Google CEO: People want Google to tell them what to do

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO sat down with a bunch of Wall Street Journal Editors recently. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. took the interview and turned it into an article, "Google and the Search for the Future." After reading the article I wish I could afford Google stock. Mr. Schmidt appears to have far reaching vision, and enough of it to keep Google at the forefront of our online life for a good while. But at the same time, I cringe to think of what his vision means for our privacy.

Why does it make me cringe? Two quotes from the article, one a direct quote of Mr. Schmidt, seem to put Google on the path to becoming Big Brother, although a much kinder, gentler big brother than imagined by George Orwell:

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," he elaborates. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

Let's say you're walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, "we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are."

We all know that Google knows a great deal about us. And I'm pretty sure that it has better than a rough idea who a lot of people's friends are. What's a little scary is the CEO of Google thinks that most of us want Google to tell us what to do. What's scarier is that he my be right.

 

George Orwell 1984 Signet Classic

Facebook puts new spin on old crimes

KTLA.com in LA reports a new spin on a not so new pastime. For that matter the spins probably not all that new. There's not really anything new about groups of teenagers or early twenty-somethings finding an unoccupied house, breaking in, and trashing it. It's also not new that the partiers don't really care if the house is empty because it's abandoned or because the occupants are away. Actually, they probably prefer the occupants be away, that way there's probably food and maybe alcohol already there.

What Facebook and other social media have made possible are a much shorter amount of time needed to setup the "party". Twenty years ago it took time to find a suitable house, let people know where the party was being held, and get everybody there. Today, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and others, a careful online search can find empty houses in minutes. A Facebook update or a tweet can potentially allow thousands of people to find out about the party simultaneously, and in no time you have hundreds of people trashing your home.

As I said, this isn't exactly new. What is new is that many people are now transmitting to anyone who cares to look that they are leaving for an extended periods. So along with having your mail held, your newspaper subscription suspended, and your lights set to go on and off while your gone, make sure no one in your family reports to the world at large that you are going to be gone.

Remember, sites like Facebook are tools. It's up to us how we use them.

Obama supports DNA sampling when arrested

Politico's Josh Gerstein tells us that, "President Obama backs DNA test in arrests." In an interview with John Walsh on America's most wanted the President professed his strong support of gathering DNA of everyone arrested for a felony crime:

"It's the right thing to do, and then, as you well know, John, this is where the national registry becomes so important, making sure that, not only are we getting these DNA tests done state by state, but then, nationally, everybody's talking to each other. That's how we make sure that we continue to tighten the grip around folks who have perpetrated these crimes."

It's a great sentiment. The problem is, that when it comes to DNA testing upon arrest, it's wrong. In the interview John Walsh says that it's no different that taking fingerprints or an arrest photo. But that is not true.

DNA samples, unlike fingerprints, don't just identify you. They have the potential to reveal health issues, genetic relationships (siblings, parents), and possibly potential behaviors. You may give up the right to protect this information if you are convicted, but to take it upon arrest flies in the face of "guilty until proven innocent." Requiring DNA sample of people who have been arrested, but not indicted, let alone convicted, says the exact opposite. It assumes you are guilty until the DNA sample proves you innocent. That is not the way justice is served in the U.S.

See the portion of the interview that talks about DNA (about halfway through on Youtube.

See the entire interview on amw.com

http://pleaserobme.com/

It's not a joke. Do you use one of the numerous services that let you tweet or otherwise post your location for the world to see? pleaserobme.com searches twitter and posts the tweets that give away the tweeters location.

It's not as nefarious as it sounds (or as it could be). The site was developed by three guys to demonstrate that we have some very bad habits, security-wise. The actual address data appears to be substituted with data from lands far away from the original poster. But that doesn't change the fact that large numbers of people are making their locations known. And part of knowing where you are is knowing where you're not. Which is exactly the information a burglar wants. Not to mention stalkers, psycho exes and assorted crazies.

Do you tweet your location? How often have you said something like, "Going to the game, hope we win. Go Tech!" How many hours would that give a crook to burglarize your home?

Obama = Bush

Now that I've got your attention, yes, I mean that. When it comes to citizens privacy rights, I can see no discernable difference between their administrations. Obama is continuing the national phone monitoring that was started by the Bush Adminstration. A program that is unconstitutional and does little if anything to benefit national security.

