The European Parliament appears to be trying to create a regulation to require search engine companies to retain total information about their user’s searches for a period of years. If you are in the EU area, I strongly encourage you to reach out to fight this.

Declaration29: “A group of members of European Parliament is collecting signatures for a Written Declaration that reads: ‘The European Parliament [...] Asks the Council and the Commission to implement Directive 2006/24/EC and extend it to search engines in order to tackle online child pornography and sex offending rapidly and effectively’.

The Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC requires that details on every telephone call, text message, e-mail and Internet connection be recorded for months, for the entire population, in the absence of any suspicion. As to what is wrong with data retention please refer to DRletter. The Written Declaration even wants to extend data retention to search engines, meaning that your search terms could be tracked for months back.

The proposed declaration has been signed by 371 MEPs (list of names here) – and thus reached the 368 members needed to pass it. Many MEPs signed because of the title of the document (‘setting up a European early warning system (EWS) for paedophiles and sex offenders’), not knowing that they are endorsing blanket data retention as well. More than 30 MEPs decided to withdraw their signature, one even on the day of adoption.”

I am very excited to be organizing a couple of panels at this year’s “Computers Freedom and Privacy” (CFP) Conference in San Jose June 15-18.

Historically the conference has focused on personal privacy / freedom issues, technologies, and policies. That was certainly my focus as well when I started Anonymizer. Over time I have become aware of some other aspects to the privacy issue that I have not seen discussed. In addition to corporations impacting privacy of their customers, users, employees, etc. they also have issues and needs for privacy themselves.

Companies activities are monitored, analyzed, blocked, misinformed, and censored. While these have analogs in the personal privacy world, the details, impacts and scale, and solutions to the problems are often very different.

I am organizing a panel to discuss these issues at the conference and would love to hear from others who may have experienced these kinds of issues and would be willing and able to share them at this conference.

This year the “Computers Freedom and Privacy” (CFP) conference is taking place in San Jose from June 15-18. This year is the 20th anniversary of the conference which helped shape my thinking about Internet Privacy and introduced me to many of the key players in this space.

Around the same time in 1992 an email mailing list started called “Cypherpunks”. Members were devoted discussions of Internet freedom and to creating and distributing privacy and security tools. Best known of these are the various flavors of Anonymous Remailers following the original anon.penen.fi.

This seems like a good time to stop and take stock of what has been achieved, lost, and abandoned in the evolution of privacy and anonymity on the Internet. I have organized a panel at CFP of some of the key Cypherpunks from the early days to talk about those early days, and share their vision and insight about where we are and where we should / are likely to end up.

I hope I will see many of you there.

Having just finished initial testing with the actual iPad device, I am pleased to announce that Anonymizer Universal (AU) provides the same level of support on the iPad that we have been providing for the iPhone and iPod Touch!

Considering how these devices are going to be used, the combination of privacy along with the security when using insecure WiFi is really critical.

I am really excited to announce our new product “Anonymizer Universal” (AU), available starting today. AU represents a totally new architecture for our services.

Not only is it more powerful, faster, and much more capable, but it now also supports Mac and iPhone platforms! With one subscription you can use it across any of the supported devices.

Our new solution is VPN based, and bypasses any specific software support issues. AU works with any browser. Any program that connects to the Internet will automatically take advantage of AU. All connections between your computer and Anonymizer are cryptographically protected.

AU continues to leverage our massively scaleable backend infrastructure that provides the anonymity and daily rotating IP addresses.

AU will replace both our “Anonymous Surfing” and “Total Net Shield products”. “Nyms” is becoming all web based and will soon be upgraded with new interface options and better integration.

Expect to see more new capabilities and expanded solutions going forward as the renewed and expanded resources we are devoting to these products bear fruit.