People probably won’t remember this but back during the 1990′s there was a big uproar amongst security folks about a major intel gather project that the FBI was investing a lot of money and energy into called Carnivore that was designed to  monitor email and electronic communications.

Then around 2005 it got replaced by another software package, and not it seems that they are going to replace it with something much better, cheaper, and easier to monitor.

I am of course referring to Facebook and Twitter.

For the pas couple of years I have not so jokingly said that why does the FBI, or any ‘secret’ agency for that matter, need to spend any money on so-called expensive special software to track what we are doing and saying when all they have to do is get access to the Twitter and Facebook firehose of data.

Well it seems that this is exactly what they are going to do if the post over at The Next Web by Harrison Weber is any indication. It seems that the FBI is on the hunt for a development team to create specialized apps that will scrape the social media data pipes and map all that data out in easy to digest formats.

For a semi-detailed look at what the FBI is looking for there is the following badly scanned official document that was posted to the Federal Biz Opps site

“SIOC intelligence staff need a tool to analyse social media focused on the situation in support of crisis operations that meets the intelligence objectives stated above”.

While there are some making light of this and having fun with the idea of agencies like the FBI using Twitter or Facebook as a tool for gathering questionable intelligence the fact is that more and more of our lives are being recorded in one fashion or another by these social networks and it is all searchable if you have the right access – which you can be assured the FBI will have.

Who needs Carnivore says FBI when we have Twitter and Facebook is a post from: The Inquisitr

Data storage is always a topic of conversation when it comes to computers, laptops, tablets, and especially servers. IBM scientists are looking at a new experimental storage technique called magnetic memory.

With this new technique, they’ve figured out how to make it 100 times denser than hard drive storage already on the market which means that this could potentially pack in 100 times more storage in the same size.

Imagine something the size of a typical hard drive, but with the storage of 100TB or more. Very intriguing and could revolutionize data storage as we currently know it.

Via IBM:

“By taking a novel approach and beginning at the smallest unit of data storage, the atom, scientists demonstrated magnetic storage that is at least 100 times denser than today’s hard disk drives and solid state memory chips. Future applications of nanostructures built one atom at a time, and that apply an unconventional form of magnetism called antiferromagnetism, could allow people and businesses to store 100 times more information in the same space. ”

“The chip industry will continue its pursuit of incremental scaling in semiconductor technology but, as components continue to shrink, the march continues to the inevitable end point: the atom. We’re taking the opposite approach and starting with the smallest unit — single atoms — to build computing devices one atom at a time.” said Andreas Heinrich, the lead investigator into atomic storage at IBM Research – Almaden, in California.”

Very exciting research and if IBM can pull if off in a reliable package, we could see our next generation of data storage.

We Could Store 100 Times More Data With ‘Magnetic Memory’ Says IBM Scientists is a post from: The Inquisitr

Steve Jobs downplayed the level of data kept by Apple on users following a Gizmodo report last week that an extensive level of information is being compiled and stored from users’ iPhones.

Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle detailed how his iPhone 4 had literally tracked his every movement since July:

The data itself is jarringly accurate. And even though it appears to rely on tower triangulation rather than GPS pinpointing (meaning you’re not safe with location services switched off), the map I was able to generate with mapping software the security duo released visualizes my life since the day I bought my iPhone 4 in July. Everywhere I’ve been. Bus trips home. Train trips to visit family. Vacations. Places I’d forgotten I’d even gone. Zoom in on that giant blotch over New York, and you can see my travels, block by block. My entire personal and professional life—documented by a phone I didn’t know was also a full time location logging device.

Jobs has taken time out to explain the functions of the devices, minimizing the level of data regarding individual users. In a telephone interview, he explained:

“The files they found on these phones, as we explained, it turned out were basically files we have built through anonymous, crowdsourced information that we collect from the tens of millions of iPhones out there,” Jobs reportedly said.

Jobs said the issue was one of informing users:

“As new technology comes into the society, there is a period of adjustment and education,” Jobs said in the telephone interview. “We haven’t, as an industry, done a very good job educating people, I think, as to some of the more subtle things going on here. As such, (people) jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions in the past week.”

In an earlier Q&A, Apple said the volume of data stored is a glitch they plan on fixing:

“The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly… We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data.”

In May, Apple is set to take part in a Senate privacy hearing.

