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Web Privacy Online and what they know about you

Learn how to protect your privacy when you are online.

Federal enforcement officials say there are no standard privacy rules for Web sites.

“There is no general legal requirement for companies to get rid of information,” said Christopher N. Olsen, the FTC’s assistant director of privacy and identity protection. It recently charged Facebook with failing to delete past users’ data, even though it said it had.

DON'T SURRENDER YOUR CONTROL OVER YOUR PRIVACY

There’s a price to pay for using the services. MONITOR YOUR online history littering the Internet with so many pieces of YOUR personal information = customer databases ARE ALWAYS SOLD = users MAY have the right to request that images / photo albums - not go to another company.

Hotmail | MySpace profile | AOL |Hotmail | Gmail | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | HootSuite | YOUTUBE | Picasa |Gowalla |Google+

The Federal governments “intelligence gathering” practices on the web.

 

Why are market forces so weak in protecting users’ online privacy?  Where's the Market for Online Privacy? by Scott Cleland 

The main reason is that the online marketplace is economically structured around users being a commodity, data, to be aggregated and mined, not customers to be served and protected in a competitive marketplace. That’s because the overriding economic force that created the free and open commercial Internet – the predominant Silicon Valley venture capital/IPO value creation model – was and remains largely antithetical to protecting online privacy.

 

Privacy Online


Privacy Icons, an alpha version. Like creative commons for privacy policies

 

Define Cultural Literacy and Technological Literacy.
The Problems with Web 2.0 and Social Networks

Parents: Teach Your Children Well!
Bristol Palin, Levi Johnson, Govenor Sarah Palin

Rules of Social Media by George Washington

Schools Used the Webcam to Spy on Children in their own House

Did you realize that you had No legal right to privacy under American law until 1890s when Brandeis' daughter's wedding photographed?

National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recently released a guide (PDF) for employers and employees wondering just how much they can post on the Internet about their workplace without fear of being fired. And the answer to "how much?" can be summed up in three words: a whole lot. "We found that the biggest misconception amongst employers was how these cases should be properly handled," Wagner said. "We found that many employers had broadly written social media policies that either didn't address the real issues of acceptable social media use, or offered broad language or impermissible rules such as forbidding employees from even mentioning their employer's name on Facebook."
The board found that many employees had come to them feeling that they had been unfairly disciplined, and in some cases terminated, for making comments online that they felt should have been considered protected speech. And in many cases, these employees were right.

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse tracks data breaches. "Even the most well-designed systems are not safe. ... This case is a good example of how the human element is the weakest link.

12/2010 Brian Kennish, a former Googler, quit Google and launches a disconnect browser extension that essentially blocks Google from tracking you. He was scared by how much Google and Facebook know about you. He is now actively building Disconnect, "a browser extension for Chrome and Rockmelt that disables multiple third party data tracking while browsing." Brian explained why he left Google to do this:

I called it quits at Google three weeks ago so I could help web users better understand the data they're unintentionally sharing and develop tools that make it simple for them to control this data (I've been referring to this effort as Web 2.1, a privacy patch for the web).

Google Profits from it's data vs. Your Privacy 2010
A confidential, seven-page Google Inc. How far should it go in profiting from its crown jewels the vast trove of data it possesses about people's activities? 2009 Google for the first time started collecting a new type of data about the websites people visit, and using it to track and show them ads across the Internet.The Federal Trade Commission does not regulate the data collecting business. The most aggressive ideas would put Google at the cutting edge of the business of tracking people online to profit from their actions. A data-trading marketplace, for instance, would allow personal information from many sources including Google to be combined and used for highly personalized tracking of individuals. Tiny companies like BlueKai Inc. and eXelate Media Ltd. already offer some of these services, pressuring Google to match them.

Recipient of Offensive E-mails Can't Force Yahoo! To Name Their Sender A plaintiff who fails to make out a claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress based on anonymous, offensive e-mails can't compel the sender's Internet service provider to reveal his or her identity, a New Jersey appeals court rules.

