“(…) Pay for everything in cash. Don’t use my regular cellphone, landline or e-mail account. Use an anonymizing service to mask my Web surfing. Stay away from government buildings and airports (too many surveillance cameras), and wear a hat and sunglasses to foil cameras I can’t avoid. Don’t use automatic toll lanes. Get a confetti-cut paper shredder for sensitive documents and junk mail. Sign up for the national do-not-call registry (ignoring, if you can, the irony of revealing your phone number and e-mail address to prevent people from contacting you), and opt out of prescreened credit offers. Don’t buy a plane ticket, rent a car, get married, have a baby, purchase land, start a business, go to a casino, use a supermarket loyalty card, or buy nasal decongestant.”

“I have been the browser history of my website visitors for the past few months to gracefully enhance adding my Atom feed to their favorite feed reader. Easily recognized branding such as “Add to My Yahoo” has yielded much higher conversion rates than a simple Atom link with a minimal effect on page load performance. Dynamically checking for active usage of 50 or so aggregators allows me to extend my total test list and promote an obscure tool that might never make the cut for permanent on-screen real estate.”

“In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: I’ve got nothing to hide. According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.”

Daniel Solove: Privacy and the “Nothing to Hide” Argument. (via)

“Op vrijdag 21 september 2007 reikt Bits of Freedom voor de vijfde keer de Big Brother Awards uit. Met de Awards worden de persoon, het bedrijf of de overheidsinstelling te kijk gezet die zich het afgelopen jaar te buiten zijn gegaan aan het controleren van burgers en afbreken van hun privacy. Vanaf vandaag kan iedereen nominaties indienen.”

Big Brother Awards 2007 – Nominaties gezocht!

Zie ook XS4ALL’s Opinie: Big Brother Awards.

Het voorstel luidde:

1. Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet-restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.
2. The company will not engage in pro-active censorship.
3. The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.
4. Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.
5. Users should be informed about the company’s data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties.
6. The company will document all cases where legally binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.

The Funds’ Stockholder Proposal, Internet Censorship

Google Web History