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The federal government has put Google, Microsoft, Apple and other technology companies on notice: Give consumers a way prevent advertisers from tracking their movements across the Web — or face regulation.

Yet for all its innovative know-how and entrepreneurial spirit, the technology industry has yet to agree on a simple, meaningful solution to protect consumer privacy on the Internet.

internet privacy controls challenge

You might not expect to find many politicians willing to take a stand against something called the “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act.”

But that’s what happened Tuesday, as some prominent lawmakers argued that the bill wouldn’t effectively limit online child pornography and would instead create privacy problems for regular Internet users.

Child-Porn Privacy Retention “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act

1. At least two NAI members are taking overt steps to respect Do Not Track.
2. Over half of the NAI members we tested did not remove their tracking cookies after opting out.
3. At least eight NAI members promise to stop tracking after opting out, but nonetheless leave tracking cookies in place.
4. At least ten NAI members go beyond their privacy policies and remove their tracking cookies.

tracking trackers stanford internet

We're forever warning teenagers to be careful online -- don't reveal personal information to strangers, avoid scams, report bullying behavior. It turns out the same advice may be appropriate for grandma and grandpa, as well. Seniors are the fastest-growing segment of new Internet users, as they've discovered email, online shopping and banking, social networking, travel planning and other online conveniences.

Even the most tech-savvy among us sometimes fall prey to online scammers, so if your parents or grandparents have recently taken the online plunge, here are some safety tips you can share:

senior internet scams

"Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., introduced a bill Friday that would give the
Federal Trade Commission authority to establish an online do-not-track
system.

The bill is the first in this session to specifically tackle the creation of
a do-not-track system, according to a spokesman for Ms. Speier. In December, the
FTC issued a report recommending the creation of a do-not-track system and
suggested that lawmakers use the report as a template for legislation."

internet privacy bill

"We often scoff when we hear about countries who
censor or limit their citizens' access to the Internet, but we somehow fail to
realize something incredibly important: Nearly every industrialized country
censors the Internet to some degree. Don't believe it? Check this map.

The map was based on data provided by
Reporters Without Borders

and designed by the
folks at
yuxiyou.net
as
a public
call to action
demonstrating the sad reality of Internet censorship. If you
want, visit that site for many illuminating infographics, or read up on the
topic over at the
Open Net Initiative's
website

—
they make it a point to gather up data like this. Or you
can just plain join me in shedding a few tears over the realization that freedom
barely exists on the Internet anymore
— and maybe never did."

Privacy internet censoring

"In response to increasing civil unrest, the Egyptian government appears to have disabled almost all Internet connectivity with the rest of the world. The Internet's global routing table, which is used by Internet routers to determine where to send traffic, has had virtually every Egypt-bound route withdrawn, giving the Internet traffic no path either into or out of the country."

Egypt Internet Unrest

"But, here’s the point that few seem to be grasping. The Internet is an inherently unprivate, unsafe, place. Why do people believe that a company that builds a service to make a profit and then gives it away for free is going to have our best interest at heart. Why in the world are people surprised that Facebook is making these moves. And most importantly why do we feel entitled to protection and privacy when the real issue is that people are sharing things they shouldn’t share in this or perhaps any environment."

Privacy entitled Internet User Responsibility facebook

Photos, addresses, family ties, court documents, details from MySpace profiles -- the moment information is published online, it can be copied and re-posted, and often is.

Privacy Internet LA Times

If you post it on MySpace, you're telling the world.

That's what the Minnesota Court of Appeals held, reviving a lawsuit filed by a Twin Cities woman who sued Fairview Health Services and a former employee, claiming the employee helped post private medical information on the social networking site.

The decision Tuesday helps bring Minnesota's invasion-of-privacy law into the Internet age.

Other courts nationwide have acknowledged invasion-of-privacy claims for decades. But Minnesota first began recognizing the claims only 11 years ago.

Privacy Internet Minnesota

Internet companies came under fire on Capitol Hill on Thursday, with lawmakers questioning how well the companies protect information that they collect online about consumers for advertising purposes.

"I think it's a big deal if someone tracks where you go and what you look at without your personal approval. We wouldn't like that in the non-Internet world and I personally don't like it in the Internet world," said Rep. Joe Barton (R., Texas).

Lawmakers in the House are drafting Internet-privacy legislation designed to provide consumers more information about what is being collected online and to give them greater control about how that data can be used. It could also set rules for how consumers could prevent their personal data from being shared with advertisers.

"Consumers are entitled to some baseline protections in the online space," said Rep. Rick Boucher (D., Va.) chairman of the House Internet subcommittee.

