source : http://www.adexchanger.com/

Nik Cubrilovic,  Entrepreneur, hacker and writer

original http://nikcub.appspot.com/logging-out-of-facebook-is-not-enough

Whilst the Important Update say Facebook has responded and issued a fix for this issue. See the follow up blog post "Facebook Fixes Logout Issue, Explains Cookies" I am very grateful that there are people about who go looking for this ....

CDT joined in a "friend of the court" brief filed at the U.S. Supreme Court in what could be one of the major Fourth Amendment cases of the decade, U.S. v. Jones, which poses the question of whether the police can plant a GPS device on a person's car for 24/7 tracking without judicial oversight.

The brief says: The issue before the Court in this case is not whether GPS tracking ever may be used by the government. Rather, it is whether the government must obtain a warrant in order to employ this technology.

CDT's brief was filed jointly with our frequent partner in Fourth Amendment cases, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  Several things make the brief special.  First, it is also signed by four technologists, whose expertise lends special credibility to the brief.  Moreover, one of the four is Roger Easton, often called the father of GPS for his groundbreaking work at the Naval Research Laboratory.  The other three represent the current generation of experts on networking, mobility and security: Andrew Blumberg of the University of Texas, Norman Sadeh of Carnegie Mellon, and Matt Blaze (who broke the Clipper chip) of the University of Pennsylvania.

And, the brief was written by Andy Pincus, a former Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States and one of the leading Supreme Court advocates today.

True to CDT's approach to tech policy issues, half of the brief focuses on the technology of GPS, half on showing how that technology interfaces with legal precedent.  Our main point is that GPS technology is fundamentally different from the "bumper beepers" whose use the Supreme Court ruled in 1983 was not covered by the Constitution's search and seizure clause.  GPS, in contrast, is so different from human observation and generates such precise and pervasive data that it violates the average person's reasonable expectation of privacy, even on the public streets.

For example, the brief notes that: As receivers shrink in size, it will be possible to install them in a person’s clothing… the government would be able to use the technology to track the movements of large numbers of individuals even more directly and precisely than through the attachment of a GPS receiver to a vehicle.

Oral argument in the case is scheduled for November 8.  The Court may not rule on the case until next year.

Full document here  http://www.w3.org/2011/tracking-protection/charter-draft

Scope

The Working Group will produce Recommendation-track specifications for a simple machine-readable preference expression mechanism ("Do Not Track") and technologies for selectively allowing or blocking tracking elements.

Proposed candidate technologies for this preference that the Working Group will consider include, but are not limited to, the use of an HTTP header to signal the preference and a site's response, and the use of a ECMAScript API or DOM property for the same purpose.

Additionally, the Working Group will define the scope of that user preference and practices for compliance with it in a way that will inform and be informed by the technical specification. The group will actively engage governmental, industry, academic and advocacy organizations to seek global consensus definitions and codes of conduct.

The Working Group may investigate monitoring of implementation and conformance to Recommendations by both user agents and Web sites.

Good article by Alistair Fairweather titled Four Very Different Mobile Payment Services  - there is more on the article than here and worth a read

This is his advantage and disadvantages and my added comments in colour

Approach one: Phones as credit card machines (Square)

Advantages

Ubiquity and familiarity of credit cards (at least in developed economies);

A clever and comfortingly familiar payment interface; and

The focus on small businesses and vendors has given them cheap and effective market penetration.

Disadvantages

Requires physical proximity between buyer and seller;

Requires a smart phone and special additional hardware (although it is free); and

Requires the buy-in of (historically unfriendly) banks and credit card companies (which may slow or limit international adoption).

All your lovely data is still not yours and make is easy for the status quo to remain, you can see some natural support from certain players who want to remain in power.

Approach two: phones as swipe cards (Google, Orange, Samsung, Barclays and many others)

Advantages

Incredibly simple and intuitive interface for users – just wave, beep and go;

Very quick and efficient for vendors of all kinds. No fiddling with change or waiting for credit card machines; and

Caters for “unmanned” purchases, such as vending machines.

Assumes that banking and payment separate

Disadvantages

Requires new technology at every payment point;

Very few handsets currently support it – although by 2014 that may have changed;

The old chicken-and-egg dilemma: merchants won’t adopt it until customers do, and vice versa;

If your phone is stolen, you’ve now also lost your credit card. Yikes.

Ah ah – you run out of battery….

All your lovely data is still not yours and could present certain strong players in an old sector with new powers to maintain dominance.

Assumes that banking and payment  

There is no escape

Approach three: SIM and/or USSD based mobile money transfers (M-Pesa)

Advantages

Lowest barriers to entry, since it works on more than 95 percent of handsets;

Low transaction costs; and

No bank account or credit card required.

Where there is nothing to compete with – probably unbeatable

Cannot be tracked (well you can but lets pretend)

Disadvantages

Tends to concentrate cash in some people’s hands and credit in others’, so physical cash transfers are still an issue, if a less frequent one;

Locks users into a particular mobile network provider; and

Since network operators are not banks, they cannot pay interest, offer credit, or other useful banking services, such as debit orders.