[Apple Insider]

Jobs: Apple doesn’t track anyone is a post from: The Inquisitr

A very scary report has just shown up on Gizmodo written by Sam Biddle where he maps everywhere he has been over the last year.

So what is so scary about that?

Well all the data used to create the map of Biddle’s travels didn’t come from special tracking gadget but instead came from his iPhone.

It turns out that the iPhone sitting comfortably in your pocket has been recording everywhere you have been since last June. The data is stored on your iPhone; and apparently your iPad as well, and is easily available to anyone who gets their hands on it.

The data itself is jarringly accurate. And even though it appears to rely on tower triangulation rather than GPS pinpointing (meaning you’re not safe with location services switched off), the map I was able to generate with mapping software the security duo released visualizes my life since the day I bought my iPhone 4 in July. Everywhere I’ve been. Bus trips home. Train trips to visit family. Vacations. Places I’d forgotten I’d even gone. Zoom in on that giant blotch over New York, and you can see my travels, block by block. My entire personal and professional life—documented by a phone I didn’t know was also a full time location logging device. It’s all accessible—where I’ve been, and when. (The animated software doesn’t show location linked to any duration of less than a week, so it can’t be used to snoop that closely. But the actual underlying database is timed to the second.) I don’t really have anything to hide, which is why I don’t mind sharing my map above. But at least let me turn this tracker off.

For now, there is no fix. The only way to remove it from your computer is to wipe your back up files from your computer. But then you have no back ups to restore your phone in case you lose it. And every time you sync your computer, though, it’ll create a new file. And if you do lose your phone, all your tracking data goes with it, right into the hands of whoever found it. And if you upgrade your phone to the next iPhone, the location tracking history goes with it.

Washington DC to New York from Alasdair Allan on Vimeo.

That iPhone you love so much – it’s tracking everywhere you’ve been – all the time is a post from: The Inquisitr

As the most recent Wikileaks data dump has everyone talking there is one thing that has business worried: lost or stolen laptops that can lead to things like the Wikileaks data sharing of what is presumed to be private information.

A study by Intel and the Ponemon Institute (pdf) attempted to answer the question of how much this kind of loss costs companies. After asking 329 companies taking part in the study they found that the combined cost to corporation is $2.1 billion a year. On a per company basis this breaks down to $6.4 million per year.

Collectively, the companies studied said their employees lost more than 86,000 laptops during one year alone. The study by Intel and the Ponemon Institute showed that the cost per laptop was $49,246, a number that includes the cost of replacements and investigations related to the loss. The losses also include costs related to lost intellectual property, reduced productivity and legal and regulatory charges.

In a three-year span, the chance that a laptop will be lost or stolen is 5 to 10 percent. About 25 percent of lost laptops are due to theft, and another 15 percent are likely lost to theft. Some 60 percent are simply missing.

via VentureBeat

So, how much does stolen or lost laptops cost business? Try $2.1 Billion is a post from: The Inquisitr

Occasionally, people in my Facebook feed will post and repost a status update about not how not to have information you’d not like public leaked on Facebook.

“Get a piece of paper and write down all the things you don’t want people to see on Facebook…” it begins, “and then don’t post them on Facebook.” While that’s marginally cute and clever, seeing it inevitably repeated in my feed is irritating because one of the biggest issues surrounding Facebook and personal privacy is that a lot of the information that stands to be leaked- demographic information, for instance- will not be revealed through status updates but rather the indiscriminate use of Facebook apps.

“Which apps?” might be the question you’d ask, and according to the WSJ, it appears that might be “all of them.” A spokesman for Facebook Sunday said that the company is working to find and “drastically limit” the availability of user information that is transmitted via the use of Facebook ID:

“A Facebook user ID may be inadvertently shared by a user’s Internet browser or by an application,” the spokesman said. Knowledge of an ID “does not permit access to anyone’s private information on Facebook,” he said, adding that the company would introduce new technology to contain the problem identified by the Journal.

“Our technical systems have always been complemented by strong policy enforcement, and we will continue to rely on both to keep people in control of their information,” the Facebook official said.

The Wall Street Journal elaborates as to how this can affect individual users regardless of the privacy settings enabled on their accounts:

The information being transmitted is one of Facebook’s basic building blocks: the unique “Facebook ID” number assigned to every user on the site. Since a Facebook user ID is a public part of any Facebook profile, anyone can use an ID number to look up a person’s name, using a standard Web browser, even if that person has set all of his or her Facebook information to be private. For other users, the Facebook ID reveals information they have set to share with “everyone,” including age, residence, occupation and photos.

