Web Attack Uses Google Geolocation Database to Identify Address of Routers

"First of all, as usual with stories like this, I have to refer back to my old essay that deals with the Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity.

Second, this hack isn’t new. See the Skyhook Wireless antics, circa 2008.

Third, the article below doesn’t make it clear, but this will only reveal your exact location if you’re using a wi-fi router that is in Google’s location services database."

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Location Oakland, Ca - Private Investigator

Outrageous Facebook habits of young women or outrageous sexist reporting by Mashable?

"Of course people do have the option of making part or all of their profile private, but why should they have to? As much as people, particularly the older generation, don’t like to admit, most of us don’t care about privacy. We like people being able to find us, or to share photos of friends and being able to look at people from school and vice versa. So why should they care? another girl who will become an addict another girl headed to addiction What has been most surprising about the Mashable post is that it focusses entirely on the survey results about women.

We are told that ‘the study sampled the habits of 1,605 adults using social media between May and June of this year in an attempt to break down their social media habits.’ That’s ‘adults’, so it’s not just women. What about the statistics on men? The results show that 20% of men use Facebook as a way to ‘hook up’ with people (only 6% of women do this). 24% of men, compared to 9% of women, have broken up with someone via Facebook, and 65% of men are OK with dating people they’ve met online. Don’t men put pictures of themselves drunk online?

Oh they do, it’s just that society (or this hack writing for mashable) still seems to think it is unacceptable to see women drunk. Surely if we continue to publish articles like this which focus on women, this backward attitude will continue?"  
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Location Oakland, Ca - Private Investigator

The Secret Life Of Teens Online

"The majority of this Internet-savvy generation of teenagers is confident in their safety online, but more than one-fourth have inadvertently infected their home computers with malware, and 14 percent share passwords with friends.

A new report by McAfee reveals how teens' perception of safe online behavior doesn't exactly match the risky ways they operate on the Net: Ninety-five percent say they are confident they can remain safe online, but in the meantime nearly one-third of them have downloaded a program without their parents' knowledge, and one-fourth of teenage girls say they chat online with strangers."  
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Location Oakland, Ca - Private Investigator

Securing your Facebook privacy settings

"One wonders if Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Facebook executives are wishing they could declare a do-over right about now, dating back to late April. That’s when Facebook held its developer summit and unveiled plans to make the social network even more ubiquitous on the Web—and that also raised a number of serious privacy concerns among Facebook users. Since then, Facebook has been the subject of what seems like a daily drumbeat of headlines about its privacy policies, whether it’s users quitting the social network service or pundits advocating for improved privacy rules."
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Location Oakland, Ca - Private Investigator

Proposed privacy legislation could nix business access to Social security numbers and addresses

"Proposed legislation on privacy landed with a thud when it was unveiled Tuesday — drawing criticism from both Internet and advertising industries, which are leery of regulation, and consumer privacy advocates, who say the bill does far too little to protect consumers."

"The bill stipulates that as a general rule companies can collect information about consumers unless a person opts out of that data collection — a point of contention among privacy advocates.

The regulation also specifies standards for the collection and use of personally identifiable information. Companies must disclose to consumers if they are collecting personally identifiable information and how they are using that data. Consumers must give a company permission to share that personally identifiable information with outside companies.

Companies also would need permission from consumers to collect sensitive data, such as medical records, financial accounts, Social Security numbers and geographic location information."

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Location Oakland, Ca - Private Investigator

Seattle Area transit cards record where and when passengers travel

Expanded use of a regional transit card in four Puget Sound counties is raising privacy concerns.

The ORCA card can be used to pay for rides on buses, trains, boats, streetcars and vans in King, Kitsap, Pierce and Snohomish counties. But a report in The Seattle Times warns that the cards record where and when those passengers travel.

That information is available upon request to employers who subsidize the cards for their workers. About 2,000 companies and institutions offer such subsidies.

Lee Tien, senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, says he doesn't understand why transit agencies actually need the enormous amount of trip data ORCA generates. He said San Francisco's BART works just fine with a magnetic stripe card that doesn't record locations.

Individuals who don't get their ORCA card from work may also have privacy concerns. If they register their card to protect against loss or theft, their personal information goes into the transit-agency database.

ORCA - an acronym of One Regional Card for All - is a card that riders use like a debit card, tapping it against an electronic reader as they get on a bus, train or boat. The cards either have cash balances that are spent per trip or are used as a flat-rate monthly pass. Card sales began in April, and ORCA will gradually replace 300 kinds of transit passes and paper transfer slips.


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Location Oakland, Ca - Private Investigator