Power shift to operator and SIM – they think they have control but UI is so rubbish it makes programming a VCR clock look simple

Your data goes from Silo to big fat pipe

Approach four: voucher-based systems (MiMoney, AMMO)

Advantages

Familiar to consumers because of its similarity to airtime ;

No special hardware required by either customers or vendors;

No bank account or credit card required; and

Very safe since loss is limited to the value of vouchers. There’s no direct access to your bank account.

Cannot be tracked (well you can but lets pretend)

Disadvantages

Requires a bank account or credit card to be used most effectively. Trekking to a kiosk with cash sort of defeats the point of mobile money;

Without special hardware, the interface is clumsy for both vendor and customer. A credit card is still quicker and easier;

You cannot get the cash out once it is in the system unless you’re a merchant, so it’s very much a purchase-focused network, unlike M-Pesa.

The same chicken-and-egg dilemma as NFC.

All your lovely data is still not yours and could present certain strong players in an old sector with new powers to maintain dominance.

Image from:

The BBC reported this morning (18^th July 2011) on CatNav and CatCam (using tech to track your cat)

The reporter Richard Westcote chatted to Roger Tabor  a Pet Behaviour Expert.  [need to ignore Roger used to present for the BBC and that his report is paid for by Bayer – who sell cat worming – which Roger managed to slip in several times, but the BBC forgot to say this was a paid ad] However, there is a report here “the secret lives of cats” if you want to know what your cat gets up to, but that is not the point.

Mary Whitehouse  (if you don’t know who she is – you really should) would have taken this up and said (me creating the words now) “It is only a short step from tracking you pet to tracking you.  Once you believe it is safe and acceptable to do so, it will become easy for you to be hoodwinked into being tracked yourself.”

It is all about small steps of education or erosion.  Is there any value in your Digital Footprint?

Pressure adds as companies come forward to reveal that they are selling your data - why is this a headline?.   My book is focussed on the topic of exchanging your data for valu  and the business models that are being used.  I have written over 60 blogs about selling your data in the barter for Free.  Whilst I love headlines; can we re-focus from shock to there is an exchange and what value is created!

Article from the Register "TomTom sorry for giving customer driving data to cops"

"Navigation device maker TomTom has apologized for supplying driving data collected from customers to police to use in catching speeding motorists.  According to the register tThe data, including historical speed, has been sold to local and regional governments in the Netherlands to help police set speed traps, Dutch newspaper AD reported here, with a Google translation here. As more smartphones offer GPS navigation service, TomTom has been forced to compensate for declining profit by increasing sales in other areas, including the selling of traffic data.

On Wednesday, Europe's biggest satnav device maker apologized, saying it sold the data believing it would improve traffic safety and reduce bottlenecks, The Associated Press reported.

“We never foresaw this kind of use and many of our clients are not happy about it,” Chief Executive Harold Goddijn wrote in an email sent to customers. He went on to say that licensing agreements in the future would “prevent this type of use in the future.”

With the revelation, TomTom becomes the latest company to raise privacy concerns about location data it holds on its customers. Over the past week, questions have been raised aboutApple, Google, and Microsoft and the location data stored or tracked by the iPhone, and Android and Windows Phone 7 devices, respectively.

TomTom has said that any information it shares has been anonymized, but customers shouldn't take such assurances at face value. Past claims about the anonymity of data sometimes turn out to be horribly wrong – witness the debacles involving AOL's sharing of 20 million searchesand the release of Netflix users' viewing habits. It's not hard to fathom a scenario in which data supplied by TomTom could be used to figure out sensitive information about its users, such as where they live and work. What could possibly go wrong there? ®"

by Vikram P. Munishwa and Nael B. Abu-Ghazaleh

ABSTRACT

Smartphones have revolutionized the way in which sensing has been performed traditionally. The people-centric nature of smartphone-based sensing enables them to be a part of participatory or opportunistic sensing, where data is collected on a set of designated smartphones and delivered to a server. In this work, we identify the existence of another type of behavior, where the data is not delivered but archived locally on the phones for later retrieval. This type of behavior is common when the phone users capture some data (e.g. a video clip) out of their own interest. However, this complicates the future data retrievals due to the uncontrolled mobility of the data-capturing smartphones. Specially, the research

challenges for later data retrieval include finding the current locations of the required subset of the mobile phones that were present in a specific region at a specific time, without compromising location and identity privacy of the phone user. We discuss existing as well as novel architectural alternatives that can be used to address this problem, along with their qualitative evaluation

Full pdf is here

The AT&T Registry, powered by BlueKai, brings transparency to consumers by allowing them to see what preferences are being logged via the cookies on their computer. Furthermore, consumers can also control their anonymous profile by managing their topics of interest. Your preferences may be used anonymously to influence which types of marketing messages you receive across partner sites that we work with. Or you can choose to not participate at all via an opt-out.

Original article http://www.gizmag.com/die-zeit-interactive-tracking-mobile-phone/18295/

“While most of us know it is theoretically possible for our movements to be tracked by detecting which tower our mobile phone is connected too, it might come as a shock to see just how much of a digital footprint we leave as we go about our daily lives. German Green Party politician Malte Spitz and German newspaper Die Zeit have provided a frightening insight into just how much information can be gleaned from the digital breadcrumbs we drop every day by creating an interactive map showing Spitz's movements and activities over a five month period based on mobile phone data and information freely available on the internet.”