If that wasn't bad enough, last night I saw two articles talking about a case being argued today in Philidelphia. The first was at Cato-at-liberty.org and was pretty short. The headline says it all:

The Government Can Monitor Your Location All Day Every Day Without Implicating Your Fourth Amendment Rights

The second was an opinion piece by Catherine Crump at the Philadelphia Enquirer. It began with,

"If you own a cell phone, you should care about the outcome of a case scheduled to be argued in federal appeals court in Philadelphia tomorrow. It could well decide whether the government can use your cell phone to track you - even if it hasn't shown probable cause to believe it will turn up evidence of a crime."

The Obama administration is asserting that U.S. citizens have no reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to their cell phones. This premise comes from the "third party doctrine." The third party doctrine is controversial to say the least, and in the modern age the equivalent of completely removing all Fourth Amendment protections without the pesky need to actually repeal it.

The third party doctrine says that once you knowingly give information to a third party you lose the right to the Fourth Amendment protections. Just to help keep things clear, the Fourth Amendment says:

Fourth Amendment – Protection from unreasonable search and seizure.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The third party doctrine is based on the premise that, since the phone company, your ISP, and any other company you may give data to is not within the four walls of your home or on your person, that data is no longer protected by the Fourth Amendments clause against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Forget whether or not you are doing anything illegal. Under the third party doctrine the government can subpoena your browsing history from your ISP without having to prove probable cause. Anything you put on Facebook (not that Facebook is private), and possibly even anything you backup to Carbonite or other online backup service.  I say possibly to the backup services because they are usually encrypted, so a "reasonable expectation of privacy" can be argued. The same can't be said for email, cell phones, text messages or almost anything sent over the internet.

I don't know about you, but almost everything I do that doesn't involve direct, face to face communication goes through a third party before reaching it's destination. There is almost nothing I do that the government can't look into for no other reason than curiosity using the third party doctrine. Knowing the history of the American colonies and the revolution, I know the founding fathers never intended the government to have that kind of power.

Lot-o-links: Articles on Facebook, Google, Supreme Court and more

From Businessweek:  New EU Privacy Laws Could Hit Facebook - Mark Zuckerbergs mouth paints a target on Facebook

Exchangemag.com: Google Social Search Hits Privacy Snag on Facebook - Maybe Facebooks privacy settings are better than we thought.

Mediapost.com: Google Scores Partial Victory In Street View Lawsuit - Google streetview photographing view of house ok. Entering private drive to do it, not so much.

U.S. News: Should Supreme Court Uphold the Quon Case on Worker Privacy? Should workers expect email and other electronic communication on company equipment be private? Take the poll.

PCWorld.com: EFF:Browsers Can Leave a Unique Trail on the Web - Find out how much information your browser gives without even being asked. With suggestions on how to obscure your trail.

RDMag.com: How Can Policymakers Promote Innovation and Strengthen Privacy? - Policy always lags behind technology, trick is protecting privacy without stifling innovation.

Hope you find the reading interesting.

Bev Stayart = Levitra?

Have you ever heard of Bev Stayart? To be honest, I hadn't, either. But looking at privacy news this evening I saw her name in a headline, "Bev Stayart Sues Yahoo Again For Violating Her Privacy Rights" and had to check it out. The story was on Techdirt, and tells the sad tale of Ms. Stayart, who sued Yahoo because she did a search for her name and didn't like what came up. That case was understandably thrown out of court, er, I mean dismissed. So here we are a year later, and Yahoo finds itself the target of Bev's lawyers once again.

Why?

It seems that now if you go to Yahoo and type in "bev stayart" the search "bev stayart lavitra" is suggested. If you choose to leave off "levitra" then on the results page it asks if you want to search for "Bev Stayart Levitra."

I'll refrain from making any of the bad jokes I'm thinking of at the moment.

Well, if you actually perform the search for "bev stayart levitra" you find that the association is made because most of top results are from her year old lawsuit with Yahoo. Well, they were, now they are from all the stories and blogs about this lawsuit AND her year old lawsuit.

Congratulations, Ms. Stayart, you are well on your way to permanently tying your name to both Yahoo and Levitra.

