http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703294904575385532109190198.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

Interesting reading, but it makes me wonder about the classic New Yorker cartoon gag, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” After reading this article, I’ll bet someone out there not only knows who’s a dog, s/he also knows the names of the dog’s fleas.

Scroogle scraper is way cool. Thanks. The secure SSL version of Scroogle can be found here:

https://ssl.scroogle.org/

Not only is the SSL version useful for bypassing all the Google data collection, it encrypts the search terms between your browser and Scroogle, and creates a blank referrer to links.

If you’re using Google at work, your employer is likely logging everything you do on the Web, including the search terms you enter in Google. That won’t happen using the SSL version of Scroogle, unless your employer also has a keylogging program or dongle on your computer.

also HOH #159 “(… puts her tinfoil hat on and covers the windows with black plastic …)”

Geez, still cracking up at that one!! too funny!!

I read your pal’s post, and he mentions not using Internet Explorer. Good advice that I’ve posted here before.

Coincidentally, today’s free Wall Street Journal article on digital privacy reveals that Microsoft *intentionally* weakened privacy protections in IE8 because they feared loss of ad revenue, having just spent $6 billion on acquiring an online ad company.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383530439838568.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories

Quoting from the article:

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The online habits of most people who use the world’s dominant Web browser are an open book to advertisers. That wasn’t the plan at first.

In early 2008, Microsoft Corp.’s product planners for the Internet Explorer 8.0 browser intended to give users a simple, effective way to avoid being tracked online. They wanted to design the software to automatically thwart common tracking tools, unless a user deliberately switched to settings affording less privacy.

That triggered heated debate inside Microsoft. As the leading maker of Web browsers, the gateway software to the Internet, Microsoft must balance conflicting interests: helping people surf the Web with its browser to keep their mouse clicks private, and helping advertisers who want to see those clicks.

In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads. Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.

[... snip ...]

Microsoft’s decision reveals the economic forces driving the spread of online tracking of individuals. A Wall Street Journal investigation of the practice showed tracking to be pervasive and ever-more intrusive: The 50 most-popular U.S. websites, including four run by Microsoft, installed an average of 64 pieces of tracking technology each onto a test computer.

[... snip ...]

Web browsers like Internet Explorer can play an important role in protecting privacy because the software sits between consumers and the array of technologies used to track them online. The best-known of those technologies are browser “cookies,” small files stored on users’ computers that act as identification tags for them when they visit websites.

Some cookies, such as those installed when a user asks a favorite website to remember his password, don’t do tracking.

Others are installed on computers by companies that provide advertising services to the websites a user visits. These “third-party” cookies can be designed to track a user’s online activities over time, building a database of personal interests and other details.

The Journal’s examination of the top 50 most popular U.S. websites showed that Microsoft placed third-party tracking devices on 27 of the top 46 sites that it doesn’t itself own.

All the latest Web browsers, including Internet Explorer, let consumers turn on a feature that prevents third-party browser cookies from being installed on their computers. But those settings aren’t always easy to find. Only one major browser, Apple’s Safari, is preset to block all third-party cookies, in the interest of user privacy.

[... snip ...]

The Internet Explorer planners proposed a feature that would block any third-party content that turned up on more than 10 visited websites, figuring that anything so pervasive was likely to be a tracking tool. This, they believed, was a more comprehensive approach to privacy than simply turning off browser cookies, one that would thwart other tracking methods.

The group also planned to design the Internet Explorer set-up process so that it guaranteed the privacy feature would be used by most people.

[... snip ...]

The browser group and its manager, Mr. Hachamovitch, tried to hold their ground. They were reluctant to let advertising executives interfere with the new Explorer design, according to people involved in the debate. Microsoft said that Mr. Hachamovitch and other members of the planning group wouldn’t comment on the matter.

The debate widened after executives from Microsoft’s advertising team informed outside advertising and online-publishing groups of Microsoft’s privacy plans for Explorer. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer assigned two senior executives, chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie and the general counsel, Mr. Smith, to help referee the debate, according to Peter Cullen, Microsoft’s chief privacy strategist.

The two men convened a four-hour meeting in Mr. Mundie’s conference room in late spring 2008 to allow outside organizations to voice their concerns, including the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Online Publishers’ Association and the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

One of the attendees, Interactive Advertising Bureau Chief Executive Randall Rothenberg, says he was worried that Explorer’s proposed privacy features would block not just the collection of consumer data, but also the delivery of some Web advertisements themselves. He says the features “seemed to equate the delivery of advertisements with privacy violations.” He was especially troubled, he says, by the prospect of Microsoft turning the features on for all consumers, by default.

[... snip ...]

The former Microsoft executive says he had never before experienced a debate at Microsoft “so driven by external influences and conflicting priorities to protect users” as the tussle over the Explorer privacy controls.

[... snip ...]

When Microsoft released the browser in its final form in March 2009, the privacy features were a lot different from what its planners had envisioned. Internet Explorer required the consumer to turn on the feature that blocks tracking by websites, called InPrivate Filtering. It wasn’t activated automatically.

What’s more, even if consumers turn the feature on, Microsoft designed the browser so InPrivate Filtering doesn’t stay on permanently. Users must activate the privacy setting every time they start up the browser.

Microsoft dropped another proposed feature, known as InPrivate Subscriptions, that would have let users further conceal their online browsing habits, by automatically blocking Web addresses suspected of consumer tracking if those addresses appeared on “black lists” compiled by privacy groups.
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No surprises here… the only outside influences during the privacy debate were organizations who snoop on users and rely on the passivity/ignorance of users to keep the data flowing. Not one representative of privacy advocates in the meeting.

Foo on Microsoft. Use Firefox, Opera, Safari, IceMonkey, SeaWeasel, anything but IE. Set your browser to reject third-party cookies. Set cookie acceptance for only that session, and set data retention to be cleared out when closing the browser.

The three-letter agencies have also invested in companies that snarf up and analyze blogs, tweets, and even your book reviews on Amazon:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-in-twitter-blog-monitoring-firm

Quoting from the article:

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America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates – even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using “open source intelligence” – information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step – get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (“Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.

Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.
—

Now combine this with the so-called web analytics of the tracking beacons, cookies, etc., plus the user-specific info your browser coughs up on every page visit (IP address, browser name/version, operating system name/version), and there’s a pretty good chance that crunching all this data can identify the specific user.

Aside from the obvious spook usage, I’ll bet lots of “cease-and-desist” letters and harrassing lawsuits emanate from corporations trying to silence their web critics, having monitored and identified them using this technology.

(… puts her tinfoil hat on and covers the windows with black plastic …)

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia

Yes, Google and the CIA investing in the same company to do the same dirty work.

Quoting from the article:

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America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” – information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.

“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.”

U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.

Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.

“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”
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