EFF (The Electronic Frontier Foundation) compiled a list of the important trends in law, technology and business that would play an important role in shaping online rights in 2010, and companies that in the past year managed to infringe on the privacy of the individual. EFF plans to revisit these trends as the year progresses, as stated by its technology manager, Tim Jones. Learn about privacy threats in 2010.

1. Global Internet Censorship

Filtering initiatives in Australia and Europe that follow similar steps undertaken in China and Iran highlight the globalization of internet censorship and a battle for internet legitimacy. There are growing concerns about the ways in which restrictions in different countries reinforce each other, on the basis of child protection, cybersecurity and IP enforcement. Blocking of websites isn’t just for autocratic regimes now, as democracies follow suit.

2. Cyber-security Legislation  Stirring in U.S. Congress

As healthcare reforms occupied Washington, federal technology legislation took a back seat. It is, however, doubtful that the case would be the same in 2010. Key provisions of the Patriot Act are up for re-authorization before April 1 and The Snowe-Rockefeller Cyber-security Act, which would grant the president the power to disconnect the Internet, is likely to resurface sometime this year.

3. Net Neutrality

Most know Net Neutrality is an abstract idea. But what would be its implications when it makes the transition from idealistic principle into real-world policies, privacy threats 2010 would tell, as the FCC attempts to institute Net Neutrality this year. How much the FCC can be trusted is yet to be seen as it tends to lean towards the demands of corporate lobbyists and “public decency” advocates more than individual civil liberties and is already promising exceptions from net neutrality.

4. News Organisations Revolt Against Google

News Corp. and other bigwigs in the media zone were unhappy with Google and its effect on their businesses. They don’t appreciate a search engine selling advertisements regarding their content without getting money for it, even if their content is openly consumable online. The print world is expected to force changes to current copyright law, and apply pressure on intermediaries to stop functioning for search engines like Google.

5. Online Video 

Like print, the TV industry is slowly being taken over by the internet and radically disparate industries are engaged in a battle for dominance. Two initiatives that should be tabbed are TV Everywhere a new DRM-laden attempt by the mainstream TV industry to outsmart innovative technologies like Boxee and Selectable Output Control, Hollywood’s latest effort to decide what you can record on your DVR, rather than the viewers.

6. Cracking GSM, SSL 

Two very significant problems expected with cryptography implementations, concern cell phone security, and web browser security. Devices that intercept phone calls that use GSM technology are expected to get cheaper and an increase in public demonstrations of the ability to break GSM’s encryption are bound to increase. The mobile phone industry needs to urgently change its obsolete security systems. SSL is probably the best web security system available, but in the past year several flaws regarding its practical use have been highlighted and it needs to immediately aim to improve.

7. Hardware Hacking

An active electronic hobbyist community is becoming a threat to manufacturers who threaten them with legal action. EFF, on the other hand, has supported these hardware hackers. Phone jailbreaking and multiple uses of electronic devices are expected to increase in privacy threats 2010.

8. Web Browser Privacy

In the 1990s web browsers who wished to protect their privacy could simply de-activate or limit their browser’s use of cookies. This proved effective against the worst online tracking practices.

But in 2010 corporations are seeking to track individuals’ use of the web by unexpected methods of profiling. At the same time, awareness and scrutiny regarding them have also risen. Most major sites share ones web activity with several advertising networks. Technical or legal restrictions on the tracking of web activity are limited and allow even mail companies to profile an individual’s web usage and exploit accordingly.

9. Location, Location, Location

The government’s ability to track individuals using mobile phones and information on social networking sites and transportation systems is increasingly threatening freedom. Location privacy is becoming a big issue in courts across America, as organizations like EFF oppose such government control.

10. Social Networking Privacy

Networking sites like Facebook have more than 350 million users, with their personal information openly available. This is used by both law enforcers to convict and by lawbreakers and hackers to infringe upon privacy. It is yet to be seen in privacy threats 2010 is laws would be made stringent or would a scam only lead to networking sites taking their users seriously.

