ANX Corporate Blog
Posts tagged as privacy
Showing 6 through 9 of 9 total posts
May 27th 2010, 8:42am
And you thought Facebook was bad!
So I came into work this morning and shortly after I had settled in at my desk, my coworker starts calling for me in a panicked voice.
I went to his desk, and apparently a friend of his had alerted him to some of his personal information on a website. Not just any personal information either. Information about his neighbourhood, people in his house, income, age, birthday, interests, you name it. Of course, being me, I went and looked myself up.
What I found just about made my heart skip a beat. The website in question, www.spokeo.com, spiders social networking sites, blogs, and any other repository of public information and aggregates it. This is just plain scary people!
Spokeo is a search engine specialized in organizing people-related information from phone books,
I went to his desk, and apparently a friend of his had alerted him to some of his personal information on a website. Not just any personal information either. Information about his neighbourhood, people in his house, income, age, birthday, interests, you name it. Of course, being me, I went and looked myself up.
What I found just about made my heart skip a beat. The website in question, www.spokeo.com, spiders social networking sites, blogs, and any other repository of public information and aggregates it. This is just plain scary people!
Spokeo is a search engine specialized in organizing people-related information from phone books,
May 26th 2010, 8:58am
Dear Google - Why Encrypt My Search???
So the tech headlines state “Google rolls out encrypted Web search option”; and with a simple move to https for all web searching, a company is sending shockwaves through URL filtering engines all over the world. Not that most filtering mechanisms don’t offer SSL capable filtering, but it is a more sophisticated deployment; and one where most setups would need hardware acceleration to keep up. According to Google, image and video searches will not be offered through the initial encrypted solution, but this will just be a matter of time. This is a nice slick tie in the Google suite of products, from email, to Google Docs and at a high level it definitely makes sense. The question
May 17th 2010, 11:27am
Facebooks Privacy Policy - Reasons to be afraid
Got a Rand McNally Handy? Because that's what you are going to need if you want to adjust your privacy settings!
You may or may not have read my rant on Google Buzz, but as a webmaster for a security company - I take security and privacy issues reasonably seriously. For that very reason, I am about to vent a bit about Facebook.
Now, anyone who knows me, knows my detest for Google and Facebook - yet I still use them. Some might call me a conformist. Some might even call me a hypocrite. I do not like to think of myself this way, I just use it as a method of staying connected to friends and family; on the other hand - as a webmaster, it would be silly for me not to exploit the features of each in order to further the reach of the company I work for.
Anyone who is anyone has
You may or may not have read my rant on Google Buzz, but as a webmaster for a security company - I take security and privacy issues reasonably seriously. For that very reason, I am about to vent a bit about Facebook.
Now, anyone who knows me, knows my detest for Google and Facebook - yet I still use them. Some might call me a conformist. Some might even call me a hypocrite. I do not like to think of myself this way, I just use it as a method of staying connected to friends and family; on the other hand - as a webmaster, it would be silly for me not to exploit the features of each in order to further the reach of the company I work for.
Anyone who is anyone has
Feb 11th 2010, 9:21am
Privacy Warning! Google Buzz Flaw
Maybe not as much a security threat as a privacy threat, but a recent article posted by Business Insider outlines a serious Privacy Flaw in their new application.
When you sign up to use Google Buzz, you are automatically set up with followers and people to follow, according to a spokesperson from Google. In all actuality, this is a great usability feature - until you get to the accessbility to your personal information. The people you follow, and the people that follow you are made publicly available to anyone who may happen to view your profile. This means that anyone could easily see the people you chat with and email most!
This claim was countered by Google, asking Business Insider to phrase this differently:
"In other words, after
When you sign up to use Google Buzz, you are automatically set up with followers and people to follow, according to a spokesperson from Google. In all actuality, this is a great usability feature - until you get to the accessbility to your personal information. The people you follow, and the people that follow you are made publicly available to anyone who may happen to view your profile. This means that anyone could easily see the people you chat with and email most!
This claim was countered by Google, asking Business Insider to phrase this differently:
"In other words, after