Time to Boycott AT&T
June 24, 2006 | 4 Comments
Quoting SFGate.com:
AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers’ personal data with government officials.
The new policy says that AT&T — not customers — owns customers’ confidential info and can use it “to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”
The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service — something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing.
Moreover, AT&T (formerly known as SBC) is requiring customers to agree to its updated privacy policy as a condition for service
One more company destroying personal freedoms and abusing their customers. I’ll have to add AT&T to my list of companies I hate and avoid doing business with when possible. They join the “good” company of Sony, Microsoft, and Delta.
Tags: at&t, delta, microsoft, privacy, sony
Who’s Listening With You?
April 19, 2006 | 2 Comments
Integrated Media Measurement has created a technology using cell phones allowing them to sample the audio someone encounters in their daily life. The intention is to better understand what media people are actually consuming in this era of portable mobile media and devices.
Using a digital monitoring system based on open-architecture cell phones, IMeasure tracks media 24/7—including media that other research companies can’t accurately measure:
Television viewing outside the home
Time-shifted and on-demand viewing
Mobile device viewing and listening
Radio
DVDs, audio CDs and video games
Outdoor
Theatrical films, live concerts and sporting events
Cell phone videos and games
Identity Woman sums up my fear level in her statement: “Just wait until it isn’t just that they are tracking.” I’d take it a step further and say wait until it isn’t voluntary.
Tags: immi, integrated media measurement, privacy
Religious Right Against RFID
March 26, 2006 | 4 Comments
In a recent Wired article titled, RFID: Sign of the (End) Times?, Katherine Albrecht’s stance against RFID is discussed. In short, she is a Christian who believes that RFID is the biblically foretold “mark of the beast” and in turn can be interpreted as the sign of the coming end of days.
I hate to find myself on the same side as someone I look at as a bit nutty, but who am I kidding, I’m just a few conspiracy theories away from wearing a tinfoil hat. Regardless of my distaste for her particular argument against RFID, hopefully it does ring true with the particularly political group of evangelical Christians who seem to have a stranglehold on the country at this point.
So if the leftist paranoid liberals hate RFID and the evangelical conservative right hate RFID, who’s out there pushing it on all of us? Oh yeah, big business…
Tags: business, conservative, evangelical, liberal, privacy, religion, religious, RFID, wired
My Cat Has A Computer Virus!?!
March 16, 2006 | 2 Comments
In a white paper released by the University of Amsterdam and promoted on RFIDVirus.org, an explanation of how RFID is actually vulnerable (in many cases) to simple SQL injection attacks.
How does this apply to your cat (or other pet for that matter)? Well, many veterinarians and the humane society now implant RFID chips in pets to help identify and match strays up with their original owners.
Their research group has developed a proof of concept following this basic scenario:
prankster decides to unwittingly enlist his cat in the fun. The cat has a subdermal pet ID tag, which the attacker rewrites with a virus using commercially available equipment. He then goes to a veterinarian (or the ASPCA), claims it is stray cat and asks for a cat scan. Bingo! The database is infected. Since the vet (or ASPCA) uses this database when creating tags for newly-tagged animals, these new tags can also be infected. When they are later scanned for whatever reason, that database is infected, and so on. Unlike a biological virus, which jumps from animal to animal, an RFID virus spread this way jumps from animal to database to animal. The same transmission mechanism that applies to pets also applies to RFID-tagged livestock.
Hopefully if this gets enough press, wide scale deployment of RFID can be further delayed.
Tags: cat, cats, privacy, RFID, rfid virus, university of amsterdam, virus
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
October 26, 2005 | 1 Comment
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act is an Act targeted at financial institutions, which also applies to higher education institutions. In turn, they must be aware of and in compliance with the Act. Of specific concern is the Safeguards Rule [PDF].
In summary:
Under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the Safeguards Rule, enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, requires financial institutions to have a security plan to protect the confidentiality and integrity of personal consumer information.
Luckily the FTC has published: Financial Institutions and Customer Data: Complying with the Safeguards Rule, which as the name implies gives a nice summary of how to comply. Of particuar interest to me is the “Information Systems” section.
As a quick side-note about GLBA, it turns out that maybe the single key reason this Act received bypartisan support and in turn passed is because of Victoria’s Secret.
Tags: act, education, federal trade commission, financial institutions, ftc, glba, gramm-leach-bliley, gramm-leach-bliley act, higher education, privacy, victoria's secret