Displaying items by tag: Privacy

On December 4th, 1981, then President Ronald Regan signed Executive Order 12333. This Order, further amended by EO13284 in 2003, 13355(2004) and 13470(2008), is what grants and governs the collection of intelligence by Federal agencies. These agencies include the NSA, the CIA and to a lesser extent the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. The collection of information includes what is often referred to as signal intelligence. This type of intelligence if the collection of any information that is transmitted via electronic means. This wonderful blanket definition has been the basis of many borderline illegal data collection programs and a few outright illegal ones.

It seems that web site data analytics are now on the radar for privacy regulators in the EU, especially Google Analytics collection tools. Recently data protection regulators in Austria and France have rules that the collection of user data by Google combined with the unregulated transfer of this information out of the country (back to the US in particular) is a violation of GDPR.

Facebook makes their money off their users. That is no shock to anyone considering the number of investigations currently ongoing over Facebook’s data collection practices. Of course, Facebook is not the only group collecting this type of information, they just tend to take it a bit farther than most of the other groups. Because of these invasive data collection practices many countries have tightened their laws around what can and cannot be used to develop and send out targeted ads. This has included a whole new category for “intimate” information. Even Apple has decided that this style of data collection might be out of bounds and have change their own privacy policies in iOS.

WhatsApp is one of a group of relatively secure messaging services available to both iPhone and Android users. WhatsApp states that it supports full end-to-end encryption, secure deletion of messages (by the sender and receiver) as well as the option to setup disappearing messages. It can also be set to block screen shots of chats which is nice when you want to keep your conversation private.

Irony is a funny thing especially when it is so blatantly obvious as in our example today. Google, owners of YouTube, Adsense and many other internet properties. Google has a history of policing content they do not agree with going so far as to demonetize and even ban differing options on topics such as the US 2nd amendment and de-prioritizing searches for topics that run counter to their viewpoint.

Remember the days when browsing the internet was simple, all you had to worry about was clearing your cookies and browser history and you were fine. Ok, so it was never truly that simple, but you get my point. Now as internet surfers become more concerned about tracking and companies find new ways to follow you even more, things have gotten a bit crazy. Microsoft’s Edge wants to remember everything you do as does Chrome and Safari. This is presented as giving you a more complete and speedy internet experience, in reality it just creates a trove of data about you that can be used for good or bad.

A few days ago we published an article that covered a leaked batch of emails that showed Kaspersky has worked with the Russian Government. We also covered that the pieces of the emails that were published were completely out of context, and also are nothing out of the ordinary for a company that has a contract with a Government body. Kaspersky's denial of cooperation is also nothing new, so why the big deal in the media? Well we might have found a few pieces to that puzzle which would certainly explain the big push to discredit Kaspersky.

The Internet of Things, or IoT, Connected Devices, Smart devices whatever you want to call them have become a fixture in most homes. It has gotten to the point where you have to look hard to find a device that is not “Smart”. Manufacturers love to push the marketing term smart onto the consumer as it becomes a value add proposal; hey this can do all of this and you can control it using your phone from anywhere. What they do not disclose is exactly how insecure these devices are and how much privacy you can end up giving up just by having them in your home.

In the last week the world saw what appeared to be another attempt to violate privacy by government law enforcement. In this case the FBI opened a “pilot” program to capture iris imprints for a searchable database. To date they have captured more than 400,000 of these imprints. The major concern here is that there was (and remains) no public debate, or oversight on the program. The program stands on its own outside the many restrictions that protect privacy and also other rights that people have. Well at least that is how things look on the surface. We took a little bit of a deeper look and tried to peel away some of the FUD and hype over the collection.

Law Enforcement surveillance is a necessary thing. It really is, but what is not necessary is when the agencies in question decide to get lazy or feel their powers extend to a larger group of people than their intended targets. This is when things get messy and from a legal stand point ugly. Over the last ten or so years law enforcement in general has made the decision to extend their surveillance programs into mass collection of data.