Privacy Resources on Port 80: Shoreline: issues

The Pentagon research agency that is exploring how to create a vast database of electronic transactions and analyze them for potential terrorist activity considered but rejected another surveillance idea: tagging Internet data with unique personal markers to make anonymous use of some parts of the Internet impossible.

Unless you have been living in a cave, you're aware of the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, the goal of which is to accumulate every bit of transactional online data worldwide and use data mining techniques to provide intelligence information.

Privacy advocates of all political persuasions are in an uproar, but this is something that should engage anyone who conducts any business that finds its way online. TIA will give the Pentagon access to your credit card data, school records, medical information, travel history, church affiliation, gun ownership, ammunition purchases, library records, video rentals, you name it.

This will all be collected into a database, the purpose of which is ostensibly to fight terrorism, but which will present a massive opportunity for government
abuse.

March 1, 2002

Better Business Bureau's Safe Shopping -- 11,000 Web sites that have earned one or both of the BBBOnline Privacy and Reliability seals

October 4

Never Before Has Such A Powerful Piece Of Software Been Released To The General Public.

Now you can have instant access to all the information you ever wanted to find out on anyone! The PC Spy 2000 is the most sophisticated investigating software ever to hit the market and for the first time ever we are making it available to you. The possibilities are endless with this incredible program. Everyone has secrets, everyone is hiding something... now you can find out the truth.

CAUTION: What you are about to read is completely confidential

Sept 29

before September 25, 2000

Customer Expectations of Privacy

Who loves the concept of permission marketing better: online marketers or online customers? The truth is, marketers love it to bits. Because getting permission enables them to be the good guys. But how excited by "permission" are the tens of millions of regular folks out there in cyberland? How many people really recognize a permission-based marketing campaign for what it is and how it protects them? Not too many, according to Nick's investigation of the top sites and their privacy policies.

no service available commercially can successfully recover any data eliminated with this program

First Monday articles

Forbes cover story

Okay, so you've heard it before: America, the country that made "right to privacy" a credo, has lost its privacy to the computer. But it's far worse than you think. Advances in smart data-sifting techniques and the rise of massive databases have conspired to strip you naked.

Organizations

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit, non-partisan organization working in the public interest to protect fundamental civil liberties, including privacy and freedom of expression, in the arena of computers and the Internet. This site is useful to the beginners of the internet, as it explains how to protect your privacy while on-line.

Polls, surveys, studies and stories in newspapers and on TV show that concerns about the way businesses treat personal information and secure transactions in cyberspace influence whether people shop online. To assure the growth of electronic commerce, it is imperative that consumers feel safe online.

The Online Privacy Alliance is a group of corporations and associations who have come together to introduce and promote business-wide actions that create an environment of trust and foster the protection of individuals' privacy online.

This site has tried to bridge the gap betwen comsumers and corporations to ensure the consumers safety and fullfilling the needs of the industry.

PrivacyChoices

PRC

An article about privacy invasion in Microsoft registration process

Last March, privacy advocates cried foul over Microsoft's registration process, which they said the company could use to collect information about users' Web surfing habits without their knowledge.

Buffalo News article about privacy

Privacy began dying somewhere between the time Microsoft founder Bill Gates was dropping out of Harvard and Dell Computer founder Michael Dell was becoming a billionaire.

The birth of massive databases to store information and high-speed computer chips to search for and retrieve data have made protecting personal privacy a 21st-century challenge.

Cryptography and the First Amendment

The ACLU has worked to ensure that First Amendment protections are extended to each new communications technology telephones, radio, television, cable, and now on-line communications. The ACLU has appeared before the Supreme Court and the Courts of Appeals in numerous cases involving the First Amendment, both as direct counsel and as amicus curiae. In fact, before the ACLU began its First Amendment litigation decades ago, First Amendment protections had not yet been extended to actions by the states and no statute, however unconstitutional, had ever been struck down as violating the First Amendment. We believe that encryption is necessary to protect First Amendment rights in all of these media (as well as protect privacy, discussed later), and we have participated in litigation and worked on legislation to protect the right of Americans to use encryption.