The FBI's Secretive Practice of "Blackballing" Files

 

Revealed: The FBI's Secretive Practice of "Blackballing" Files 1/17/2012
by: Jason Leopold, Truthout | Report

Have you ever filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI and received a written response from the agency stating that it could not locate records responsive to your request? If so, there's a chance the FBI may have found some documents, but for unknown reasons, the agency's FOIA analysts determined it was not responsive and "blackballed" the file, crucial information the FBI withholds from a requester when it issues a "no records" response. The FBI's practice of "blackballing" files has never been publicly disclosed before. With the exception of one open government expert, a half-dozen others contacted by Truthout said they were unfamiliar with the process of "blackballing" and had never heard of the term.
Trevor Griffey learned about "blackballing" last year when he filed a FOIA/Privacy Act request with the FBI to determine whether Manning Marable, a Columbia University professor who founded the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, sought the FBI's files on Malcolm X under FOIA. At the time of his death last April, Marable had just finished writing an exhaustive biography on the late civil rights activist. Griffey filed the FOIA hoping he would receive records to assist him with research related to a long-term civil rights project he has been working on.
In a letter the agency sent in response to his FOIA, the FBI told Griffey that it could not locate "main file records" on Marable responsive to his request. Last November, in response to a FOIA request Truthout filed with the FBI for a wide-range of documents on the Occupy Wall Street, the agency also said it was unable to "identify main file records responsive to [our] FOIA," despite the fact that internal FBI documents related to the protest movement had already been posted on the Internet. The FBI has been criticized in the past for responding to more than half of the FOIA requests the agency had received by claiming it could not locate responsive files.
Griffey, who also teaches US history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is co-editor of the book, "Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action and the Construction Industry," was baffled. He found it difficult to believe that Marable would not have filed a FOIA for Malcolm X's FBI file. So, he sent an email to an FBI FOIA analyst asking for clarification.
The FBI FOIA analyst responded to Griffey in an email, asking him to supply additional "keywords" to assist in a search of the agency's main file records for documents on Marable responsive to his FOIA request.

The analyst then disclosed to Griffey, perhaps mistakenly, that a search for previous requests for records on Marable turned up a single file that was "blackballed" per the agency's "standard operating procedure."

So last May, Griffey again turned to FOIA, this time to try and gain insight into the blackballing process. He filed a FOIA request with the FBI seeking a copy of the agency's standard operating procedure for "blackballing" files. Two months later, he received five pages from an untitled and undated PowerPoint presentation that outlined procedures for blackballing files from FOIA requests. The FBI cited three exemptions under the law to justify withholding a complete and unredacted copy of the PowerPoint:

(b)(6) Personnel and medical files and similar files, the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

(b)(7) Records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information:

C. Could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy;

E. Would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law ...

Griffey appealed the FBI's decision to withhold information contained in the PowerPoint under the (b)(7)(E) exemption, but it was denied.
Still, the PowerPoint pages the FBI did turn over to Griffey provide insight into the "blackballing" process. On a page titled, "Blackball Files," it says files identified as 190 and 197 "main files," which are FBI classifications pertaining to FOIA/Privacy Act requests for files on people and civil litigation, are blackballed unless "specifically ask[ed] for" by the requester when an initial FOIA request is made.
Moreover, the agency deems certain "control files," "separate files which relate to a specific matter and is used as an administrative means of managing, or 'controlling' a certain program or investigative matter," that pop up and are unresponsive to a FOIA to be ripe for blackballing. However, a FOIA analyst must first get permission from a supervisor before a "control file" can be blackballed.

