Posted 11:10 AM (0) comments

Gmail makes strange bedfellows

Its not often that Tim O'Reilly and I agree, but his weblog posting "The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It's Bogus" hits quite a few nails on the head. In particular, "There are already hundreds of millions of users of hosted mail services at AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo! These services routinely scan all mail..."

But these other services are claiming they scan for spam, while Gmail will scan for keywords to target advertising. This unveils the sad truth about the whole privacy cartel - its not privacy they want, its the end of capitalism. I understand that there are still a number of folks (all my age or so) that want to reclaim the "good old days" when commercialism was banned on the internet. Evidently, though, they've managed to snare quite a few younger people into supporting their view while claiming its all about privacy. A lot of them are also the same folks who have told us over the years that they only watch public television because it isn't crass like the sponsored networks. Have you checked the shilling on PBS lately? Not only the almost continual pledge drives, but the "underwriter billboards" have gone from a single text-only slide to full blown 30 second commercials. How is this really different from CBS? But I digress...

Tim's post (which also digresses) should be a wakeup call to the technological community.

Posted 9:26 AM (0) comments

But what about the courier?

According to the US Internal Revenue Service 1980s technology keeps electronically filed tax returns safe from prying eyes. Forms are only accepted from previously vetted tax preparers over private (or dialup) systems so that the data never hits the internet.

But how does that data get to places such as Intuit or Turbotax? Why over the internet, of course! So while I'm not worried about a break-in to the IRS files it should be relatively easy to intercept transmissions to the tax preparers. Given the potential size of the payoff (social security numbers, income figures, bank and stock data, etc.) these should be prime targets for criminals.

Posted 5:42 PM (0) comments

Sauce for the Google

With all the world and their mother (see previous story about CA state senator Liz Figueroa) up in arms about the privacy implications of Google's Gmail why aren't these same protectors of individual rights up in arms about Amazon's new A9 search service? A9 (which is, ironically, built on top of Google's search engine) requires that you log in then tracks your queries so it can "customize" your search results. So not only does Amazon know what you read it will now know what terms you search for and (presumably) which sites you visit from the results page!

Google has said they won't have humans reading the Gmail and I believe them. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, is an honorable man. Amazon's Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, is the guy who thought he couldn't patent every bit of web technology he used - or thought about using. I wouldn't trust the man to walk behind me, never mind to safeguard my whimsical searches.

But it is curious why the usual suspects (Larry Lessig, Dan Gilmore why haven't you chimed in on this?) ignore the anti-privacy implications of A9.

Posted 9:36 AM (0) comments

You'd think they might have something better to do

California state senator Liz Figueroa (D-10, Milpitas, San Jose, So. Alameda cty.) is introducing legislation to block Google's new Gmail service, calling it "an invasion of privacy". Evidently the senator isn't familiar with the meaning of that phrase. Gmail will be a free service, supporting 10 gigabytes of email storage for users. It will be advertising supported. Just as Google posts targeted ads on its web search pages and supplies them to other web sites under the rubric "Ad Pages", so too will it target ads around the email contents. To do this the service will scan the contents for key words. Just like it does on search results or AdSense placements. And nothing is done without the consent of the user.

So any of the privacy nazis who are complaining so vociferously have a simple solution - don't subscribe to Gmail. No legislation needed. Please, senator Figueroa, get back to trying to balance the budget - something that will impact people's lives.

Posted 8:58 PM (0) comments

Government regulated protection racket

A task force on computer security for the department of Homeland Security this week issued a report threatening corporate CEO's with government regulation if they didn't voluntarily comply with the task force's guidelines.

The guidelines, though, are drawn in a way that benefits security firms (such as RSA) as their products are likely to be seen as more compliant than home-grown security tools. The chairman of the task force is Arthur Coviello of RSA Security.

By aiming at CEO's, already beleaguered by Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory challenges, the task force may be trying to bypass the relevant input of enterprises' IT staff. Its a remarkably despicable approach, combining fear of terror attacks and fear of government prosecution in an attempt to drum up business.

Regulations already exist covering the protection of both customer data as well as corporate secrets. Shareholders do have recourse should a corporation have security problems. This is a report which should be shot down and buried.