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Sunday, August 13, 2006
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A new service that measures radio signals beamed between your cell phone and cell phone towers could soon help speed up your commute. IntelliOne Technologies, a company that specializes in using mobile phone network usage to measure roadway speeds, has launched a real-world test of its technology along the streets, freeways and highways of Tampa, Florida. Called Need4Speed, the test will run from Aug. 7 to 18. The company's technology takes advantage of the fact that wireless devices in motion communicate constantly with multiple cell towers. Wireless carriers use this data to maintain and optimize their networks, but this information can also be converted into speed and travel time information for any roadway that has cell phone coverage. The new service isn't the only example of a creative use for cell phone towers. In another recent study, scientists used dips in cell phone signals during storms to measure rainfall.
6:02:55 PM 
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Amazon.com is developing a system to gather and keep massive amounts
of intimate information about its millions of shoppers, including their
religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and income.
The database, which would combine information disclosed voluntarily
by customers with facts gleaned from public databases, conceivably
would give Amazon a larger or more detailed profile of its customers
than any other retailer.
The Seattle-based company, with 59 million active customers, said it
has no immediate plan to implement such a program. Its ability to do so
emerged in a detailed patent application with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, disclosed Thursday.
A privacy expert said customers should be wary about Amazon having
the capability to gather such a large amount of detailed information.
She said the data could end up in the hands of the myriad retailers
that do business with the company, or with government officials or
hackers.
"Amazon never ceases to amaze me," said Lillie Coney, associate
director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington,
D.C.
"If they create this database, it will be used for other purposes.
... They are really creating something worth a great deal of value that
will help their company."
5:27:34 PM
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New Super-sized Customer Database for Amazon? dtjohnson writes "Amazon.com has applied for a patent to create an online customer database which would allegedly contain 'massive amounts of intimate information about its millions of shoppers, including their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and income.' From the article: "The database, which would combine information disclosed voluntarily by customers with facts gleaned from public databases, conceivably would give Amazon a larger or more detailed profile of its customers than any other retailer. Does this cross the privacy lin" [Slashdot: Your Rights Online]
5:20:27 PM
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OTTAWA -- Privacy advocates are raising fears that
the country's Internet service providers are turning into Big Brother
watching every move you make online.
Bell Sympatico, Telus, Bell Aliant, Primus and Rogers all have
clauses in their customer service agreements warning customers that
they could be monitored at any time.
Bell Sympatico set off controversy in June when it changed its
service agreement to allow monitoring, but University of Ottawa
professor Wade Deisman said the industry has been monitoring customers
for several years.
Lawyer Lawrence Greenspon, an outspoken advocate of privacy rights,
said the language in each Internet provider's agreement is too broad,
suggesting that they are monitoring customers' activities. "Given that it appears (this clause) is in all of these agreements,
there should be a huge concern for all Canadians," Mr. Greenspon said.
"This is an outrageous violation of individual rights."
In its agreement, Bell Sympatico warns customers that it intends to
"monitor or investigate content or your use of your service provider's
networks and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy any laws,
regulations or other governmental request."
The other service providers use similar - or even stronger - language.
4:48:31 PM
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Four neighborhood surveillance cameras will be installed this week
on D.C. streets as part of the city's crime emergency plan, which will
bring as many as 48 cameras to some of Washington's more violent areas
in the coming weeks. The first cameras will be installed in the
Northeast, Southeast and Northwest quadrants, on blocks where
robberies, drug dealing and assaults frequently occur, police said. All
will be encased in bulletproof boxes. As if to underscore the
crime problem, which has been marked among juveniles, a man was killed
yesterday at one of the sites, and a 15-year-old was charged in the
death. Ricardo Jones, 22, of the District was fatally shot at 14th and
Girard streets NW about 12:30 p.m. Last night, the teen, a male who had
been arguing with Jones, was charged as a juvenile with second-degree
murder while armed, police said. Had the cameras been up,
investigators could have checked whether the killing was recorded.
