Google Transparency Report shows government surveillance, takedown requests are up.

The number of information requests coming to Google from governments around the world is growing fast. It is up 55% for the first half of 2012 vs. the first half of 2010. The linked article has some nice graphs showing the trend.

It is interesting to note that the US leads the world with over a third of the total requests, followed by India then Brazil.

The other even faster trend is in takedown requests. Since they are s search engine, not a host, this is really pure censorship. It is up 88% between the first half of 2011 and the first half of 2012. That is a true hockey stick. A lot of it appears to be trying to suppress criticism of government or government activities.

The more such information is gathered, the more important it is to take control of your own personal privacy.

censorship · google · internet · surveillance

CNET has a good description of exactly how to do it.

google · Policy · Privacy · privacy tool

Google and other online advertising companies like Vibrant Media, Media Innovation Group, and PointRoll, are using a flaw in Safari on iOS to track you despite your privacy settings.

iOS Safari is set by default to reject tracking cookies from 3rd party websites. That means that unless you are directly and intentionally interacting with a site it should not be able to cookie and track you. Specifically that is intended to prevent tracking by advertisers displaying banner ads on websites.

The hack is that these advertisers use a script within the website to cause submit an invisible web form to the advertising website, which looks to Safari like you directly interacted with that site and so allows the site to send a cookie. Another flaw in Safari causes those cookies to be returned to the 3rd party sites once they have been set.

Apple is saying that they will address the issue. Google is blaming Apple for breaking with web standards (even though almost all browsers support blocking 3rd party cookies iOS Safari is unusual in making this the default).

My suggestion:

1. On your iOS device (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) go to “Settings”, select “Safari”, scroll down and “Clear Cookies and Data”. Do this frequently.
2. Don’t log into Google or other social media sites through the browser, only use the dedicated apps.
3. Use those social media apps to “like” or “+1″ content, rather than doing so in the browser.
4. Protect your IP address with a tool like Anonymizer Universal so these sites can’t just use your IP address in place of cookies to track you when you are at home or work on a WiFi connection with a long term IP address.

The WSJ had the first article I saw on this, but it is paywalled.

9 to 5 Mac has a nice article on it.

John Battelle’s searchblog tries to look at this issue from both sides.

advertising · google · Privacy · tracking

A reader of this blog recently emailed me to ask:

What s/w do you recommend to keep anonymous while using Gmail, IE, Outlook, and Facebook on a laptop?

This is actually a very tricky question because the nature of all of these tools, except Internet Explorer (IE), is to be associated with a visible and discoverable account and identity in the “cloud”. I will discuss IE last and separately.

Gmail ties to your gmail and other Google accounts. Outlook ties to some existing email account at some email provider. Facebook is tied to your Facebook account and is explicitly designed for making your information public.

The profound question here is, what do we even mean by being anonymous using these services? I would argue that the best one can manage is to be pseudonymous; that is to maintain a persistent and visible pseudonym / alias which, while discoverable, is not associated with your true identity.

Fortunately Gmail and Facebook are free and typically do not require any real credentials to set up an account, and many of the free email providers work similarly. Using Anonymizer Universal (AU), and a browser with no history or cache to set up the accounts would ensure they were not connected to your real identity. It is important that the accounts never be accessed in any way except through AU, or they will be forever after associated with your real IP address. Furthermore, it is critical that the browser used is never used for any activity connected to your real identity, or the cookies and other digital detritus in your browser may allow these sites (or other folks) to tie the pseudonym to your other real name accounts.

IE is in many ways the easiest because there is no underlying account, but all the same rules apply. You need to ensure that you isolate your anonymous or pseudonymous activity from your real name activity.

For all of this activity a virtual machine can be a very effective tool. For example, if you use a Mac you can use a virtual machine running Windows or Linux for all of your alias activities and use the normal operating system for your real name activities. Similar tools exist for other operating systems.

anonymity · facebook · gmail · IE · laptop · Outlook · Privacy · software

Reuters reports that the Google admits that its Street View vehicles captured much more WiFi data than previously reported. It appears that they managed to capture entire emails and passwords among other information.

People are vilifying Google about this, but I am not going to get on that bandwagon. The reality is that they did this accidentally, but the architecture of WiFi allows any bad guy to do the same thing intentionally. Google did not “hack” in to these WiFi communications, they simply configured their WiFi cards to accept all packets flying by them through the air in the clear. Anyone sitting in a Starbucks, driving around town with a laptop in the passenger seat, or in a thousand other ways could intentionally capture and maintain much more information and with it do significant damage.

The take away from this is that you need to take precautions when using open public WiFi. Full VPN technologies like Anonymizer Universal ensure that when (not if) someone sniffs your traffic they will not be able to get any of your personal information.

One of the reasons interception of insecure passwords is so scary is the tendency for people to use the same passwords for many accounts. While you might not care if someone hacks in to your social network or news account, if you use the same password attackers might use it to log in to your bank or email.

google · internet · Privacy · security · wifi