Finally, according to the PowerPoint, some files are automatically blackballed by an FBI FOIA analyst, but the public is not permitted to know the classification of files that fall into that category because the FBI redacted that part of the PowerPoint, claiming disclosure would reveal "techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations and procedures." "Not only are we not told when the FBI withholds material from FOIA requests, but we are not even allowed to know all of the kinds of material it withholds," Griffey told Truthout. "The law itself and not just its enforcement, is now effectively secret."
But Bill Carter, an FBI spokesman, told Truthout in an interview that "blackballing" is not about secrecy nor is the process used in any way to conceal responsive records, which the Justice Department revealed it has been doing for more than two decades in certain cases.
"Blackball is a term of art used by the [FBI's] FOIA section people in the records management division," he said. "It's an unfortunate term. It applies to people and events. It means that we pulled a file that initially looked responsive but after a review it turned out it wasn't because the file didn't match the requesters' specific request" for records.
Carter sent Truthout an email that contained an explanation of the blackballing process as provided to him by Dennis Argall, the assistant section chief of the Record/Information Dissemination Section, FBI's Records Management Division:

"[B]lackball" is a term we typically use to describe a file (not a request) that initially looked responsive but upon review we find it's for a different guy or event. It can also be used to describe a file that we won't process because, i.e., a guy makes a request for his "FBI file" in 2005 and [we] process it for him. When he makes another request for his "FBI file" in 2011, we will only process his "records" but will not process the file that was created to respond to the 2005 FOIA request, which is 190 file series [the classification the FBI uses for files requested on people].

That's exactly how the FBI described the blackballing process to attorney Kel McClanahan, executive director of Arlington, Virginia-based National Security Counselors, a public interest law firm.
McClanahan told Truthout in an email interview that he first learned about blackballing when the term was used in a set of FBI "processing notes" he requested from the agency to determine how FBI FOIA analysts had handled one of his FOIA requests. Although McClanahan believes there is "definitely a place for blackballing in the FOIA process" he said the way the FBI "does blackballing leaves a lot to be desired."

"First of all, even though [the FBI] may blackball 50 records and release 3, they never tell the requester about the 50," McClanahan said, hitting on Griffey's main complaint about blackballing. "They never mention word one about 'and we found other records that we deemed non-responsive.' The requester is left to wonder why the FBI only found 3 records about the subject in question and he will never know that they found 50 others that they ultimately deemed non-responsive unless he has the foresight to FOIA the FBI's processing notes for his request. Knowledge like that is very important when a requester is trying to decide whether or not to tie up [the Justice Department's's Office of Information Policy] with an administrative appeal, let alone litigation."

McClanahan said his concerns would largely be addressed if the FBI "only blackballed records for good reasons." "If I could trust the FBI only to blackball things that were clearly non-responsive, I don't need to know that they found completely unrelated records," he added. "However, that's not what the FBI does. I have seen it blackball records because they 'weren't FBI records,' even though they were in FBI files (they were FBI copies of other agencies' records, which any FOIA person worth his salt knows are still responsive to a FOIA request made to FBI). I've seen it blackball records because the request asked for 'internal FBI records' and the records in question were sent outside of the FBI, based on a strained interpretation of the word 'internal.'" The FBI will be forced to make a choice "if it wants to apply FOIA correctly," McClanahan said. "The agency can either limit its blackballing to records that nobody would think are responsive (e.g. different people with the same name, records outside a set time frame); or it can tell requesters in the administrative stage that it determined that certain records were non-responsive and why," he said. "Failing to do either, however, is bad FOIA."


The Cloud Mirror by Eric Gradman

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Privacy is Dead Lessons Learned from the Cloud Mirror
"It may seem obvious that a generation that's had access to social networks since they learned to type would have notions of privacy different from your own. But there's no clearer illustration of that than the Cloud Mirror. Over the course of the week, I saw groups of junior- and high-schoolers register with the Cloud Mirror without a moment's hesitation. What happened next was even more fascinating. They would proceed to literally *shove* one another out from in front of the camera, hungry for a moment on stage presenting the social network they'd so carefully cultivated . There wasn't a hint of hesitation in their actions. To them, the Internet is for sharing." The lesson here is that if you give someone a shiny trinket, they'll give you their password in return. The Cloud Mirror reveals our online identities, but it also reveals that we're easily persuaded to exchange personal data for a shiny trinket or a quick laugh.