Cameras will roll 24 hours a day but will not be monitored live. "It's
not a panacea," Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said. "It gives us a
chance to see some crimes being committed in public places." The
cameras are part of the 90-day crime emergency package passed by the
D.C. Council last month in response to a summer crime surge. The
package also authorized 300 new police officers and a 10 p.m. youth
curfew.
4:29:15 PM
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NEW YORK -- Calling the terrorism threat to public safety "substantial
and real," a federal appeals court Friday upheld the constitutionality
of random bag searches by police in America's busiest subway system to
prevent terrorism.
The
2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday rejected a challenge to the
searches by the New York Civil Liberties Union, saying a lower court
judge properly concluded that the program put in place in July 2005 was
"reasonably effective."
The searches began after the deadly
terrorist bombings in London's subway system in July 2005. The NYCLU
filed a federal lawsuit to stop them, saying they were an unprecedented
intrusion on privacy and ineffective because they can be easily evaded.
The appeals court said it was proper for Judge Richard M.
Berman in Manhattan to conclude that preventing a terrorist attack on
the subway was important enough to subject subway riders to random
searches.
Berman had concluded that the searches were a
reasonably effective deterrent and that the intrusion on the privacy
rights of riders was minimal.
The appeals court said
counterterrorism experts and politically accountable officials had
undertaken the delicate task of deciding how to use their resources to
fight terrorism.
"We will not _ and may not _ second-guess the minutiae of their considered decisions," the appeals court wrote.
4:26:11 PM
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Privacy advocates in the United States and Canada have serious
concerns about the privacy of electronic health records accessed
through master patient index software developed by Initiate Systems,
which recently received funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm
of the Central Intelligence Agency. Canadian privacy
advocates have called for a federal and provincial investigation into
the relationship among the CIA, In-Q-Tel and Initiate. The
Veterans Health Administration uses Initiate's Identity Hub to
eliminate duplicate records and improve matching of records in its
master person index (MPI), which has 12 million entries. The software
is also used to help match patient records in a three-state regional
health information organization that the Markle Foundation's Connecting
for Health supports. The company's software is widely
used in Canada, particularly in the provinces of Alberta, Newfoundland
and Labrador, and Ontario. Canada Health Infoway, a federally funded
nonprofit corporation that leads e-health efforts in the country,
signed an agreement to use Initiate MPI software throughout Canada in
May 2004, almost two years before In-Q-Tel made its investment in
Initiate this March.
4:06:40 PM
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A survey last year that found that 7 percent
of 89 retailers and 11 percent of 120 consumer products manufacturers
had delayed or scaled back RFID investments because of privacy
concerns, according to Christine Overby, who follows the technology for
Forrester Research, a market research company based in Cambridge, Mass.
[...]
At a technology trade show in Las Vegas on May 1, a "Privacy Best
Practices for the Deployment of RFID Technology" was unveiled.
Headed by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a
Who's Who of commercial and public organizations that includes the
American Library Association, Cisco Systems Inc., Eli Lilly and
Company, IBM, Intel  Corporation, Johns Hopkins University, Microsoft, National Consumers League, and others.
This eclectic group has put together a comprehensive voluntary guide
for business and government to follow for ethical deployment of RFID
technology.
Some of the guidelines state: "Consumers should be notified
when entering a commercial or public environment where RFID technology
is in use. Wherever practicable, individual RFID readers should be
identified. Consumers should be provided with clear, conspicuous and
concise notice when information, including location information, is
collected through an RFID system and linked, or is intended by a
commercial entity to become linked to an individual's personal
information either on the RFID tag itself or through a database."
Susan Grant, vice president for public policy at the National Consumers
League, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, D.C., believes that
self regulation can be helpful, but only laws have the teeth to ensure
that privacy violations will be strongly deterred.
4:02:57 PM
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Did AOL Put Your Id Online?
