About two weeks ago, Verizon changed its privacy policy to allow the company to record customer location data and Internet usage, combine it with personal information such as age and gender, aggregate it with other customer data and then sell it on an anonymous basis.

“Verizon revealed the industry’s strategy,” explained Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “This is more than the camel’s nose under the tent. With NFC [near field communication, an emerging technology for mobile payments] and GPS, there’s a new digital gold rush here, and wireless companies want to reap the tremendous financial rewards that will come with dominating a local advertising market.”

Chester also added that other carriers, such as Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T compile similar information, but that Verizon was just the first to fess up to the practice.

“They’re all doing this,” Chester told CNN. “Everyone is aware that big growth in the digital economy is mobile and location-based services.”

Selling customer information is an age-old practice that is certainly not exclusive to the wireless industry. Brian Kennish, a former DoubleClick engineer who developed the advertising network’s mobile ad server, noted that wireless companies have been sharing users’ location data with third parties for more than a decade.

But the rise of smartphones has given mobile providers a whole new level of personal information: The gadgets are hyper-personalized tracking devices that “know” more about their owners than any other product on the market.

“The Web pages we go to and searches we do are the closest thing to our thoughts, the most private info of all, that can be recorded,” said Kennish, who now heads up Disconnect, an online privacy tool. “If Verizon succeeds, I’m sure others will follow. Despite all the talk about privacy lately, things are just getting worse.”

via CNN

Wireless Phone Companies Reportedly Peddling your Personal Info is a post from: The Inquisitr

When Bangladesh-born artist Hasan Elahi was stopped at an airport in 2002 and then put through several months of scary interrogations he decided that hiding anything from the government was pointless. Instead of hiding his information Elahi decided to bottleneck those agencies that interrogated him by posting an overwhelming amount of data about himself on his personal website.

On his site Elahi puts up pics of everywhere he eats, what his dinner fork looks like, what his food looks like and everything else he observes throughout the day.

Writing in the New York Times. Elahi says:

 “You want to watch me? Fine … But I can watch myself better than you can, and I can get a level of detail that you will never have.”

After launching his website Hasan began to track server logs and discovered that he was being watched by the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Executive Office of the President.

Just for a bit of fun Elahi has made it hard to decipher a timeline for his websites information, deliberately making his data hard to place into any type of useful order.

“By putting everything about me out there, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life,” he writes. “In an era in which everything is archived and tracked, the best way to maintain privacy may be to give it up.”

Do you think Hasan Elahi’s website is a good way to waste U.S. officials time after they spent months attempting to tie him to crimes that they could never prove?

Artist Overwhelms Government Agencies With Personal Data After Being Targeted is a post from: The Inquisitr

Using a technology of indeterminate origin, Kraft has come out with an kiosk designed to scan customer’s faces in-store and determine which Kraft foods are best suited to certain consumers.

Annoyingly, the Fast Company piece doesn’t say whether this scanning of faces is opt-in, or if the machine just scans every poor schmuck that passes by. Also not addressed is whether the data is stored or if it is used in any other ways. But scanning your supermarket loyalty key-fob will enable the kiosk to go through your prior purchasing history and make suggestions based on how frequently you veg out in front of 30 Rock with a sad Lean Cuisine. Last item of note in this vein- the kiosk is quite creepily called the “Meal Planning Solution.”

Although the machine deals exclusively in Kraft-brand recommendations (duh), the company says the goal is to broaden consumers’ dinner repertoires with suggestions of mac and cheese and frozen pizza:

The average shopper, says Kraft’s VP of retail experience, Don King, has a paltry 10 recipes in his or her average meal-time rotation: Spaghetti, pizza, hamburgers, chicken, etc. Kraft’s goal is to help them expand that repertoire using, of course, Kraft products. Plus, 70% of them enter the store without a clue as to what to serve that night for dinner.

There is one bright spot, however- the machine dispenses samples, which improve grocery shopping by approximately 117%. Do you see yourself using a marketing tool like this? Do you think this kiosk will encourage customers to try new foods, or is it another greased slope on the slide into crushing obesity and reliance on frankenfoods?

[Fast Company via Gawker]

Kraft unveils kiosk that reads your face, selects your dinner is a post from: The Inquisitr

A burglary at a third-party human resource company included computers with files of Google employees hired prior to 2006, according to a letter from Google to the New Hampshire Attorney General. The files were stored at a company called Colt Express Outsourcing Services and contained names, addresses, and social security numbers.

Some Google employees were notified of the breach as recently as Tuesday. The company is offering to pay for a year-long identity theft monitoring service for those affected.

CNET learned last month 6,500 of its own employee records were also stolen in the same burglary from the office. It is also offering an identity theft monitoring service free of charge to its affected employees.

Google Employee Data Stolen is a post from: The Inquisitr