In my last post I said some companies do better than others at scrubbing your confidential search logs as time passes. Google appears to be the worst of the major search engines from a privacy point of view; Ask.com, with AskEraser turned on, is among the best.
But there’s a far better answer than looking for the search company that …
Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life — online and off. Search engine companies offer a benefit in return: more relevant search results. The more they know about you, the better they can tailor information to your needs. But you pay a …
Encrypting your PC is one thing, but how do you keep it backed up? And how do you maintain easy access to the files if you work on several computers at different times?
One author I know has two simultaneous book projects going, both of them full of juicy material. He wouldn’t want his notes, drafts or recorded interviews to be cast …
Mike Masnick over at Techdirt, who had a kind word for my first post about “nothing to hide,” draws my attention to a short scholarly essay on the subject by GW Law School’s Daniel Solove. By way of rebutting the claim that we don’t need privacy if we do no wrong, Solove lays out what he calls a taxonomy of the many issues …
There’s an investigator I know, top of her profession, who once put her laptop in the trunk of a cab. By the time she reached her hotel, the laptop was gone. This happens thousands of times a year at airports, train stations, libraries and coffee shops. Sometimes the thief wants your hardware. Sometimes your data turns out to be more …
Ah, the land of the free.
Forrester Research has a depressing summary of international privacy protections for data stored in a cloud service like Mozy, Google Docs or Dropbox. (It’s a clever graphic done up as a “data protection heat map.”) The worst countries to live in, if you value your digital secrets, are marked with an …
A few years back, I did a long newspaper story about the FBI snooping on the private records of ordinary citizens. As my old editor Michael Kinsley likes to say, the scandal is what’s legal. The Patriot Act unleashed the FBI to search your email, travel and credit records without even a suspicion of wrongdoing. The FBI was doing it, in …