Privacy Security Internet Data Collection Targeted Advertising

Despite China’s claims that Green Dam Youth Escort - the spyware the government has commanded shall be installed on all new PCs - is merely a porn filter, it’s now clear that the software filters a whole bunch of political content.

According to The Wall Street Journal, a report by Harvard University researcher Isaac Mao, who has seen the code, says Green Dam’s data files block “much more than Falun Gong.”

Mr. Mao, who has seen the program’s coding, said the words in the lists aren’t necessarily blocked by the software. He said the blocking will appear inconsistent to users because the program includes mechanisms that activate and deactivate various functions. The software also appears to communicate with a centralized server, he said.

China Internet Political Malware Green Dam

Bruce Schneier's Security blog readers discuss Scalia's comments & law school professor's assignment to research Scalia to learn how easy it is to uncover personal information.

Provides various viewpoints on the issue.

Schneier blog Scalia Privacy Internet Reidenberg Law

MPs have today launched an investigation into the use of snooping technology by ISPs which allows them to profile customers for advertisers and throttle or block specific types of traffic.

An inquiry by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Communication will examine issues such as the emergence of Phorm's profiling system, and the restriction of bandwidth available to specific applications such as BitTorrent. Both activities are reliant on Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology.

"Now the Internet is part of daily life, concerns are increasingly raised about a wide range of online privacy issues," the group said in a background statement.

"Should there be changes to individual behaviour? Should companies be pressed to prioritise privacy issues? Or is there a need for specific regulations that go beyond mere 'data protection' and address privacy directly?"

The inquiry will also consider the impact of DPI technology on ISPs' "mere conduit" protection from liability for illegal traffic such as child pornography and copyright-infringing filesharing.

Privacy Internet Net Neutrality Deep Packet Inspection

Will there be one major catastrophe, or just smaller disasters? Panelists discuss what security issues we should be watching out for, where the threat might come from, and the difficulties in predicting the unpredictable. Panelists include: Whitfield Diffie, vice president and chief security officer for Sun Microsystems; Ronald Rivest, Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT; Adi Shamir, professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel; and Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for BT Counterpane. Moderating the panel is Ari Juels, chief scientist and director of RSA Laboratories.

Privacy Security Fear Internet Pearl Harbor Digital Terrorism

There was no way I was ever going to convince my parents that Jimi Hendrix's music was good. More than anything, the youth culture was defined by its music. The chasm it created was called "the generation gap" a metaphor for the ideological differences that separated us. There is a new generation gap. It's not defined through music or politics or fashion, those ideas are shared much more among the generations than before. This time it's about privacy.

My generation came of age thinking about "1984", the looming threat of "Big Brother" watching over all of us all of the time. It was the government or some group which would monitor all of our actions, know all our habits: who we associate with, what we watch, what buy.

1984 came and went. Nothing like "Big Brother" happened unless you count Apple computer's historic "Big Brother" commercial which ends with the slogan: "On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "1984". They were right - 2009 is.

Personal details used to be considered private. We were careful about who knew what about us and certainly didn't post pictures of our friends, families and fantasies for all to see. Privacy does not seem to be valued anymore. Giving up one's privacy has become a rite of passage. It's what you leave at the portal when you sign up for any of the social networking sites on the internet. The sites are free - as long as you don't calculate the value of your identity, demographics, viewing and buying habits to advertisers. This isn't new, the Nielsen Ratings service has been assembling viewer information since the 1950s for television advertisers, but its methods were primitive in comparison to the two way constant information gathering that's done on the internet.

In March 2009, Google initiated the use of "behavioral targeting", which uses information collected on someone's web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that indivi

Privacy Internet Communications

By now, many employees are uncomfortably aware that their every keystroke at work, from email on office computers to text messages on company phones, can be monitored legally by their employers.

What employees typically don't expect is for the company to spy on them while on password-protected sites using nonwork computers. But even that privacy could be in jeopardy.

A case brewing in federal court in New Jersey pits bosses against two employees who were complaining about their workplace on an invite-only discussion group on MySpace.com, a social-networking site owned by News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal. The case tests whether a supervisor who managed to log into the forum -- and then fired employees who badmouthed supervisors and customers there -- had the right to do so.

The case has some legal and privacy experts concerned that companies are intruding into areas that their employees had considered off limits.

"The question is whether employees have a right to privacy in their non-work-created communications with each other. And I would think the answer is that they do," said Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment expert and partner at Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP in New York.

