arts.

BBCWEACITY cookie

Used to store your user preferences for home city - allows the the weather site to present information for your local area.

BBCNewsAudience cookie

Used to store your user preferences for which edition (domestic UK or International) of the BBC homepage, Radio, TV and Weather homepages, News site and Sport site you wish to view when visiting www.bbc.co.uk.

BBCNewsAudcWght cookie

Used to record the degree of certainty of the domestic UK or International edition preference ascribed to you. If you make an express preference (see above) then we can be certain of which edition of the domestic UK or International site to serve to you. If you do not express a preference we will make a guess of varying degrees of certainty as to which edition of the domestic UK or International site is most appropriate for you based on your IP.

BBCNewsAudcWghtUpd cookie

Used to keep track of when your BBCNewsAudcWght cookie (if any) was last updated. This ensures that, where we have guessed which edition of the domestic UK or International site is most appropriate for you, we continue to review our assumptions.

SSO2-UID cookie

Used to allow you to be automatically signed in to a bbc.co.uk service which you have previously registered for.

BBC-H2-User cookie

Used for user authentication for the bbc.co.uk messageboard system.

rmRpDetectReal cookie

Used to store a preference to prevent 'You don't have Real player installed ...' alerts coming up if you really don't want to install it and don't want to be pestered with requests to do so.

*votename* cookie

Some voting systems on bbc.co.uk may set a cookie to discourage voters voting more than once. In each case the cookie's name will reflect the vote in question.

Survey cookie - "bbcsurvey"

Used to ensure that once you have taken a BBC survey, or said that you don't want to be surveyed, that you are not offered the same survey again.

bbcComSurvey

Used to ensure that once you have taken a BBC survey, or said that you don't want to be surveyed, that you are not offered the same survey again. This cookie is used when there are two concurrent surveys being run.

myway

Used to store your user preference for which colours to use (for example, high contrast colour scheme) on bbc.co.uk/accessibility.

BBCLiveStatsClick

Used to capture the co-ordinates of clicks made on the BBC News pages. The cookie expires after 8 seconds and the information is used to inform editorial decisions about page layout and promotion.

BBCHomeOpt

Used to store user preferences for customisable elements, where available, on the bbc.co.uk homepage.

BBCNewsCustomisation

Used to store user preferences for customisable elements, where available, within news.bbc.co.uk.

BBCMobilePref2

Is a unique identifier for mobile phone users of bbc.co.uk which is used to recognise revisiting users in order to offer them a more personalised user experience.

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2. CBBC Cookies

Below is a list of the main cookies that CBBC web pages set:

cbbc_anim

Set whether the user wants the Flash background playing or not

CBeebiesJourney

Record a users journey throughout the site to allow for quick links

cbeebies_snd

Opt in for audio navigation

bbcsr_users[x]

Where x is an integer to identify a specific user Used to store a users preferences for a switch news reader application

cbeebies_rd

Stops intro animation on the Razzledazzle site (/cbeebies/razzledazzle/) being shown more than once

cbeebies_pet_loyaltyengine

My Cbeebies (/cbeebies/mycbeebies/) - monitors points for CBeebies Pet point scoring system

cbbc_roly_splash

Stops intro animation being shown more than once, on the RolyMo site (/cbeebies/rolymo/)

cbbc_ar_sendtofriend

On the CBBC Adventure Rock (/cbbc/adventurerock/) site, once SSO signed-in users have downloaded the game, this allows them to fill in a form to send emails to their friends telling them about the game.

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3. 3rd Party Cookies

The BBC uses a number of suppliers who also set cookies on bbc.co.uk on its behalf. These include:

Nielsen/Net Ratings and SageMetrics

Nielsen/Netratings and SageMetrics are two independent measurement and research companies. They gather data regarding the visitors to BBC sites on our behalf using cookies, log file data and code which is embedded on our website. The BBC uses this type of information to help improve the services it provides to its users.

Nedstat

Nedstat, an independent measurement and research company, gathers non-personal information regarding visitor activity of the BBC iPlayer site and service and other audio video embedding web pages. The BBC uses this information to help improve its iPlayer and embeddable audio video services.

Bango

An external BBC supplier who provides a unique identifier to each modile phone user of bbc.co.uk in order for the BBC to recognise revisiting users and personalise their user experience.

Omniture (Visual Sciences)

Provides anonymised statistical information to BBC Worldwide Limited ("BBCW"), about ex-UK users only. They process IP addresses and information from other cookies used on "bbc.com" so BBCW know how many page views it has, the number of international users, what browsers international users are using (so BBCW can target resources in the right way to maximise compatibility for the majority of international users) and in which country, city or region international users are located.

This statistical information also allows BBCW to determine how much it should charge for advertising, and if it is hitting its target audience. Information (IP addresses and information in other BBC cookies) that Omniture (Visual Sciences) collects is transferred to the United States BBCW confirms that Omniture (Visual Sciences) satisfies the EU's data protection requirements.

Doubleclick

Doubleclick 'Spotlight Tags' are used to measure the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns for the BBC. Double Click is used by BBC World Ltd and BBC WW as they publish advertising on bbc.com when the site is accessed outside the UK. This service gathers information regarding visits made by international users which is used to decide on the insertion of adverts. For information on the cookie set by Doubleclick plus information on how to opt out please go to http://www.doubleclick.com/privacy/dart_adserving.aspx

For users outside of the UK ONLY - Omniture (Visual Sciences)

This company provides anonymised statistical information to BBC Worldwide Limited ("BBCW"), about users outside of the UK only. They process IP addresses and information from other cookies used on "bbc.com", BBCW's international online service for users outside of the UK, so BBCW know how many page views it has, the number of international users, what browsers international users are using (so BBCW can target resources in the right way to maximise compatibility for the majority of international users) and in which country, city or region international users are located.

This statistical information also allows BBCW to determine how much it should charge for advertising, and if it is hitting its target audience. Information (IP addresses and information in other BBC cookies) that Omniture (Visual Sciences) collects is transferred to them in the United States. BBCW confirms that Omniture (Visual Sciences) satisfies the EU's data protection requirements.

For users outside of the UK ONLY - AudienceScience Inc. (formerly Revenue Science, Inc.)

This company uses cookies to discover general information about the pages on "bbc.com" that you visit and it also processes IP addresses to collect other non-personally identifiable information in order to place you in a "market segment". This includes data about the country, city or region where you are located and your domain name (e.g. what ISP you use). It then places advertisements onto "bbc.com" which it believes people in your market segment will find relevant. If you would like more information about the cookies used by AudienceScience and how to opt out, please see their privacy policy at: http://audiencescience.com/privacy.asp.

Information (IP addresses and information in other cookies on our sites) that AudienceScience collects is transferred to them in the United States, and BBCW confirm that AudienceScience satisfies the EU's data protection requirements through its registration with the US Dept of Commerce's "safe harbor" framework. Data is sometimes shared with AudienceScience's sub-contractors in India who also contractually satisfy the EU's data protection requirements.

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[thithi]

uhhh

Edited May 10, 2009 by thithi

[MKAsok]

uhhh

Note to thithi: You can't eat these cookies and they're nothing like cakes.