In an interesting CNET article Google CEO Schmidt talks about how new technologies are going to impact society. One of his comments really struck me. Schmidt said that the only way to handle the new technologies is “much greater transparency and no anonymity.”

I have not seen the arguments and evidence behind such a bold claim. I would have argued exactly the opposite. We need MORE anonymity for users and more transparency and accountability from data collectors like Google.

This Article on Wired.com is about an initiative by Juniper Networks in collaboration with Feeva to sell a new tracking technology to ISPs.

The enhanced router would be sold to ISPs and will automatically insert your ZIP+4 into HTML headers. This will allow marketers to have much more accurate information about the user’s physical location.

They claim that the “consumer is not in any way stripped of their privacy” but fail to actually explain how that is the case. The point is for ISPs to get a piece of the advertising pie. The ZIP will be encoded, not sent in the clear, but will be available to some undefined set of “trusted third parties”. That does not give me much comfort.

I have seen many examples of websites which charge different prices based on where you live, or otherwise restrict access to web pages. This kind of targeting does not help me at all. If I want to be located, I have many ways of explicitly telling the site where I am.

This is another example of why you can’t trust your ISP. Their interests are not the same as yours. They have a strong incentive to track and monetize your activity.

Fortunately it is easy to take back control. If your traffic is encrypted within a VPN, then the ISP will be unable to insert this information. It gives you the absolute ability to enforce your own “opt out” even if the ISP does not want to give you the option. Anonymizer Universal(TM) provides an easy tool to accomplish this.

WikiLeaks seeded its database of documents by intercepting traffic through a TOR node they were operating.

This article at Wired highlights an almost buried section of this New Yorker interview with one of the founders of WikiLeaks.

Before the WikiLeaks site went live, the founders noticed that hackers were transferring stolen government documents over the TOR network. They captured over a million of these documents to form the initial core of the WikiLeaks archive.

This shows once again what I have been saying for a long time. Any privacy system that allows any untrusted and unknown person to become part of the infrastructure and have access to cleartext information is fundamentally flawed.

Any person with malicious intent can easily set up a TOR node and begin exactly the same kind of data collection that the WikiLeaks folks practiced.

Reputation is everything in this business. It is not practical for typical individuals to properly vet their providers. Track record, reputation, and respected third party endorsements are your best bet when choosing a privacy or security provider. Look for those for everyone who has access to your information.

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.