“Social engineering,” the fancy term for tricking you into giving away your digital secrets, is at least as great a threat as spooky technology. We all know (right?) about the scam emails that inform you of a surprise inheritance or lottery win. Recently I came across a surprising variation: a scam that deliberately targets folks who …
Counterspy
Facebook: You’re Not the Customer, You’re the Product
Man, I love Bruce Schneier. Here’s a pithy, pitch-perfect summary of your relationship with Facebook:
Social networking websites are “deliberately killing privacy” in order to make a profit, according to renowned security author Bruce Schneier.
Speaking at the RSA Europe security conference in London on Tuesday, the BT Counterpane
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Encryption (Part 3): How to Keep Secret Files in the Cloud
In an earlier post, I speculated that DropBox and TrueCrypt could be a killer combination — a painless way to keep confidential files encrypted while taking advantage of online backup and synchronization. I’ve been trying this out for a while now, and these two free tools work very well together. You’ll need an hour or two to set up the …
Commercial Spying: Worse Than We Knew
The Wall Street Journal, which has been doing great work on Internet privacy, has a disturbing piece today on the way online data companies build “profiles” of your intimate life — even if you try to stop them by deleting browser cookies. The disclosures are not entirely new — Wired, for example, has done good reporting on it before — …
Passwords: How To Stop Ignoring The Expert Advice
By now you’ve heard endless warnings about the risk of short, trivial passwords. There’s a good chance you ignore them. Let’s talk about why that is and what you can do about it.
To begin with, it really does matter. Easy to guess passwords (12345, pet’s name, kid’s name, birthdate, etc) really do expose you to snooping and identity …
The Snoop In Your Browser: An Alternative
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 …
The Snoop In Your Browser
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 …
Encryption (Part 2): How to Back Up Encrypted Files
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 …
What Is ‘Privacy’: a Professor’s Taxonomy
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 …
The Case of the Stolen Laptop: How to Encrypt, and Why
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 …
Worst Government Snoops: Russia, China … and USA
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 …
Digital Privacy: If You’ve Done Nothing Wrong, Do You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’?
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 …