The much knowledgeable computer hardware geek Chris has written a blog post on Google and Privacy. A subject that has taken up most of my free time for the last few weeks. A subject that I have been most inclined to write about, but never actually got down to scribble something. A subject that I have worked on for the last few years. So now that I have something to rant about, I’ll let my thoughts flow. The article discusses Google owned applications such as Gmail, Adsense and Gtalk etc more from a ‘single point of failure’ perspective than from the privacy angle. Privacy breach is not limited to someone getting into your account and stealing away your information. Privacy breach is misusing Google for google-hacks and collecting, processing and disseminating personally identifiable information without consent. Being a techie or geek helps you being safe on public networks such as Internet. It protects you from virus, trojans and known malicious activities on the Internet. It helps you filter between legitimate emails and phishing attacks. But does it help you protect your privacy to a safe limit? The answer from my experience is NO. Continue reading ‘Google & Privacy’
Archive for the 'Research' Category
Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age presents a comprehensive and multidisciplinary examination of privacy in the information age. It explores such important concepts as how the threats to privacy evolving, how can privacy be protected and how society can balance the interests of individuals, businesses and government in ways that promote privacy reasonably and effectively?
A must read for anyone remotely interested in privacy. (discovered via Ars Technica)
Browsing through articles on MSNBC, I found an interesting and rather alarming article describing how companies might now want to consider using TPM for checking user authentication. So does this bring us to end of frauds and anonymity mennace on the Internet? Not exactly. Anonymity can be used in many better ways than just creating menace on the Internet. Ofcourse there are several ways to beat the TPM system, but I wish to hear TOR and EFF’s take on the matter.
Read the complete story here
Johny Long talks to BBC about ease of identity theft using a good search engine such as Google. Listen to the transcript here.
Talking about online privacy, you may also want to read about top ten privacy compromises reported worldwide. The article was also mentioned on Bruce Schneier’s website, and can be found here.
Until I did a summer research on Anonymity and Privacy on public networks, I was never a strong advocate of the concept of anonymity. For those of you who think anonymity is only required by the whistleblowers and miscreants, read no further. There is enough literature on the Internet to convince you morons.
Coming back to the concept of anonymity, there have never been too many tools available for non-geeks to play around with anonymous browsing. The TOR project was the only surviving anonymity product, but it required considerable tweaking on the system. Recently I came across a complete package from the guys at TOR for single click install on Windows, Linux and Mac machines. I thought this is the best it can get until few days back when I discovered Torpark – a portable anonymous surfing browser based on Mozilla framework. Nothing needs to be installed and you can just run it off a USB drive. Very cool !
Writing a thesis is not as pleasurable as waiting for its result to be out. My thesis is finally accepted.
After working on my thesis for a year, I finally submitted it. It had been a long long journey, endless hours of writing, reading and experimentation. Now I wait for review, and the date when it is passed.
On a similar note, I start writing again to publish my summer research on anonymity and privacy.
I am Sumeet,an information security enthusiast, crazy about Coffee, iPod, everything mac, travelling, consuming rss and eating. I work for a large consulting firm where I usually rant about security best practices.