This story is old hat to me. I now am able to suppress the expression of disgust on my face fairly quickly when I see the little microphone just above my head, but for those that don’t know, all new taxis in most major cities in China are bugged. More here.
Month: September 2010
Concerns about the future of the mobile web
Read about what Tim Berners-Lee was talking about at Nokia World 2010 under the four main themes of: privacy, accountability, neutrality, and finally bringing web access to the rest of the world reported by ReadWriteWeb.
UK companies are using insurance instead of security to protect your personal data
This really is NOT cool. UK companies, instead of investing in taking the privacy of personal data seriously, i.e. by implementing controls that prevent unauthorized access, they are taking out insurance policies to protect themselves from the ensuing damages that could follow. According to Beer, of the UK companies that had insurance protecting against “theft or misuse of assets such as electronic data or customer records”, an enormous 83% had successfully made a claim on the policy, compared with only 13% globally. Read more: Companies turn to insurance as data-loss safety net at PC Pro
Who watches the watchmen?
So this news about an engineer at Google who allegedly got fired for using his high-level access to stalk teenagers…
It’s nothing new to point out the risks with all the massive data mining that Google and others do through their services. It has been done before. What surprises me is that there seems to be such small reactions to when this data is clearly abused. People usually responds to surveilance that they have nothing to hide. Only criminals have somethin to hide. But is this really true? What if someone right now had access to all the emails you ever read, or written, all web pages you have visited, all search queries you’ve ever done, chat trancripts etc.? I have nothing to hide does not equal that I want to show you everything. Google insist that it’s doing good. I would say that that is a necessary tag line for a company that collects all the personal data on everybody they can reach on the internet. The problem is that Google is a company, full of people who might have their own definition of “doing good”.
Hackers block regime critics in Malaysia
Saw this the other day… It seems that regime critics are getting their blogs and websites ddos’ed in Malaysia. Jose Nazario, senior security researcher at Arbor Networks, claims this on his blog. Not that this is the first time we see political ddos attacks.
Twitter changes everything!
I’m a big fan of Twitter. When I first got introduced to it I was highly sceptical, but have since changed my oppinion. Although it sort of promotes the opposite of what I have posted before on blogging, I really like what the the 140 char restriction brings to the communication.
On that note, I saw this comment on Kanye Wests stream of tweets two days ago. Perhaps not the most revolutional insight that twitter further evolves how people communicates, but still true enough to warrant a post.