[edited title to be more informative by Bert]

TOR cracked to catch child pornographers

Tuesday I wrote about TOR, The Onion Router. Wednesday in ZDNets "Zero Day" blog I read about a TOR server patch written for the purpose of catching child pornographers. Not just to the geographic location they are operating from, but to the computer they are working at. A worthy endeavor. But since the author, HD Moore of Metasploit fame, is releasing the source code, modified versions of the patch can be created to track anyone using TOR. This means TOR as a standalone item has become useless for protecting people who need protecting, i.e. human rights activists in oppressive countries, journalists and police under cover, and anyone with a legitimate need to keep their location hidden.

Moore (arguably) had good reason to do this. In Germany, at least, TOR is being heavily used, or is suspected of being heavily used, to traffic in child pornography, and the German authorities have been cracking down on TOR servers. But is the possible benefit in one admittedly important area worth the cost in several other important areas?

But there is an alternative the the TOR package by itself. It is also cross platform, and free. It will run on Intel Macs, Windows, and Linux. It is called JanusVM and runs in a virtual machine. It plugs the holes used by Moore's patch, and keeps your location obscured. From the Janus website:

JanusVM is powered by VMware, built on the Linux 2.6.14 kernel, and brings together openVPN, Squid, Privoxy, and Tor, to give you a transparent layer of security and privacy that is compatible with all your TCP based applications. DNS request are also passed through Tor so even your ISP doesn't know what web site you are looking at.

JanusVM is free, cross platform, and can take a little more setup than the basic TOR package, depending on how your network is setup. But if you need anonymity online, it's the best thing going now.

How's your Online Rep?

I was going through my alerts today, and a Smart Planet blog caught my eye. Titled, "How to build and manage an online reputation," it's a good primer, and has some good links at the end of the article. We'll go over some of what they say, and some of what some other people say, but I recommend checking out all of the sites linked today. They all have a lot more to say than I can repeat here.

According to the article at Smart Planet, the first thing you need to do is find out what's out there about you. Just a few years ago the only people who really had to worry about their online rep were people who'd reached a certain status level in certain technical fields. Today almost any job you go to will check out your Facebook page and/or hit the search engines.

Have you googled your own name lately?

Some privacy advocates say googling yourself is a bad idea. Frankly, you can't afford not to google yourself - and Yahoo and Bing yourself (that last one just doesn't sound right, does it?).  What you see is what potential employers are going to see, and each search engine give slightly different results.

Another blog entry at onlinereputationedge.com brings up a good, but seldom talked about point - what you say about other people online usually says a whole lot more about you than about the person you're talking about. So be careful what you say. And remember, once you put something online, it will never be gone, so the bad impression you create today could come back to haunt you thirty years from now.

Onlinerepmanagement.com uses Kanye West to teach us that even the biggest blunders - or group of blunders - can be mitigated by an active online presence. Because he is very active online you won't see much negative about him when you search for his name, even after 2009's gaffs. It's amazing what an active online presence can take care of.

That's it for now. Stay safe and work on that online rep.

Google CEO scoffs at privacy

Last week, just days after announcing Google Public DNS and raising the question of how much do we really want Google to know about our web activity, Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave us the answer in an interview on CNBC. The answer is, as little as possible. When the CEO of Google basically says, "you have no privacy, get over it" it's time to let him know that it does matter. I'm not too impressed by the way he used the Patriot Act to justify it, either.

Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's chief of community development feels the same way. In his blog he tells people to add Bing to Firefox. You know if Mozilla, one of the opponents Microsoft couldn't quite kill, is suggesting a Microsoft product they have serious concerns. The add-on he links to is here. He also says that the Bing privacy policy is better than Googles, but I don't really see a whole lot of difference on a quick read of both.

I'm sure I'll keep using Google search, if only because I use multiple search engines already. The webs a big place, and most search engines hit spots that others don't - even if it only shows up 4 or 5 pages down - yes, I often go that far down in search results.

The truth is, as much as I don't like Mr. Schmidt's attitude toward privacy, until someone comes up with a new way to do search that out-googles Google, you can't afford to ignore it. But you can let them know what you think about it and hurt they're bottom line by using other search engines more.