On the Privacy Front

While we’ve been overwhelmed with news from health care, our failing economy, and many other sides (it’s called the “fog of war,” or cognitive dissonance, and it’s intentional, in many respects), we’ve been losing our privacy inch by inch. One of the major sources of our loss is Google (H/T Gawker).

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Here is the man who, several years ago, blacklisted CNET because one of its writers used the Google search engine to find out all sorts of information about him, and posted that information on a web page. In other words, a highly private man who doesn’t mind invading your privacy at all. After all, if you don’t have anything to hide, then you have nothing to be afraid of, right? No wonder Google loves big government.

Simple advice: Don’t use Google, unless you must. Use ixquick.com (itsquick), or cuil.com, or one of the other privacy respecting search engines.

Not that many other big companies are any better, honestly. Sprint, for instance, has gladly turned over location information on its customers to the Federal Government.

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with customer location data more than 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009, according to a company manager who disclosed the statistic at a non-public interception and wiretapping conference in October.

The manager also revealed the existence of a previously undisclosed web portal that Sprint provides law enforcement to conduct automated “pings” to track users. Through the website, authorized agents can type in a mobile phone number and obtain global positioning system (GPS) coordinates of the phone. -Wired

The Federal Government differentiates between a “wiretap,” which is for real time information, and a request for “stored data,” such as email, search queries, voice mail, purchasing records, and any other information that might be stored “in the cloud,” or on a “third party server.”

The reporting requirements for intercepts and pen registers only apply to the surveillance of live communications. However, communications or customer records that are in storage by third parties, such as email messages, photos or other files maintained in the cloud by services like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Facebook and MySpace are routinely disclosed to law enforcement, and there is no legal requirement that statistics on these kinds of requests be compiled or published. -Slight Paranoia

And in case you think your data is safe, so long as you don’t put it into “the cloud,” think again. Microsoft now includes a service called “shadow copy,” that allows you to see the previous versions of a file, and to restore files you accidentally deleted. The problem with this “shadow copy” is the files stored through the service cannot be deleted through any manual process, even if you do a “secure wipe” on a particular file (I secure wipe most files on my hard drive through the PGP shredder service). The files are also, apparently, not stored in encrypted format, even if you have encryption installed and running on you machine. See the full story over at Bruce Schneier’s blog.

Researchers have uncovered new technology that allow them to “fingerprint” the signals transmitted by RFID chips. BAck when I was working in RF, we always “knew” that you could measure certain things about a radio signal, such as the attack and decay times, sideband slippage, and various modulation components, and then use these things to find that specific transmitter—so long as none of the major components of the transmitter were changed. Since the “transmitter components” of an RFID chip can’t ever be changed, what this means is someone can “fingerprint” a specific RIFD chip, and then find that chip among thousands of similar chips (in a crowd) reliably. So that jacket you just bought with an RFID chip sewn into the hem can now identify you as uniquely as your personal fingerprint, for as long as you own—and are wearing—it.