[ Big Brother - Einstein 3 ]
$17 billion - Einstein grew out of a still-classified executive order, called National Security Presidential Directive 54, that President Bush signed in 2008.

Einstein 3 reportedly can read the content of email and other Internet traffic. It can also intercept threatening Internet traffic before it reaches a government system, thanks to technology based on a similar program used by the NSA.
The classified NSA system, known as Tutelage, has the ability to decide how to handle malicious intrusions — to block them or watch them closely to better assess the threat, sources said. It is currently used to defend military networks. Utah will host new $1.9 billion NSA spy center
An American Bar Association panel said this about Einstein 3 in a September 2009 report: "Because government communications are commingled with the private communications of non-governmental actors who use the same system, great caution will be necessary to insure that privacy and civil liberties concerns are adequately considered."
Privacy Impact Assessment document on Einstein page 18, “In this day and age it is assumed computer users are aware that they are voluntarily providing some information to the government when they communicate with it via the Internet. Electronic mail and Internet users have no expectation of privacy in the to/from addresses of their messages or the IP addresses of the websites they visit.” Deployment of the Einstein System on 3 major carriers – AT&T, Qwest and Sprint.

SELLING CHILDREN'S INFORMATION AND THEIR RIGHT TO PRIVACY

 

Coupons TELL ALL

 

A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.

 

GET OFF FACEBOOK NOW
Adrianne Jeffries 12/13/11
betabeat.com

Yesterday afternoon, this reporter was scrambling to finish reporting a forward-looking story about how banks are exploring the possibility of using social media data to judge loan and credit applicants. My editor wanted a quote from a privacy advocate, so I immediately thought of Eben Spying for Free Moglen, a militant digital privacy advocate, founder of the uber-secure personal server FreedomBox, and the inspiration for the decentralized social network Diaspora. In hindsight, perhaps I should have just called Cory Doctorow.

Mr. Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, was not particularly interested in talking about banks using social media to spy on their customers.

Everyone who uses Facebook, Twitter and the like shares the blame for the serious and ongoing global erosion of privacy enabled by the internet, he said. Banks aren’t the problem, he said; the users tempting banks with their Twitter and Facebook postings are the problem. As are reporters who write about privacy issues with social media without first closing their Facebook accounts.

I call Mr. Moglen’s office

Me: I’m looking for… like, whether this is a privacy issue?

Mr. Moglen: I don’t understand what that means.

The data is a privacy issue because we have an enormous ecological disaster created by badly-designed social media now being used by people to control and exploit human beings in all sorts of ways.

That’s the consequence of social media structures which encourage people to share using centralized databases, and everything they share is held by someone who is no friend of theirs who also runs the servers and collects the logs which contain all the information about who accesses what, the consequences of which is that we are creating systems of comprehensive surveillance in which a billion people are involved and those people’s lives are being lived under a kind of scrutiny which no secret police service is the 20th century could ever have aspired to achieve. And all of that data is being collected and sold by people whose goal it is to make a profit selling the ability to control human beings by knowing more about themselves than they know. Okay? That’s true of all this information all the time everywhere. The thing you’re working on is simply one of 100,000 implications of that disaster.

Me: Right.

Mr. Moglen: Okay, so have you closed your Facebook account and stopped using Twitter?

Me: Have… I?

Mr. Moglen: Yes, you!

Me: No, I can’t!

Mr. Moglen: (getting agitated) Of course you can, if you don’t want to be in a situation in which you are more heavily surveilled than the KGB or Stasi or Securitate or any other secret police ever surveilled anybody (indistinguishable) and what do you mean you ‘can’t'? I can, how come you can’t?

Me: Well, everyone else is using it.

Mr. Moglen: That’s not true. And besides, if everybody else is using them then I couldn’t be doing what I’m doing. I’m not using them. You’re quite wrong.

