It does seem like online privacy is starting to hit the big time. We got it wrong, thinking that 2009 would be the year it really hit home, but we were a year early. But now everyone is trying to get More Private Then Thou - see
Google Chrome's attempts:
Google just launched a new stable version of Google Chrome, the company's increasingly popular browser, which introduces a number of new features and more advanced privacy controls. Chrome will now automatically detect the language of any site you surf to and offer you to translate the text for you. In addition, Google also added granular privacy controls to Chrome that allow you to turn off cookies and JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. For now, these new features are only available in the Windows version of Chrome.
But Google (and Facebook) are probably past the point of believability....
PC World:
Several major U.S. Internet companies, including Google and Facebook, need to "step up" and better protect consumer privacy or face tougher penalties from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, a commissioner said Wednesday.
And then there is this.....Twitter in its new "don't be evil" mode is
getting the Security bug:
On Tuesday, Twitter added computer security veteran Bob Lord to the company's expanding employee roster as the manager of network and infrastructure security, bringing with him 20 years of experience focused on electronic security systems at large companies, most recently including Red Hat, AOL and Netscape. Highlights in Lord's background include his building security and encryption features into the Netscape browser, iPlanet servers (an alliance with Sun and Netscape) and the AOL Communicator product, which also included Mail, Address Book, Instant Messenger and Calendar. Since leaving AOL, Bob has worked with a team of cryptography experts to add security features to many projects including FireFox, Mozilla Thunderbird and Red Hat Linux.
Problem is, its hitting the mainstream - what we were writing 2 years ago is now hitting mainstream media -
New York Times:
If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?
Probably not.
Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.
Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.
They go on to note:
You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.
“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. “In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.”
Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive “social signature,” researchers say.
The power of computers to identify people from social patterns alone was demonstrated last year in a study by the same pair of researchers that cracked Netflix’s anonymous database: Vitaly Shmatikov, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas, and Arvind Narayanan, now a researcher at Stanford University.
By examining correlations between various online accounts, the scientists showed that they could identify more than 30 percent of the users of both Twitter, the microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing service, even though the accounts had been stripped of identifying information like account names and e-mail addresses.
That prediction from connected data is an effect we've also noted.
And so the dance begins, as the companies whose business models rely on massive privacy violation (see above companies...) try and keep one step ahead in the dance of the seven veils that keeps the publoc from sussing them out. But it takes two to tango, and the user is getting a lot of notification about what is going on now from both the mainstream media and from New Media researchers
such as dana boyd as well.
So, whose cards will be marked this year?