[Via eWeek]

Privacy on the internet has been threatened multiple times during this year 2011. Indeed, on multiple occasions, and from different parts of the world, the internet has been used to spread some information that isn’t necessarily reported on the mainstream media. Learn about the 2011 privacy issues.

Social media has made it that citizen media became more and more popular. Combined with social media, the rise of mobile phone coverage with data plans has made it that it’s easier for a regular citizen to upload photos, videos or narration of what he has witnessed on the internet. Platforms like Facebook, Youtube, WordPress, Tumblr, Twitter has been used to share pictures, videos or simple text updates for friends to follow and re-share.

But on the other hand, there has also been a lot of ways used to circumvent those attempt to block access to some internet resources. 2011 has probably been the year where we’ve heard a lot of news reporting a government that tried to implement some regulations or technical solutions to block access to some websites. To review some of the prominent events related to privacy, here is a simple list of events that are worth mentioning:

• SOPA: this is an on-going battle of the Titans in the U.S (although it should also be a concern for us living outside of the U.S since it allows a U.S attorney to pursue any internet user who downloaded illegal movies/software). On the one hand, we have the U.S movie industry, and on the other hand, we have internet companies and users. I’ve written about this SOPA issue in detail.
• Twitter subpoena: still in the U.S, there’s a case where one Twitter user is now sued because he publicly shared a document involving a police department
• Arab spring and attempts to block internet: this is a story on its own. It all started with internet activists; the government tried to block some internet resources, activists found ways to circumvent those blockages, … A typical cat and mouse game, but we all know the “ending.”
• Wikileaks: another cat and mouse game too. It all started with Julian Assange publishing confidential information from different intelligence agencies, then trying to move from server to server the hosting of the wiki … The rest is also part of history.
• U.S Patriot Act: although not specific to 2011, this is yet another activity that is in some way considered by Internet companies (especially those in the cloud computing industry) as a threat to privacy on the internet,

Here, on How-to-hide-ip, we were mainly focusing on the use of VPN, proxies as well as other tools to protect your privacy when browsing the internet, or for accessing some geo-location limited internet resources. Chances are that this will evolve drastically in the next year. We’ll keep you posted on this blog.

Had I missed some other stories, feel free to add them in the comment section- that’s also the good part with social media and blogging: we leverage on user-generated content. Your turn now

Personal data protection video

In fact, as Internet users, we’re too busy using our favorite online platforms that we usually forget how exposed we are. And that’s what I like about the video that I’m showing here.

[Video no longer available]

Have you noticed how those same people in the video still act as if everything were normal even though, in between, they’re completely exposed and naked: call it unconsciousness or exhibitionism but there’s definitely something we need to worry about. After all, who wants to be the next guy in town that has his very life exposed to all the city?

Be aware of your personal data protection

What I also like about this smartly conceived video is how it refers to the usual things we do:

The guy at the airport terminal playing with his tablet

How can common such situation be? And I’m sure most travelers can relate to this. I know I’ve been using some airport-provided Wi-Fi to connect to the Internet while waiting for my check-in (especially during transit).

Well, if you don’t connect to Wi-Fi, but only use your computer or tablet for watching movies, the risks are limited – but since we are addicted to the internet, chances are that we would want to go online.

With the advent of WiMax technologies, I experienced, somewhere in Cape Town, a case where the Wi-Fi codes that my hotel gave me could still work with the Wi-Fi system that Cape Town airport is using. In fact, they were using the same provider, though the ability to do so. While this was quite practical, I guess this makes that same Wi-Fi installation more prone to hacks and attempts to get into the lambda user computer. I guess that the same kind of system also exists in other big (or not so big) cities all around the world.

So what’s the point here? Don’t be like that guy at the airport transit surfing with his tablet (or laptop) and be publicly exposed without even knowing it. At least, use a VPN solution that will protect your connection from hackers and spies.

