privacy

Google-

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I have deleted my Google+ profile, effective immediately.

I know, I know, I was all hot to join Google+, to the point of publicly begging for an invite. But now, after having played with it for a while, and after seeing how Google has once again failed to think their policies through with a social network, I’ve decided that the reasons to leave outweighed the reasons to stay.

In particular, I was concerned about the real-name policy–not because I was in violation, but because of the severity of the penalties involved and how arbitrary the enforcement seemed to be. I won’t recount all the stories (here‘s a starting point), but it reeks of the same lack of forethought that all of Google’s social products have shown.

I also got scared about this story, involving a longtime Google user who had his Google account suspended–and with it, virtually his entire digital life–because a Google bot wrongly flagged an image he had posted as being obscene. At the time, nobody at Google would tell him what was going on; it was only after his story went viral that a human being looked at the offending image and reinstated his account.

To me, these arbitrary and capricious uses of the banhammer are fairly terrifying, even though I’m not doing anything that comes close to violating Google’s TOS. I depend on Google for far too much of my digital life not to take seriously the possibility that I could lose it all because of a poorly thought-out policy, whether enforced by a human or by an algorithm. (Not to mention the fact that I have an Android phone linked to my account, which means a risk of even more pain.)

Add to all this the fact that Google+ doesn’t really offer anything that I don’t already get from Facebook, and that I’ve never been all that comfortable with Google Profiles anyway, and I see no reason to stay with Google+.

And I will also be looking at how to extract at least some of my digital life from Google’s clutches. I won’t be leaving entirely, or immediately, because so much of it is extremely useful. But I’m convinced now that it’s not wise to have so much of my activities dependent upon a single company–especially when that company is looking more and more like the Borg. I think it’s time to escape before I’m irreversibly assimilated.

 

Oh boy, here we go

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By way of Boing Boing comes word that it is now possible to quickly reproduce house keys on a 3D printer. Apparently all you need is the key code stamped on the key.

Of course, it’s already possible to take a photo of a key and recreate it. But this means it’ll be possible to create a database of house keys, matched to the locations of the locks they open, that can then be sold to enterprising burglars. Kinda like what’s been happening with credit card numbers for years.

For a long time, ordinary people have gotten adequate security from physical objects that they carry around. This is no longer true. Wonder how we’ll adapt?

 

No matter where you go, there you are

privacy, technology , 0 Comment

Ran across this excellent report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on threats to locational privacy–your ability to control information about where you are and where you go.

This is a good example of technology creating an issue that we never really had to think about before. Used to be it was difficult for even a dedicated sleuth to know where a particular person was at any given moment. (An example that leaps to mind: detective stories are full of scenes where the protagonist goes to the target’s neighborhood and asks around the local bars, looking for him.)

But now, many of us are carrying around devices that broadcast information about our location to anyone who cares to look. iPhones and other smartphones know roughly where they are by checking for nearby cell towers; people who have to pay tolls regularly can get devices for their cars that talk to the toll gate and debit an account; and many people deliberately reveal their location to search for nearby businesses or to make themselves findable by their friends. These services are useful, but they also make it far easier for us to be found, or to have our movements tracked, when there’s no good reason to do so.

For example, since most with toll passes don’t turn them off (or even have the ability to do so), some police departments with a flexible notion of civil liberties have taken to passively scanning various locations to collect information about who drives by. Street-corner cameras with facial recognition software allow the same kind of tracking for pedestrians. And transit cards, if they’re individually identifiable, allow anyone with access to the data to reconstruct a person’s route through a city. Usually, these systems have little or no privacy controls built in to them.

Not to mention what a sufficiently motivated individual might do, just with some clever searching. In January, Wired magazine put out this article in which their writer tried out a number of location-aware apps. At one point, he watched a random woman taking a photo in a park with her iPhone. Using the time and location, he was able to find the photo later on Flickr, and from the geotags on her photos he was able to deduce her home address. The usefulness to stalkers should be obvious.

Not that I think these apps are necessarily a bad thing; they just have to be used with a bit of thought. The solution, I believe, is simply to educate people about the privacy implications of their activities, so that they can make good decisions about what data they put out there.

Personally, I don’t yet have a camera that uses geotagging, but when I do, I plan on turning it off by default, and then turning it on only for shots I want to be locatable. And you can bet that if I ever have a FasTrak pass, I’ll figure out how to turn it off when I’m not near a bridge.