Facebook says they have disabled thousands of apps since the issue came to light, but it wasn’t clear “how many, if any” of the cases were related to leaking user info to marketing companies.

[WSJ]

Facebook: Popular apps are leaking, selling user information is a post from: The Inquisitr

By now most people will have seen the images of incidents of crime in San Francisco as elevation maps so it was only a matter of time before folks decided to play with other kinds of data – say for example one’s Foursquare check-ins.

This is what Kevin Burg decided to do and he shares the results on his Tumbler blog but here is the image of his results.

You can see the high-rez versions of the image at Kevin’s blog.

Seeing your Foursquare check-ins as an elevation map is a post from: The Inquisitr

There’s a report making the rounds on the web that started with a New York Times post about how cellphones are being used more for data than they are for actual voice phone calls.

According to the CITA, the wireless industry association, the amount of data in the form of emails, streaming video, music and other services in the United States increased by more than 50 percent over 2009. Not only that but the actual time spent in a phone conversation has dropped as well from 2.27 minutes in 2008 to 1.81 minutes in 2009.

“I have thousands of rollover minutes,” said Zach Frechette, 28, editor of Good magazine in Los Angeles, who explained that he dialed only when he needed to get in touch with someone instantly, and limited those calls to 30 seconds. “I downgraded to the lowest available minute plan, which I’m not even getting close to using.”

Mr. Frechette said part of the reason he rarely talked on his phone was that he had an iPhone, with its notoriously spotty phone reception in certain locales. But also, he said, most of his day was spent swapping short messages through services like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter. That way, he said, “you can respond when it’s convenient, rather than impose your schedule on someone else.”

Others say talking on the phone is intrusive and time-consuming, while others seem to have no patience for talking to just one person at a time. They prefer to spend their phone time moving seamlessly between several conversations, catching up on the latest news and updates by text and on Facebook with multiple friends, instead of just one or two.

“Even though in theory, it might take longer to send a text than pick up the phone, it seems less disruptive than a call,” said Jefferson Adams, a 44-year-old freelance writer living in San Francisco. By texting, he said, “you can multitask between two or three conversations at once.”

Source: New York Times

All of this the mobile providers love of course because the more data they get flowing the more money that can make and eventually the more the can increase their fees for service.

However this is a nothing more than a scam. The idea that we are paying to separate fees, one for voice and another for data, is nothing short of theft. What people are seemingly forgetting that both data and voice are exactly the same ones and zeros in the digital age. The moment your voice or data hits the pipe they are exactly the same.

The pipe doesn’t go – oh this is voice ones and zeros … oh and these are data ones and zeros. We have been convinced by the providers that these are two different things and as long as they can keep us all fooled they get to make money hand over fist because they are in effect charging us twice for a single service.

Talk about having your cake and eating to.

More data than talk and the scam continues is a post from: The Inquisitr

I ran across this little tidbit of news over the Christmas holidays and it amazes me that more people aren’t asking if what is being reported is something we really want to see happening.

You see Google has been running a bit of an advertising campaign built around the fact that over 60% of the United States state governments are using part or all of Google’s Apps. I realized that the open source and freetard brigade will argue that this is a great thing given that it boost the whole idea of free and open source software in the public eye but stop and think for a minute.

60% plus. That’s 60% or better of states who are storing supposedly private and extremely personal data of ours on a third party server of a company thats sole purpose is to index all the information in the world.

Uhm .. did you give your state government permission to to this?

Are you really comfortable with the fact that Google is now storing data that it has no business being near?

As pointed out by Sherri over at philosecurity

In other words, according to Google, United States state governments have literally handed over our public data to be held and managed by a private company which has well-publicized partnerships with other governments such as China. The data is physically stored in Google’s buildings, on Google’s servers, managed by Google’s employees. This means Google now controls our government’s access to it’s own data.

I’m all for open source and free crap but when it comes to our data being held by any government it has no business being stored on a corporate server – especially a company with partnerships that include places like China.

Sorry this is a bad idea and one that should be stopped. It will only end badly.

