Charter’s Web monitoring draws intervention from Capitol Hill | The Iconoclast - politics, law, and technology - CNET News.comIt looks like Charter may not start monitoring its user’s web activity after all. We shall see… 

It appears that a company is now selling a tool that will allow high resolution tracking of the motion of customers through stores and malls by triangulating on their cell phones. The technique involves tracking the phone through its globally unique IMEI number. The company claims that this is anonymous because only the phone company knows the correspondence between the IMEI and the customer’s real name.I have very little faith in that protection. There are simply too many ways one might extract that kind of information, which could then become widely available. One could even connect the location information and IMEI data to checkout records. After a couple of trips, it would be fairly unambiguous. This is certainly clever, but disturbing. There is no opt-in or opt-out, and the tracking takes place passively with no ability for the user to detect that it is going on.Shops track customers via mobile phone - Times Online

Fledgling Rebellion on Facebook Is Struck Down by Force in Egypt - washingtonpost.com  For a short time Facebook became the center of a fledgling activist movement in Egypt. Over 74,000 people registered on a Facebook page devoted to this issue. It became the primary communications path for this group, and enabled its explosive growth. It also contained the seeds of its rapid unwinding and the arrest and beating of the creator of that page.To me this is yet another example of the “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog” syndrome. People feel so comfortable in front of their computers, they will say and do things they would fear to do in public or face to face. Facebook is in no way anonymous, nor does it claim to be. While there are many tools that could have enabled these people to operate and organize anonymously, there is no evidence that they used any of them.The Internet is very powerful, but it is also very public. People wishing to use it in repressive countries need to take special care to protect themselves and their visitors. 

I encourage everyone to read this article by Declan McCullagh: Q&A with Charter VP: Your Web activity, logged and loadedThe gist is that Charter Communications, the third largest cable operator in the US, is testing a system to capture the URLs you visit when you browse the web, then provide that information to advertising networks through a third party company, NebuAd. They claim this information is “anonymized”, but I can’t really see how that is possible. If a company wants to target car ads at people who visit many car websites, then the advertiser must know that you have done so when you are shown the ad. Since they have your IP address, they know who you are (or at least have personally identifiable information).While the advertiser may not get the actual web logs, this is a huge amount of information, and I am sure more could be gathered by a clever and systematic set of advertising targets. For each narrow target, capture information on which users match the target criteria when there is an opportunity to show them an ad.The obvious solution is to prevent the ISP from gathering this information in the first place. Any kind of encrypted tunnel, like those provided by the various Anonymizer solutions, will prevent this kind of commercial espionage on their users.

New Sites Make It Easier To Spy on Your Friends - WSJ.com This article does not break any new ground, but does a nice job of listing and discussing a number of tools one can use to gather information on people. They pull from on-line information sources as well as public records for things like criminal history. For employers, it would be a good place to start before hiring someone to do a full background check.The big take away at the end is that you need to make sure you reduce your Internet footprint, specifically by taking care to check the privacy box on many sites, and to simply provide no or false information to others. For example, although I would never provide a wrong age to gain access to a restricted website, I almost never provide my correct birthday because to many other sites (like banks) use that as part of your identity verification. 

China won’t guarantee Web freedom over OlympicsHere is an interesting article on Internet censorship during the Olympics. Fortunately for visitors, it is easy to set up secure communication links back to the US before going over. VPN links back to a corporate headquarters outside of China can be a very effective conduit around the censorship. While Anonymizer’s commercial solutions are blocked in China, our censorship circumvention technologies are very effective within the country.  

I have some exciting news to announce today. Anonymizer is in the process of being merged with Abraxas <www.abraxascorp.com>. I initially started talking with Abraxas about a possible partnership but synergies between the companies were so clear the conversation quickly went from discussions of teaming to discussions of acquisition. Abraxas is a very well respected risk mitigation company with many unique technologies and capabilities. This combination will enable Anonymizer to significantly enhance and broaden its offerings. I am excited by the prospect of rolling out these new capabilities to our users over the next months and years.  This is the start of a new and exciting phase for Anonymizer.Anonymizer will continue to operate independently under the existing management team (including me) as an independent subsidiary of Abraxas. In addition, I am thrilled to be taking a very visible leadership position in Abraxas as their Chief Scientist. This change will have no negative impact on the level of privacy we provide to our users. My personal reputation is and has been closely linked to the ethical behavior and trustworthiness of Anonymizer. Nothing will happen to compromise that integrity.