Me: Right…

Moglen: Right. But you’re not going to do anything about that. So you’re using them and every time you tag anything or respond to anything or link to anything, you’re informing on your friends. You’re part of the problem, you’re not part of the answer. Why are you callng up to ask me about the problem you’re creating?

Me: Well, I was hoping you might be ableto help me think about this particular—

Mr. Moglen: I have helped you. And you have refused to help me back. I’ve told you this is an ecological problem created by people doing a silly thing.

Me: I think the problem is, people have trouble understanding why, like what the real dangers are—

Mr. Moglen: But that’s not the problem! You know what the problem is. The problem is, even though you know what the problem is you’re continuing to make it worse.

Me: It just doesn’t seem like the consequences are that bad.

Mr. Moglen: The problem isn’t people who don’t know! The problem is people like you who do know and go on making it worse. Right?

Me: Well I think for me personally—

Mr. Moglen: Well, now you know. So you should stop now. And not only should you stop, you should get the people around you to stop. If you get the people around you to stop, they’ll get the people around them to stop and we’ll fix the problem. It’s like littering. Why are you calling me up to ask me about the social consequences of your littering without stopping doing it? And then when you tell me a fatuous thing like you ‘can’t,’ it’s perfectly clear that whatever you do here, it won’t be civic journalism because it won’t result in a better world.

Me: Uh, okay. I hear what you’re saying.

Mr. Moglen: No, you don’t actually. You just want to claim you hear what I’m saying.

Me: Well just for me personally right now, the utility seems to—

Mr. Moglen: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no! You see that’s not true. You injure other people today also using social media. You’ve informed on them. You’ve created more records about them. You’ve added to the problems not of yourself but of other people. If it were as simple as just you’re only hurting yourself I wouldn’t bother pointing it out to you. See, that’s the difference, okay? The reason that this all works is that even when you know you’re hurting other people, you’re too selfish to stop. And there are hundreds of millions of people like you. That’s why it works.

Me: What’s the damage?

Dr. Moglen: Well you called me, you know what the problem is. People lost their homes. People lose their money. People lose their freedom. You know because you saw it, because you’re following this, that Facebook now acknowledges what we said for a long time and they didnt acknowledge, that every single photograph uploaded to Facebook is put through facial recognition software they call PhotoDNA which is used to find people for whom any law enforcement agency in the world is looking. You understand? So every time you upload a photograph to Facebook or put one on Twitter for that matter you are now ratting out anybody in that frame to any police agency in the world that’s looking for them. Some police agencies in the world are evil. That’s a pretty serious thing you’ve just done. But you do it all the time. And when I asked you to stop you tell me you can’t, which is an antisocial thing to say.

Me: That wasn’t a totally serious answer.

Mr. Moglen: Of course it was a totally serious answer. It’s the truth. You’re not going to do anything about fixing this problem. You’re going to claim that it’s just something you’re reporting and then you’re going to go right back to making it worse. And if you ever call me up again to ask me about yet another one of these things you’ll still be making it worse, because although you can report the problem you can’t take social responsibility for your part in causing the problem. That’s why I tell you it’s like littering. You should stop doing it before you write in the newspaper that there’s too much garbage on the street.

Me: Okay. Well thanks for your help. I appreciate it.

Mr. Moglen: No it wasn’t helpful, it was hurtful because I told you the story you’re working on is the story of your own anti-social behavior and that of people like you. It’s not helpful.

What you want to know is that somewhere there’s a regulator who might stop the bank. But you don’t want to hear that the regulator we really need to call upon is you, yourself. Right? You don’t want to write that in the newspaper. I guarantee you whatever story you file will treat this as a problem caused by everyone except the readers at The Observer and that will be false. The problem is caused by people who would like a little help spying on their friends. And in a genteel way, that’s what the social media offers. They get to surveil other people. In return for a little bit of the product, they assist the growth of these immense commercial spying operations. The commercial spying operations are used to empower people who have lots to get more from people who have less. They lead to a more unequal society. More unequal in economic terms and more unequal in political terms. The users, as with most stuff that’s dangerous that’s sold to people, the users are the victims and even the stuff you write which purports to be critical will do everything except telling people the central fact, which is they have to stop using.