Are you an AOL customer who is wondering if you are one of the 648,000 people whose searches were released by AOL? That data set has quickly been fed into searchable online databases so that anyone can search through them (but I'm not linking to them). You might think that AOL would have notified each member by now (it should be a trivial task for an AOL engineer to internally re-identify these people), but despite all their public apologies, they haven't said squat about notifiying their affected customers. Perhaps that's because their lawyers told them they might be on the hook for $658 million? So if you were a paying AOL customer from May to June this year, you might try the nifty little page the Electronic Frontier Foundation set up, which has AOL phone numbers, talking points, and a feedback form to tell EFF how it went. Also if you want to take some basic precautionary measures when searching the internet, try this handy guide Wired News made when the feds came after Google's data store (which Google has no intention of limiting, even though it could and its president CEO knows the data is a ripe target for the government). Photo: Griff le Riff  [27B Stroke 6]
3:39:01 PM
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The search records were available online for about a week before a
few bloggers stumbled over them, triggering an outcry about privacy.
AOL responded by yanking the records from its site, but by then it was
too late -- others on the Web were already making the records available
to all comers. On Monday, the company apologized, saying the original
release was unauthorized and contrary to its policies.
AOL may
have failed its customers, but it did the rest of us a favor by showing
the kind of information that search sites collect. Like AOL, spokesmen
for Google and Yahoo say records are kept for "as long as it's useful."
In some cases, the information is associated with a specific individual
-- for example, a Yahoo or Google account holder. In other cases, it's
linked to an Internet address, which can be traced (with some effort)
to a particular Internet access account.
The search sites have
a legitimate interest in keeping the logs, which help them make it
easier for users to find what they're looking for online. But users
have just as strong an interest in searching the Web without fear of
being watched. That's true not only for people who value their privacy
but also for those who don't want their activities online misconstrued.
Searching for "Al Qaeda training camps," for example, doesn't mean you
want to enroll in one.
3:36:07 PM
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Internet search engines are a marvel of the 21st
century. "Google" has become a verb. An astonishing array of
information is available with a few keystrokes.
The downside is that as easy as it is for you to
learn about the world on the Internet, you're one security blunder away
from the world being able to learn about you.
Despite the anonymity you may feel as you surf
the Net, your searches leave an electronic trail of your interests,
wishes and desires -- some mundane, some potentially embarrassing.
A security breakdown at AOL, disclosed this
week, exposed some 20 million search requests made by 658,000
subscribers during three months earlier this year. The release was
supposed to be exclusively to researchers, but the data surfaced on the
Internet and was widely copied.
Although the individuals behind those 20 million
searches were identified only by numeric IDs, bloggers and other
amateur investigators were quickly able to piece together some
identities. Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow from Lilburn, Ga., found
her Internet searches about pet incontinence, numb fingers and single
men featured on the front page of The New York Times.
3:33:18 PM
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Preventing Another Search Data Debacle. AOL's data leak is a disaster, but there may be some silver lining. By putting the spotlight on the dangers of Internet companies storing massive amounts of private information, the data leak could spur better business practices and Congressional action to protect privacy.
While AOL rightly apologized and began investigation into its practices, Google CEO Eric Schmidt unfortunately appeared to shrug off the issue, essentially saying "trust us." That's not an adequate response, as the LA Times and USA Today made clear in editorials this week:
- LA Times: "The companies say they keep their logs private unless forced by a subpoena or court order to share the data with investigators or lawyers. That's a start, but it would be far more comforting if they had clear data-retention policies limiting how long the information could be linked to individual accounts or Internet addresses."
- USA Today: "[AOL's] screw-up raises larger questions, however, about whether companies like AOL and Google should be storing search requests.... AOL's blunder ... shows their privacy safeguards fall well short of foolproof."
Those questions should also be taken up by Congress, as Rep. Ed Markey repeated this week. This issue isn't just about mistaken public disclosures -- the logs can be a dangerous honeypot of information for the government or any individual litigant wielding a subpoena. Congress must consider clarifying privacy protections and limiting data retention.
Take action now and spread the word about this critical issue. [EFF: Deep Links]
3:29:40 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Paul Hardwick.
Last update: 9/2/06; 4:22:14 AM.
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