Mark's Views, Perhaps — from behind my eyeballs
“It seems like people are no longer in control of their own privacy.”
No. Kidding. 🙄
Mr. Zhang sounds shocked. Please. Of course people have lost control of their privacy.
And most don’t care. 😯
Besides, haven’t we known for years that “Google is your friend”? Read it all
A look back at some things I saw online this week.
First of all, though, several of my many Google searches: Read it all
Google Street View near Perrysville, IN — except what you see below is looking up.
I have no idea what that is, though apparently it’s near a farm on N County Rd 200 E.
Some other blogger posted a more-zoomed-out version, though I have no clue why. I studied it and failed to find anything particularly outstanding.
Except for this: Read it all
Maybe it’s time to quit posting personal photos online.
Anywhere.
Actually, it’s too late for me.
But I could continue to abstain from posting photos of new family members.
See what you make of these excerpts from an article I quickly scanned tonight:
With Carnegie Mellon’s cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person’s online identity takes less than a minute. Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it’s a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait. In their most recent round of facial recognition studies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website where the vast majority of users operate pseudonymously with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities.
The repercussions of these studies go far beyond putting a name with a face; researchers Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross, and Fred Stutzman anticipate that such technology represents a leap forward in the convergence of offline and online data and an advancement of the “augmented reality” of complementary lives. With the use of publicly available Web 2.0 data, the researchers can potentially go from a snapshot to a Social Security number in a matter of minutes:
[…]
The relevant point here is not Schmidt’s thought on behavior and choice but the fact that, no matter what you choose to do or not do, your life exists in the cloud, indexed by Google, in the background of a photo album on Facebook, and across thousands of spammy directories that somehow know where you live and where you went to high school. These little bits of information exist like digital detritus. With software like PittPatt that can glean vast amounts of cloud-based data when prompted with a single photo, your digital life is becoming inseparable from your analog one. You may be able to change your name or scrub your social networking profiles to throw off the trail of digital footprints you’ve inadvertently scattered across the Internet, but you can’t change your face. And the cloud never forgets a face.
How naive we’ve been.
Well, for me, “had been.” The moment of awakening to this came several weeks ago. But still, prior to that was much too long a time to have been naive.
For a generally-suspicious, naturally-cynical, privacy-and-security-conscious person, that’s pretty bad.
But now it’s now…so…now what?
Do we just accept our fate and continue carelessly?
I say, “No!”
(So…?)
Wherein one Internet titan shows a thing or two to another Internet titan’s competing browser:
Users report Microsoft Security Essentials removes Google Chrome
On September 30th, 2011, an incorrect detection for PWS:Win32/Zbot was identified and as a result, Google Chrome was inadvertently blocked and in some cases removed. Within a few hours, Microsoft released an update that addresses the issue. Signature versions 1.113.672.0 and higher include this update. Affected customers should manually update Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) with the latest signatures. After updating the definitions, reinstall Google Chrome. We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused our customers.
An inadvertent inconvenience — yup. Sure. You betcha. 😆
But, hey, they apologized.
I can believe that.
Question is, does Google? 
Next thing you know, we’re going to hear about some strange search (non)rankings and (non)results for Microsoft products.
Maybe when you do a search for “word processor suite,” the results will show WordPerfect back its rightful kingly place. And Microsoft Word(no-perfect-there) will show up once at the bottom of the first page of results…with an ominous warning about it being a potential attack site.
Stand by, folks. This could get exciting.
We may be entering a new phase of the browser wars. 😯
Meanwhile, maybe you’d better play it safe. Use Yahoo! for search, Firefox for browsing, and WordPerfect for documenting. (And maybe Linux for an operating system.)
This PSA has been brought to you by Mark Roth, Ain’t Complicated, and your local browser. You’re welcome.
PS: Coming tomorrow — His Name Is Obama. If current plans don’t hold, well, that post won’t be coming tomorrow. Keep your browser tuned to this…ah…station.
I just thought I’d tell you.
Something is amiss.
Google isn’t coming up. Neither is Facebook. Nor Twitter.
I haven’t looked at the news yet, so I don’t know if this is widespread.
Or ominous.
Pity all the addicts of such services.
It turns out Google’s Street View cars found out more about Internet users than previously acknowledged. Last Friday, the company said the cars, which roam the world taking pictures for its location-based applications, scarfed up e-mail addresses, URLs and passwords from residential Wi-Fi networks they passed by in dozens of countries.
[…]
Some privacy advocates say Google’s admission highlights a common attitude among high-tech firms that rush to get out new technologies without enough consideration of how consumers may be harmed in the process.
“First they said they didn’t gather data; then they said they did, but it was only fragments; and today they finally admit entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords,” said John Simpson, director of consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog. “Maybe some Google executives are beginning to get it: privacy matters. The reality, though, is that the company’s entire culture needs to change.”
Source: Google ‘mortified’ that Street View cars scarfed up e-mail, passwords; privacy criticism intensifies
If they’re stealing and abusing data from people, what are they doing with the data people give them willingly?
Think: Gmail, Buzz, Maps, Docs, Search, API, and on and on!
Oh, and let this be another reminder to secure your wireless networks, OK?