Government data, our data, now held by Google is a post from: The Inquisitr

It’s one thing when some silly Web 2.0 social service gets sold, or shuts its doors, and our data either goes poof or gets bought up by whoever buys the service but what happens when that service is a company that holds our most personal information – our DNA?

This is the question being asked as deCode Genetics declares bankruptcy and becomes the property of another company who is known for doing whatever it has to to maximize the returns on its investments. In this case the company is Saga Investments and many are worried that it will find ways to monetize the DNA data of people who have used the service.

Kari Stefansson, deCODE’s chief executive, told The Times that ownership of genetic data remained with the company’s customers and that Saga would be bound by a privacy policy that prevents disclosure of data to third parties such as insurers, employers or doctors.

Industry experts said that Saga would want to maximise returns on its investment, and could still make wider use of data that some subscribers may find uncomfortable. Pooled and anonymised information, for example, could be sold to academic researchers or pharmaceutical companies.

Dan Vorhaus, a lawyer with the US firm Robinson, Bradshaw and Hinson, which specialises in genomics, said that while the new management would be bound by deCODE’s customer agreements, these were often unclear and contradictory.

Source: Times Online

As has been proven before any supposed anonymized data can actually be “de-anonymize” the data. It is my opinion that if we are going to be silly enough to use services like this that there should be safeguards put in place to make sure that important and immensely personal data like can not be transferred for any reason.

deCode Genetics closes doors, questions about data raised is a post from: The Inquisitr

Like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of breadcrumbs, we all leave a trail of personal information as we navigate the internet.

Your friend sent you a birthday drink! A post about taxes in your hamlet, another about your toddler’s eating habits, a flight or hotel reservation, your Netflix queue… I think every internet user has a bit of a creeping bit of nervousness about what the web collective “knows” about their lives.

Ars Technica has an interesting post on this very subject today, summed up in a slightly jarring quote here:

“For almost every person on earth, there is at least one fact about them stored in a computer database that an adversary could use to blackmail, discriminate against, harass, or steal the identity of him or her. I mean more than mere embarrassment or inconvenience; I mean legally cognizable harm. Perhaps it is a fact about past conduct, health, or family shame. For almost every one of us, then, we can assume a hypothetical ‘database of ruin,’ the one containing this fact but until now splintered across dozens of databases on computers around the world, and thus disconnected from our identity. Reidentification has formed the database of ruin and given access to it to our worst enemies.”

Luckily for all of us, we’re Joe Average. The majority of us will never run for office or be in the headlines, but woe betide those of us who do. Google knows who you are, and it doesn’t keep secrets. Everyone laughed at Caribou Barbie Sarah Palin when some enterprising /b/tards youths hacked her e-mail account. But how secure are your security questions?

We all think we’re careful, not spilling an awful lot in public space and hey, my Facebook profile is set to private! (But as the ACLU pointed out not too long ago, our random FB tidbits also leak out through the profiles of our friends, of which I have over 150. I haven’t even met 150 people, in my life.) The linked Ars Technica article points out that even the benign stuff is not necessarily benign, when combined with other data that’s readily available. For instance, 87% of Americans are identifiable by birth date, zip code, and gender alone. How many places on the internet is that information readily available about you?

Perhaps the most worrying part is that information leakage seems to be trending toward being perpetuated forward but becoming relevant backwards. Let me explain with another anecdote from the article. In the mid-90s, a grad student in Massachusetts took an admittedly dopey initiative to study “anonymized” medical records data for all state employees to try to identify one. She was quickly successful in finding and delivering the Governor’s personal data to him:

Only six people in Cambridge shared his birth date, only three of them men, and of them, only he lived in his ZIP code. In a theatrical flourish, Dr. Sweeney sent the Governor’s health records (which included diagnoses and prescriptions) to his office.

So while you may be anonymous for now, bear in mind that almost unlike the fairly recent past, most of the information you release is leaving a trail. Could a forum post made in haste about a chronic cough affect your health coverage in 15 years? Could an old Netflix queue be used against you in court?

Anonymous data not so anonymous after all is a post from: The Inquisitr

Online advertising is big bucks and those bucks get even bigger with the more information that advertisers know about you and your habits – both on-line and off-line. From things like income and credit scores to whether you have a fishing license to what kind of car you drive your data is being collected everyday. For the major players like Acxiom it doesn’t matter whether that data is your on-line surfing and buying habits or if it is your off-line shopping habits – it’s all data for them to collect.