Me: I think that’s totally relevant and will definitely put it in. (N.B.: In the end, I did not put this in the story for several reasons, not the least of it was the fact that it was late and over word limit.)

Mr. Moglen: Well, we’ll see what gets past your editor. That much there’s a test for. I can see what The Observer publishes. Now, assuming all that, and assuming you’re actually going to give even an instant’s consideration to your own part in creating this ecological nightmare, what else do you want to know?

[snip]

 

Google Toolbar Tracks Browsing Even After Users Choose not to so that we can be tracked for advertisers.

 

Federal Trade Commission Groups Far Apart on Online Privacy Oversight has been examining whether online privacy should be regulated. The debate has grown louder as technology companies are tracking and profiling people in new ways, Congress is showing an interest in the subject, and companies are trying to avoid government intervention.

Federal Trade Commission officials have been vocal, saying that privacy policies of companies are not clear or accessible enough to protect visitors, and debating whether online data is being used appropriately.

You aren't searching annonymously

 

 

 

We use Strong VPN - USA Based IP VPN Accounts

May 17th, 2010 Web Browsers Leave 'Fingerprints' Behind as You Surf the Net
EFF Research Shows More Than 8 in 10 Browsers Have Unique, Trackable Signatures
New research by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has found that an overwhelming majority of web browsers have unique signatures -- creating identifiable "fingerprints" that could be used to track you as you surf the Internet. The findings were the result of an experiment EFF conducted with volunteers who visited http://panopticlick.eff.org/. The website anonymously logged the configuration and version information from each participant's operating system, browser, and browser plug-ins -- information that websites routinely access each time you visit -- and compared that information to a database of configurations collected from almost a million other visitors. EFF found that 84% of the configuration combinations were unique and identifiable, creating unique and identifiable browser "fingerprints." Browsers with Adobe Flash or Java plug-ins installed were 94% unique and trackable.

Google Toolbar Tracks Browsing Even After Users Choose "Disable" even after a user specifically chooses to "disable" the Google Toolbar, and even after the Google Toolbar disappears from view, Google Toolbar continues tracking users' web browsing -- including the specific sites visited, pages browsed, and searches conducted. Learn how Google's installation -- which lets users activate these transmissions in a single click, while making it much harder to cease the transmissions and compare Google's current notice/consent process to Google's 2004 version, finding important declines in both presentation and substance of disclosures. ~ Ben Edelman

This year, Google began running online advertisements based on consumers' online behavior patterns.,

privacy

A Little 'i' to Teach About Online Privacy

2010 Most major companies running online ads are expected to begin adding the icon to their adsalong with phrases like “Why did I get this ad?” When consumers click on the icon, a white “i” surrounded by a circle on a blue background, they will be taken to a page explaining how the advertiser uses their Web surfing history and demographic profile to send them certain ads.

Mihajlo Zeljkovic, and Craig E Wills have a Web site that detects sites that your browser has visited.
The site then shows you how your browsing habits are tracked by third-party sites for advertising purposes along with information such as location, age and gender that is inferred about you by these advertisers. The site does not store any information such as cookies or IP address that could identify you.  By participating you will not only be able to see your results, but aggregate results of others who have participated.

Ruling Limits Prosecutions of People Who Violate Law on Privacy of Medical Records
The ruling was a surprise to many lawyers. Robert M. Gellman, an expert on privacy and information policy, said, "Under this decision, a tremendous amount of conduct that is clearly wrong will fall outside the criminal penalties of the statute," the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

If a hospital sells a list of patients' names to a firm for marketing purposes, the hospital can be held criminally liable, Mr. Gellman said. But if a hospital clerk does the same thing, in defiance of hospital policy, the clerk cannot be prosecuted under the 1996 law, because the clerk is not a "covered entity."


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