Look at that woman working at the office

She just thinks that it’s a safe environment (probably because she assumes that the same office has IT support people who manage to protect her personal data while she’s online).

We all go on the Internet doing things that aren’t necessarily related to our work. And even if we don’t, chances are that the tools that we use at work (browsers, e-mail software) have some built-in tracking feature that will expose some of the personal things that we do online. Those can be cookies or logs that can be stored on your computer, or on some of the office’s server. The fact is, most of the things related to the internet connection are not only limited to you and your own computer. Some solutions exist so as to limit exposing your personal data: either surf in the incognito mode of your browser or try enabling your browser’s do-no-track feature. This later has some limitations though.

Conclusion

Anyway, I strongly recommend you sharing this same article to people who do not necessarily care about protecting their personal data online: I expect that humorous tone that the video adopts will help open their eyes.

More power to “Hollywood & Entertainment” industry

Because it gives again, more power to “Hollywood & Entertainment” industry, it may lead to unauthorized censorship and may influence (in a bad way) internet in the whole world we think it should be opposed. Introducing more and more restrictions over the internet, its users and providers will not stop piracy but it will stop freedom and evolution of the web. As it is it may also lead to complete lack of privacy and anonymity. As above mentioned Android Authority we will use Wikipedia to tell you first what SOPA is:

“The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as H.R.3261, is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011, by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) and a bipartisan group of 12 initial co-sponsors. The bill expands the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.”

SOPA – Know the supporters of both sides

Against SOPA

On the business side of things, news is reporting some very popular radical stand vis-à-vis the SOPA: for example, Godaddy initially publicly supported SOPA, but then, once the community started targeting them, and especially when a high number of their current customers have decided to move away from Godaddy’s services, they decided to publicly claim that they are against SOPA. We aren’t going into the details about knowing if that decision was taken for commercial reasons instead of conviction.

On another side, Reddit, the popular user-curated news site has decided to blackout his services on January 18th to show their protest against SOPA. This is a courageous move, and while people are expecting a similar move from big internet companies, it is expected that there will be more mobilization for the coming weeks to put the pressure on. The site Americancensorship.org maintains a list of people and organizations that are actively involved in combatting SOPA.

Pro SOPA

People supporting the SOPA are also active. Since we have issued a list of people against SOPA, here is the counterpart: those who are supporting the SOPA bill. Just for the note, interestingly, as I searched the internet, I didn’t find a lot of “news” showcasing people/organizations supporting SOPA.

I know, I may not have used the proper search terms, but anyway, it makes me think that since we’re on the internet, and that SOPA deals with internet censorship, could it be that the internet has “censored” SOPA supporting news? I know, this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I’m sure there’s a lot of convincing/support for SOPA in the offline world that aren’t reported on the internet. If you find some of them, I’d love your comments about it in this article.

Godaddy and SOPA

This act has generated a lot of outcry from internet users. We can even cite that some big companies (Godaddy for example) are now suffering from publicly supporting this SOPA act. More and more people have decided to transfer their web and domain hosting accounts to other providers mainly because Godaddy has initially backed up the SOPA act.

Despite the fact that GoDaddy stepped back and reviewed its position, it is clear that users have already made up their mind and that the damage has already been done the minute they have publicly shown their support to the SOPA act.

Anyway, it is expected that more companies are facing the same issues.

But what is SOPA anyway?

Simply said, it’s an attempt by the US to control over offshore “rogue websites” that “steal America’s innovative and creative products attract more than 53 billion visits a year and threaten more than 19 million American jobs.”. While the goal is noble – it’s hard to accept that other people are only leeching from your hard work- the fact of the matter is: a lot of internet users do not accept the way it is handled.

Interestingly, major internet big companies have shown their disagreement against SOPA. A long list of companies is available on the internet, but we can cite the letter that Google, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, and LinkedIn wrote to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. That letter is claiming that SOPA poses “a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job creation, as well as to our nation’s cyber-security.“. Some companies, like Yahoo, even went further by leaving the US Chamber of Commerce since it supports the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).