Americans for Computer Privacy

A very informative site. Lots of in-depth backgound in the "about the issue" link. Great detail regarding the legislation.

right to privacy.com

Center for Democracy and Technology

National CPR

Be informed about Internet privacy

For the first time in history, your speech, communications, beliefs, preferences, orientations and daily activities are being digitally archived. Your personal and private information is gathered every time you use the Internet. One site might ask for your birthdate, another might ask where you live, while a third wants to know how much you earn. These little requests for information often go unnoticed. What you don't realize, however, is that behind the scenes, this information is pooled into large databases by information aggregating companies (and others) and, combined with your credit information, education history, medical records, census info and more, the data is used to create eerily accurate profiles on you and millions of other netizens around the world. These profiles are then made available to third parties, that resell the information to marketers and advertisers, often without your knowledge or consent.

Vendors Broach End-User Privacy Issues

A SMALL BUT discernible trend in the technology used to target consumers is focusing on protecting privacy rights rather than invading them. Companies are discovering that there is money to be made in offering privacy protection along with their much-prized one-to-one marketing model.

The first products are bubbling up out of the PC online support industry.

For the full story:
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/02/14/000214hntech.xml

DoubleClick Invades Privacy?

"Cookies" (those tiny text files that some sites create on your system) generally are very, very safe. For example, by design, only the site that creates a cookie normally can read that cookie.

But DoubleClick---the huge ad-banner company--- has overcome that limitation through social engineering: They're paying 10 large web sites for user data. If you go to one of these sites and make a purchase or enter any private information, DoubleClick now has a way to get that data, and to link it to what should have been the anonymous cookies generated by your visits to any of the 1500 or so web sites in the DoubleClick network.

In other words, DoubleClick is using human intervention to overcome the privacy protection that's built into Cookie technology.

Reader Chuck Quenzler was the first to alert me to this, and he sent along an address for more info, including how to opt out of DoubleClick's profiling, and more:

http://www.cdt.org/action/doubleclick.shtml

Even so, I have to admit I wasn't sure what to make of all this at first, but then reader Gary G. Taylor sent me this link:

Attorney General Jennifer M. Granholm today announced that she has initiated legal proceedings against DoubleClick, Inc., the world's largest Internet advertising business, and two web sites that it owns and controls, IAF.net and NetDeals.com.

In a Notice of Intended Action filed today, Granholm alleges that DoubleClick has violated the Michigan Consumer Protection Act and other laws by failing to disclose to Internet users that DoubleClick is systematically implanting electronic "cookies," or electronic surveillance files, on the hard drives of users' computers without their knowledge or consent. According to Granholm, DoubleClick is then compiling personal user profiles on consumers which, potentially, can be linked directly to a consumer's name, home address and e-mail account. DoubleClick has collected 100 million consumer profiles according to news reports....

There's a problem with this release because cookies are not "electronic surveillance files." By themselves, they're harmless, static text files, and actually are highly useful. The problem is not with the cookies, but with their abuse--- when DoubleClick works around the cookies' inherent safety and anonymity, for example.

Still, it's clear something bad is going on here---Check it out for yourself!

Government Ponders Internet Privacy Issues

AMID HIGH-PROFILE charges that online ad giant DoubleClick is infringing on consumer privacy, Capitol Hill is considering several online privacy bills -- portions of which worry some technology groups.

Several bills introduced in 1999 are aimed at online consumer privacy protection. Industry groups such as the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), however, fear that some of the bills are shortsighted.

DoubleClick's apparent attempts to defeat Cookie privacy

Reader David J Snyder dug out a bunch of opt-out links for DoubleClick and many other ad-tracking companies as well; he says he got the URLs from an issue of PC Computing.

http://www.247media.com/privacy.htm

New Bill Targets TV Privacy

While Web privacy gets plenty of attention, a California legislator thinks TV viewers are increasingly vulnerable electronic privacy invasion. She's introduced legislation meant to limit use of viewer tracking info by next-generation TV services.

JUNKBUSTERS Privacy Headlines

Most junk doesn't find you by accident. It's carefully targeted based on information about you held in what we call junk databases. To stop junk and to protect your privacy you need to control the information stored about you in these junk databases. Here are the main ways you can do that.

