Jan 18
You have too many friends—I promise you. Really. You’ve been collecting them for probably half a decade, like barnacles on the side of a slow boat, and they’re holding you back. They’re also threatening your privacy. End it. More »
Jan 18
Hands On With Kim Dotcom’s New Mega: This Service Could Dismantle Copyright Forever
Posted in: Today's Chili
Kim Dotcom’s Mega officially launches tomorrow, but we’re already in. From the membership plans we showed you this morning, the service might look like it’s just another online storage locker like Dropbox or Google Drive. (Update: It’s live.) But it’s way more than that. Mega is a weapon aimed straight at copyright rights holders. It’s maybe the most private, invincible file-sharing service of all time. More »
Jan 18
This week we’re hearing a lot of talk about how the upcoming Graph Search inside Facebook will be un-privatizing us once again – let’s talk about why that’s not true. In a report in Ars Technica they note how once Graph Search is turned on for the masses, information you’d previously had hidden from search results will become public. There’s also a post on Quartz citing a segment in the Facebook Privacy Policy which interprets a “hiding from timeline” note as Facebook admitting it wont hide anything no matter how hard you try – that’s simply not true.
The note that this talk all comes from is in an update to the Facebook Privacy Policy made public on December 11h, 2012. This update notes some specifications and clarifications on how the Facebook Timeline works since basically everyone in the Facebook universe is now up and running with that interface. Have a peek and see what you make of it:
“When you hide things on your timeline, like posts or connections, it means those things will not appear on your timeline. But, remember, anyone in the audience of those posts or who can see a connection may still see it elsewhere, like on someone else’s timeline or in search results. You can also delete or change the audience of content you post.” – Facebook Privacy Policy as sited by Quartz
Both Ars and Quartz refer back to a phone interview done between Nick Bilton and Facebook’s Sam Lessin in which Lessin said that “one-single digit percentage of users” had worked with Facebook’s original ability to “hide themselves on Facebook’s search.” Because 1% of Facebook’s users is somewhere in the tens of millions of people, the one single fantasy “hide me” button’s disappearance became the main subject.
In fact, you are still able to hide yourself from Facebook search, and not just by deleting your account entirely (which is always an option, of course). What you’re able to do right this minute – aside from the collection of Privacy assurances and how-to demos given by Facebook earlier this week – is to go to your Privacy Settings and Tools tab and check it out: “Who can see my stuff?” and “Who can look me up?” the both of them.
You can change “Who can see your future posts” to “Only Me”, go to your Activity Log and cut out everyone on everything you’ve ever done, and “Limit The Audience for Old Posts on Your Timeline” with a single button – that’s limited to your Friends, mind you. You can update “Who can look be up” from “Everyone” to Friends only, and you can un-check “Let other search engines link to your timeline.” If you do all of these things (however inconvenient it is to do several tasks here instead of just one), your visibility will indeed be limited to those you’ve connected to as Friends on Facebook. Make it work!
Lack of Facebook “hide from search results” no reason to panic is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Jan 18
The Transportation Security Administration has announced that it will remove the controversial “naked image” body scanners from US airports because developers can’t write software to make the images less revealing. More »
Jan 18
The US Supreme Court might have ruled last year that GPS tracking is equivalent to a search, but that doesn’t mean the government’s practices are transparent. If anything, they may be more opaque than ever. The Department of Justice has responded to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request for a pair of GPS tracking policy memos by providing almost completely redacted versions that, effectively, say nothing. Not surprisingly, the ACLU isn’t satisfied — it’s worried that the government is playing fast and loose with definitions of where GPS tracking is usable, and when it requires a warrant under the Fourth Amendment. Whether or not the allegations are true, the civil liberty advocates are going through the courts to push for more access; we may know the truth before too long.
[Image credit: Frédéric Bisson, Flickr]
Filed under: GPS
Via: The Hill
Source: ACLU
Jan 17
In a world dominated by the instant availability of digital information, social profiles, and constant connection to the proverbial hivemind, privacy is more of an issue than it has ever been. While many users are ready to pounce on the latest Facebook privacy blunder or diligently request that their data be removed from people search websites, there’s one area of privacy that has been all but overlooked: DNA. Researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research demonstrated how they were able to identify anonymous study participants using nothing more than their genomes and the Internet.
The researchers sought to identify individuals who participated in a genomic study, a goal they were ultimately successful in. The project was performed using the Internet and the participants’ genome sequence. This was done in order to demonstrate an area of privacy concerns that have been overlooked, as well as to initiate public discussion of the matter.
How did the researchers manage to do this? The first step was recognizing the correlation typically present between last names and the Y-chromosome, which is caused by the standard of a male inhereting both his father’s Y-chromosome and his last name. Patterns on the chromosome are usually shared between father and son, helping further pinpoint identity.
Armed with this knowledge, the researchers used ten public genomes and ran them through a specially-designed algorithm to identify the patterns in the Y-chromosomes. Once they were identified, the information was then used in conjunction with genealogy databases to find potential last names. Once some potential names were found, details were tossed into the mix from public records, such as age, to pinpoint the participants’ identity. Overall, they successfully identified 50-percent of the individuals.
According to the researchers, as genomic sequencing becomes cheaper and more common, a new type of privacy concern will arise. For now, the odds of this type of identification happening to the average person are small, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute. Still, public discussion on the matter shouldn’t be delayed.
[via Wired]
Researchers use the Internet and anonymous genomes to identify individuals is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Jan 16
Tweaking your Activity Log just became a necessary and tedious new part of being a Facebook user. Thanks to the service’s new Graph Search feature, all that profile info you’ve painstakingly updated over the years (employer, home town, relationship status, movie likes, etc) and all the photos you’ve added over time, are now to become data in a database of the social network’s trillion connections between a billion users. More »
Jan 15
Twitter is modern day people watching. Anytime you check it, you see what a person is thinking or doing or saying. But it’s not all happening in a digital vacuum, they’re on break at work tweeting about their boss, they’re outside a hospital tweeting about their day, they’re somewhere tweeting about something. This photo project, Geolocations, by Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman show where people are when they send out tweets. It’s completing the picture. More »
Jan 12
How To Disable Java in Your Browser
Posted in: Today's Chili
Java isn’t good for your for your computer’s health right now. It can mess it up pretty bad. Bad enough that the Department of Homeland Security is warning us all to turn it off. OK, but how do you do that? Fortunately, it’s not that hard. More »
Jan 11
Bitdefender’s Clueful, once an iOS app in its own right that Apple apparently took offence to, is now back as a webapp. Use it to find out if your apps are spying on you, storing your personal information, and sending it anywhere you might not want them to. Essential for the paranoid; interesting for the curious. [Clueful via TUAW] More »
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