As we can see, there’s a lot at stake here.

SOPA breaks the Internet

If it is passed you might wake-up to quite new reality where your ISP constantly monitors what you do on the internet, where not only download but streaming copyrighted material will be a felony.

It may also prevent new start-ups from succeeding if they will be marked by the entertainment industry as illegal (as once YouTube was!). If you are an American or if you have friends in the USA let them know what is happening – remember that what today is in the USA tomorrow might be a law in your own country as the reach of “Hollywood” can go really far.

How would that affect offshore websites?

Let’s suppose that one offshore website has been identified as one that falls into the “rogue website” category. A US Attorney General can then seek for a court order to bring that website down by presenting that court order to the Internet providers of the offshore website.

I’m not going to go into details into the legal matters (this definitely isn’t my cup of tea). But if I want to be pragmatic, this means that if that rogue website is on a co-hosting web server where my own website is (which happens a lot in the web hosting industry). Then there’s a high risk that my simple and clean website would also be brought down since my co-tenant would have been sued as a rogue website. My website would only count as another collateral damage that none of those big guys would even care about.

When VPN and proxies won’t protect you from SOPA

Let’s suppose that someone does some file-sharing over the internet. Let’s not discuss if it’s legitimate or not file-sharing. Let’s suppose that this file-sharer was smart enough to use a VPN or proxy for doing so.  For whatever reason, let’s suppose that the case comes under the SOPA act, so an attorney wants to know who the guy who did that file-sharing is.

From the logs of the file-sharing server, there will be an IP address showing the computer that did the download/upload. So by going up the line, the attorney would find that IP address belongs to the VPN or Proxy service provider. He will then ask who that IP address belongs to. SOPA allows him to do so.

At this stage, there may be some hot discussions about privacy and all those long political/legal debates so as to identify if the VPN provider would provide the information or not. Should the SOPA become enacted, then there’s a legal argument that the VPN provider can’t deny, so he’ll be obliged to reveal the IP address corresponding to that specific connection.

Wait, wait, wait …

Aren’t VPN providers supposed not to log those kinds of things?

Well, let’s just consider that if it isn’t clearly written on the contract that they don’t log your IP address, or anything private, then just assume they’re doing it – so I strongly advise you re-read your contract with the VPN or Proxy provider. From here, they have your actual IP address. Guess what, the SOPA enables the attorney to ask the ISP to reveal who used that IP at that time – guess what: the ISP would have to give the information he has about you on their files (or at least the data that are associated to the internet contract).

Back to you …

Anyway, this SOPA case isn’t over yet. It surely is a good scenario for another Hollywood movie that would be titled “Hollywood vs internet: battle of the Titans”. What’s your view on this SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) case?

In fact, privacy has become a business on the internet nowadays. If I were a cheater, I’ll develop one small program that will show you a “lock” icon on your browser that would tell you that your connection is secure or not (that lock will turn red if you are not secure, and turn green if it’s ok – as opposed to the locked “lock” from your browser ). Knowing how scared people are about their online privacy, I’ll just throw away that little software (that does nothing that toggling between red and green), and I’m pretty sure someone would download (or even buy it) – even though it’s only a placebo internet security solution.

Your “Internet Security” solution is not 100% bulletproof

So what’s my point here? I just want to open your eyes to the following thing: no matter what “internet security” specialist tells you about how great their internet protection suite is, there are few things that you should care: your “internet security” won’t necessarily tell you this unless they’re faced with an actual situation where your computer has still been attacked even though you have their software installed: but even at that time, they may get away by telling you that there are few things that you should have done on your side.