DoubleClick Plan Falls Short

by Chris Oakes
3:20 p.m. 14.Feb.2000 PST
Privacy advocates are not impressed with DoubleClick's new multi-point consumer privacy plan.

Experts say the Net ad agency's opt-out approach does not provide an adequate solution to the privacy risks inherent in their practices.

14.Jun.1999
DoubleClick, one of the Net's biggest ad firms, said on Monday it agreed to buy consumer data marketer Abacus Direct in a US$1 billion stock swap.

The combination would create a powerful online direct-marketer armed with a rich offline database -- complete with names, addresses, and phone numbers -- on millions of Americans. While that might sound like a boon to advertisers, it has some privacy advocates crying foul.

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,20205,00.html

DoubleClick Inc. chief executive Kevin O'Connor said Tuesday the privacy concerns that have sparked government inquiries into how the Internet advertising agency gathers personal information are industry-wide issues.

DoubleClick, which places advertising banners on Web sites and keeps track of who views them, has become the target of inquiries by attorneys general in New York and Michigan as well as the Federal Trade Commission.

****DoubleClick's Big Blow****

AltaVista and Kozmo are distancing themselves from the controversial ad-banner firm because of consumer privacy concerns.

DoubleClick privacy czar to be 'inside watchdog'
By Christine McGeever, Computerworld

The Privacy Partnership is a grass-roots initiative, open to all, that is intended to educate the Internet community about this important issue. Members include America Online, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Microsoft, Netscape, Snap, Yahoo! and TRUSTe.

DoubleClick was under serious fire for plans to 'de-anonymize' the user information it captures online. The company's stock dropped. Customer Web sites got nervous. In the end, DoubleClick turned tail.

In recent issues, we discussed the intent of DoubleClick---the banner-ad giant---to circumvent the privacy safeguards built into "Cookies" by buying databases that contain detailed purchase and registration information, and matching the anonymous Cookie information with the information from the databases. The result would have been DoubleClick's knowing more about your web habits and practices than anyone else. (See http://209.41.41.165/newsletters/2000/feb-21-00.htm#2 and http://209.41.41.165/newsletters/2000/feb-28-00.htm#8 )

AltaVista is changing its policy about releasing customer data to DoubleClick; they will now require customers to "opt-in" before they share the data. Sorry, AltaVista; only half credit for deciding to do WHAT YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOING ALL ALONG:

A HIGH-PROFILE INTERNET crime report delivered to President Clinton on Thursday immediately drew the ire of key privacy groups.

Chaired by Attorney General Janet Reno, Clinton's Working Group on Unlawful Conduct on the Internet concluded that some federal laws do not translate well to Internet crime.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/en/xml/00/03/09/000309enreport.xml

Business Week believes there is a better way. Instead of a conflicting patchwork of state rules, the federal government should adopt clear privacy standards in the spirit of the Fair Information Practices--a philosophical framework for privacy protection that has been adopted worldwide over the past 25 years. The broad principles are essential:

-- Companies conducting business online should be required by law to disclose clearly how they collect and use information.

-- Consumers must be given control of how their data are used.

-- Web surfers should also have the ability to inspect that data and to correct any errors they discover.

-- And when companies break the rules, the government must have the power to impose penalties. ''All of these bits you are sending out are your digital DNA,'' says Tara Lemmey, president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ''You should have control of that.''

what do you think?

If you have nothing to hide, what are you afraid of? At the Bistro, you can talk to others about it.

Look at the Ricci Street Traffic Report. It's about visitors collectively, not individually. See the Ricci Street Privacy Policy. While the proprietors will never reveal anything about you individually, it is most helpful to know about you collectively. As Gerry McGovern writes in The Caring Economy:

The more I think about the Internet the more I realise that it is much bigger than the wires and computers that seemingly house it. It is in some ways like millions of doors that millions of imaginations flow through. Dreams, desires, ideas, hopes, emotions, language and expression spark and ignite across its vast and expanding surface.


issues and policies for exploring webs


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modified: September 25, 2000 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/port80/shoreline/privacyresources.htm

Privacy Resources

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November 2002