The legal landscape is murky. For the most part, employers don't need a reason to fire nonunion workers. But state laws in California, New York and Connecticut protect employees who engage in lawful, off-duty activities from being fired or disciplined, according to a report prepared by attorneys at the firm Proskauer Rose LLP. While private conversations might be covered under those laws, none of the statutes specifically addresses social networking or blogging. Thus, privacy advocates expect to see more of these legal challenges.

In February, three police officers in Harrison, N.Y., were suspended after they allegedly made lewd remarks about the town mayor on a Facebook account. The officers mistakenly thought the remarks were protected with a password, but city officials viewed the page, said Harrison police chief David Ha

Privacy Employee Employer Relations Internet First Amendment

IT directors are adding multiple layers of protection to their networks and constantly upgrade those measures to adjust for new threats. Is this good? Is the Internet too broken to fix? Is there a better path to enterprise network security? One option is a new "gated community" Internet, where users give up their freedoms and anonymity for safety.

My initiation to the Internet and the World Wide Web occurred in 1994 in a large meeting room at an Atlanta hotel. Most of the 100 or so seats were empty. Those in attendance seemed fairly rabid about this new network and took exception to one speaker's prediction that the Web would become a major marketing vehicle. "Not gonna happen," said one attendee. "We'll spam them into submission if they try. We won't let this become commercialized." I kind of chuckled to myself.

Those early adopters were mainly concerned with protecting the Internet from commercialization and marketing. Security was not even part of the discussion. Now, it is threatening to dismantle the Internet as a communication and commerce tool.

Cyber attacks on U.S. government computer networks increased a reported 40 percent in 2008, according to data from the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. More than 100 million credit card accounts at Heartland Payment Systems were compromised last year. In November, the Pentagon suffered from a cyber attack in the form of a global virus or worm that spread rapidly throughout a number of military networks, and caused the agency to ban the use of external storage devices, such as flash drives and DVDs.

And this is just the tip of the Internet security Relevant Products/Services iceberg. Enterprise networks are being used to launch phishing Relevant Products/Services and other Internet scams, such as the Conficker worm that infected 12 million computers late last year.

IT directors everywhere are adding multiple layers of protection to their networks and constantly having to upgrade those measures to adjust for new threats. Is this good? Is the Internet too

Privacy Security Internet Threat

Beware of web sites offering free money

Iain Thomson in San Francisco

vnunet.com, 04 Mar 2009
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is warning of a rash of online scams offering payouts under the economic stimulus plan passed by Congress.

Businesses and individuals are being targeted by the scammers using web sites and emails, the organisation warned. Recipients are typically offered 'grants' from the government, and must either surrender bank details to get the funds or make a small payment.

Advertisement"Web sites may advertise that they can help you get money from the stimulus fund. Many use deceptive names or images of president Obama and vice president Biden to suggest that they are legitimate. They are not," said Eileen Harrington, acting director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "Don't fall for it. If you do, you'll get scammed."

Several variants have also been discovered that use malware to steal important data. These include pages that purport to offer links to sites that show how to get the federal funds. The pages are loaded with malware that can penetrate an improperly patched browser.

"Consumers who may already have fallen for these scams should carefully check their credit card bills for unauthorised charges, and report the scam to the FTC," said Harrington.

FTC Federal-Trade-Commission Threats Malware Barack Obama Internet Security

The debate on Internet privacy has begun in Congress.

I had a chance to sit down recently with Representative Rick Boucher, the long-serving Virginia Democrat, who has just replaced Ed Markey, the Democrat from Massachusetts, as the chairman of the House Subcommittee looking after telecommunications, technology and the Internet. Mr. Boucher is widely regarded as one of the most technologically savvy members of Congress.

As he ticked off his top priorities for his panel, most involved the pressing demands of telecommunications regulation. There is a law governing how local TV stations are carried on satellite broadcasters that needs to be renewed. There is the Universal Service Fund, which takes money from most telephone customers to pay for rural service to be improved. And there is the conversion to digital television and the investments in rural broadband to be supervised.

But high on his list is a topic that is very much under his discretion: passing a bill to regulate the privacy of Internet users.

“Internet users should be able to know what information is collected about them and have the opportunity to opt out,” he said.

While he hasn’t written the bill yet, Mr. Boucher said that he, working with Representative Cliff Stearns, the Florida Republican who is the ranking minority member on the subcommittee, wants to require Web sites to disclose how they collect and use data, and give users the option to opt out of any data collection. That’s not a big change from what happens now, at least on most big sites.

Privacy Internet OPT-IN legislation