Things you should always check

So here are few things you should check no matter which “internet protection suite” you opt for: have your computer run the latest updates: I know this is an argument that has been told to you so many times. But let’s get into more details here. When I mean, have updated software, this applies to the following:

• your browser: run the latest version of the browser, and remember to update the plugins/extensions that are installed. If some are reported to be incompatible with your current browser version, just disable them -or even better: uninstall those plugins. Moreover, please keep the list of extensions running with your browser to the minimum – this will leave less security-breach potential,
• your operating system: people tend to forget it – but this is a crucial element when it comes to keeping your computer secure. Apply the latest security updates that your operating software editor is suggesting you. Most OS now comes with a notification system when some updates are available: take the time to download and apply them,
• Java and flash: those are common browser components that need to be kept updated as a lot of internet applications rely on those two platforms

As you would see, most “internet security software” don’t mention those items when selling to you. My two cents is that they keep those arguments untold so that they have some kind of backdoor to send back the responsibility to you whenever their system fail. So don’t get us wrong here, even though we are advocating for the use of VPN solutions to keep your privacy secure on the internet, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take care of the previous measures.

The user is the target

In fact, if we look at it, for most big players on the internet that get revenues from advertisements, their main asset is (and will remain) the users. Google is claiming to be the one of the few (or only?) web player who actually wants his internet visitors to leave their search engine page results in the quickest possible (as opposed to most website assets that want to keep each visitor the longest possible): but at the end of the day, they are serving a lot of ads through their network and they want to “tailor” those ads based on each user’s online surfing history and habits.

… for serving ads

If you consider other players, Bing and Facebook have cut deals so as to include Facebook data into Bing results. But if we dig deeper, the main asset of Facebook is its large user base that they can serve ads to. Usually, when such deals are cut, there are millions of dollars passing from had to hand (or at least, from one account to another) – but as a user, have you ever been involved in such deals?

That’s the point. The fuel that makes those industries are their user base, most of the big players (whether it is Google, Bing, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, …) are gaming the fine line between your online privacy and the “protection of your data”. Simply said: they always claim that you own the data that you publish on their platform. Well, we have to be clear what data are we talking about first.

“Your data belong to you, but we make a bunch of money out of it”

Let’s say that I am wandering somewhere in town with my smartphone turned on. As I pass by an interesting place, I shoot a picture of it and upload it to one of those giant online sites (whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, … or whatever you want). As most of those services are free to use, they have to get some money from elsewhere, and that’s where advertisements show up usually.

Now, while I browsed the internet, I know that some cookies were installed on my phone. The online platform where I want to publish the photo of that nice place would access some of those cookies so as to serve me the adequate ad: so the cookies are data that some third party stored on my phone. But on the other hand, I also uploaded pictures on these online platforms thereby feeding them with fresh and unique content – by this way, I help them give more essence and “interestingness” to their platform.  Considering that most of those platforms count millions of users, in fact, they live by the activities that we, users, perform on those sites. It’s just that they “forget” to keep you in the loop when they cut deals to leverage on the data that you provide. Simply said: “your data belong to you, but we make a bunch of money out of it”.

What we know

Anyway, this shows once again that:

• every popular platform tends to be the target of choice of all sorts of hacking and cracking. Popularity always comes with its downsides. We’ve seen it while Microsoft Windows grew so much that it became the target of choice for all viruses and malware. The same applies to Microsoft Office who had hard times dealing with macros scripts. Now, with Android holding the biggest market share on the smartphone segment (at least in the U.S), it comes to no surprise that it also gained attention from those hackers,
• privacy is also an issue with mobile phones. On one hand, smartphones are becoming more connected (with 3G and even EDGE networks).On the other hands, we can see apps and software that are targeted to monitoring a smartphone behavior. If you search on the internet for apps that allow you to spy your spouse, or monitor what your kids are doing, then you’ll find plenty of solutions.

How does it work?

While the following does not specifically apply to CarrierIQ Keylogger, it gives you a broad understanding of what is now offered/possible in this field of logging activities on Smartphones. In fact, this means that a software is running in the background and record whatever action you do on your smartphone then send it elsewhere: your smartphone has an internet connection, isn’t it? In fact, most software can be installed without the owner being aware of it once it’s running (at least most of the times).