On-line much of this data collection happens as a result of ‘cookies’ – those simple little text files that websites drop on your computer as you visit, and buy from them. In the past these cookies were fairly simple things that let you login to a site automatically or remembered you items you wanted to buy at sites. Since then though they have gotten a lot more complex and carry a lot more information which companies like Acxiom suck up every minute of the day.

Consumers can avoid cookie-based tracking by deleting cookies from their computers or setting their browsers not to accept cookies. But few do, and privacy advocates say it is easy for companies to add cookies without users noticing.

For decades, data companies like Experian and Acxiom have compiled reams of information on every American: Acxiom estimates it has 1,500 pieces of data on every American, based on information from warranty cards, bridal and birth registries, magazine subscriptions, public records and even dog registrations with the American Kennel Club.

Patrick Williams, the publisher of the personal finance magazine Worth, recently asked Acxiom to find the names and addresses of 10,000 Americans from each of 11 cities who had houses worth more than $1 million, net worth of over $2 million, lived within a few miles of other rich people and subscribed to business publications.

“They are the scariest data research company around — they know far too much,” said Mr. Williams, who said he was very happy with the amount of information it gave him.

Source : New York Times :: Ads Follow Web Users, and Get More Personal

Typically a Datran’s, a competitor to Acxiom, cookie can hold 50 to a 100 pieces of information and while these companies claim the data is all anonymous many privacy advocates are concerned by the amount being collected.

Paul M. Schwartz, a law professor and privacy expert at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, said the unwitting participation by consumers makes online marketing different from offline.

“Interactive media really gets into this creepy Orwellian thing, where it’s a record of our thoughts on the way to decision-making,” he said. “We’re like the data-input clerks now for the industry.”

Source : New York Times :: Ads Follow Web Users, and Get More Personal

Advertisers: Don’t mind us as we follow you everywhere is a post from: The Inquisitr

Okay so it’s not quite a pony express service in the truest sense of the word but in a day and age when cloud computing and fast broadband are the hot buzzwords Amazon’s new AWS Import/Export service sure sounds like a modern day equivalent to it. The idea that it would be faster to send a hard drive full of data to Amazon in order for it to be uploaded to the company’s S3 account with Amazon strikes me as borderline ludicrous.

The fact that we are being driven to using the postal, or courier, service for transferring data raises two points. The first it shows how inadequate our broadband really is and the second is that if we are producing such large amounts of data is the idea of cloud computing even practical on a large scale?

To give you an idea of what Amazon’s recommendations for considering the Pony Express USPS option Stacey Higginbotham provided a nice cheat sheet with her post on GigaOM about this great move forward in data transfer.

Kind of reminds me of the old sneaker net days only with hooves.

Amazon’s new Pony Express service is a post from: The Inquisitr

While the reports of data breaches are probably only a fraction of the real number of times your personal data has been stolen from companies the fact that it happens is almost an accepted fact. However there is a far worse type of use of your personal data that we don’t hear about, except maybe from those “kooks”. It is also the scenario that many security minded computer experts worry about as we try to move more and more of our data into those large corporate databases in the sky.

Whether it being health companies turning down applicants based on databases searches or data sharing with other companies we can never be sure that our personal data isn’t being misused. Now before your start making up that tinfoil hat for me to wear you might be wise to first take into account a news story out of Vancouver, British Columbia.

It appears that the province’s own insurance company, Insurance Corporation of B.C. (ICBC), has been found to be checking the accident claims histories of jurors in a recent civil court case. This checking of jurors is a total breach of the province’s freedom of information and privacy laws. It has also prompted the judge, Justice Malcolm Macaulay, to schedule a special hearing with ICBC’s corporate lawyer and the defense lawyer. At question here according to the judge is whether ICBC has done the same thing in the past and why it was even doing it in the first place.

On the fourth day of the trial, with the jury absent, the judge was told that a settlement had been reached.

What came next, however, staggered the judge.

Scott Macfarlane, corporate counsel for the insurance company, asked the judge for permission to address the jury, saying he wanted to tell them that some of their claims histories had been disclosed to defence counsel.

When the judge asked if it was standard practice for ICBC to check jurors’ driving records, Macfarlane said it was the only incidence he was aware of, but he promised the court there would be a review of the corporation’s files.

Source: Vancouver Sun

Your data safe from prying company eyes? Think again is a post from: The Inquisitr