If your smartphone has GPS, it can record on a regular basis your GPS coordinates then send it online so that the places where you’ve been (well actually it’s the place where your smartphone has been) can be plotted on a Google Map. So let’s say that your coordinates are sent to the server every 30 minutes, imagine how you can be traced all the time.

Let’s be paranoiac

Some software even pretends to be able to send to online place copies of SMS and chat sessions that you have done, as well as the websites. I’ve even seen one software who can send a text to parents if a specific keyword appears in the SMS his kid is exchanging, thereby informing the parents almost in real-time about what’s happening. Some apps even send copies of photos that have been snapped from the smartphone.

In fact, the major issue is that most smartphone owners are usually not aware of what that software is doing. Truth to be told, it doesn’t take too much data volume to send a GPS coordinates, nor send copies of SMS texts: this means that it is highly unlikely that the user would see a high increase in their data bill.

What’s your view?

Well, it may sound like a sci-fi movie scenario, but the fact is: the reported news (about the CarrierIQ Keylogger), as well as the public commercial, offers that you can find on the internet, demonstrates that some (or most) of the features we’re mentioning here are already available. I just remember back in the years of Windows adoption and the rise of viruses: users were told not to install unknown programs (and freeware), it sounds like the same approach is happening with smartphones and apps now.

What’s your view on this? Any tips you’d like to share for preventing such things to happen to our fellow smartphone users?

In fact, by too frequently adding some changes to their privacy settings, Facebook is addressing their users concern. However, by giving more control to the users, things seem to be worse as most of Facebook users are not even aware of the default settings for their account. While Facebook can say that they implemented solutions to strengthen privacy issues, users are more and more lost. While some “advanced” Facebook users are trying to help their peers by indicating what to do to increase their security settings, most users adopt few principles that, at the end of the day, do make sense.

My recommended attitude toward managing Facebook privacy settings

Personally, from the beginning, and independently of what privacy settings Facebook have implemented, I just consider that anything that is published on Facebook falls into the public domain, which means that anybody can see and eventually use it. Most of Facebook users would come out with some tips and tricks to restrict access to my Facebook profile (and they probably are right), but I’m convinced that without going through a major redesign, Facebook won’t convince me that they have addressed all the privacy issues.

Is Facebook addressing privacy concerns?

The way I see things is simple: Facebook has brought ad-hoc changes so as to address users’ complains, or in order to copy other platforms interesting features (see Google Plus granular control of who can see your posts). But the Facebook platform itself wasn’t conceived as a target-oriented publishing platform.

If we take the analogy with Microsoft Windows platform: viruses are king on this platform since the platform wasn’t initially designed with security in mind, and despite all the anti-virus solutions that exist everywhere, the fact remains the same: Windows isn’t a secure-enough platform. The same case applies for Facebook: it was initially conceived to show-off publicly whatever you want to share, as opposed to Google Plus for example, who was conceived from the beginning with granular control in mind.

Don’t get me wrong, however, I know Facebook is working on improving their privacy settings, but can I ask you a question? Raise your hand if you are ever able to catch-up with all of Facebook updates. Almost every week, you can see people, blogs, and mainstream media talking about a new feature, but whoever implement them as soon as they read it? It’s more than common that some “old” information updates only reach Facebook users months later.

What if you’ve been hacked in between?

How do you revert back? The most common solution that is given to users is to change their Facebook password – but how can it help you recovering one of your private photos that have been copied to another Facebook user’s computer? It’s almost useless. That’s why I always say: if you think any information that you want to post on Facebook can’t fall into the public domain field, just don’t publish it. I know, for example, that you can set some settings whereby you can limit it so that only your friends can see it: but how can you be sure about it?

Think again about it: can you actually be sure that it’s actually protected?

As I said earlier, those are my perceptions of how secure Facebook is. I know there are users out there who don’t agree with my point of view. Feel free to raise your voice on the comment system. We will then help educate Facebook users to get more control of their privacy on this popular platform.