Tag Archives: privacy

Adjust Default Privacy Settings, Facebook, Facebook Secrets, Facebook Tricks, Turn off location mapping

Facebook – Guard your privacy

September 14, 2012 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

If Facebook had its way, we would have no walls on our houses and we’d all be wearing ID chips to show our current location. If you think this idea is something from science fiction, think again. Right now, many of you are telling Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare and WeChat(Weixin) and other social networking sites exactly where you are. Here’s some what-ifs for you.

1. What if you had a stalker, someone from work or school or your neighborhood, who really wanted to get closer to you? How would he or she do that? Well, getting you to add him or her was a friend on Facebook would be a start. Do you know all of your friends? Do you know if they are really who they say they are? Chances are, if you connect to social networking through your mobile device or tablet, you’re opening yourself up to this kind of sketchy activity.

2. Do you drive a fancy car, say a Mercedes or BMW? To most people, driving a fancy car is a status symbol. That’s easy to figure out, isn’t it? Let’s say that some burglar is looking for a nice score in your neighborhood. Let’s say they figure out your name and address. With a bit of work, they could track you on some social networking site and know when you are not at home. That’s a lot easier than your might think. Even if you are just out shopping, maybe across town or in the next city, and you connect to one of your social networking sites through your phone, you are most likely telling that burglar exactly where you are and approximately how long it will be before you return home. You might as well leave a sign on your door, “Out for a bit, help yourself.”

3. You are applying for a job or an internship and someone wants to see what kind of person you are, aside from your resume or application. Maybe you’re in a bar, having a rousing good time and you tweet about it, maybe post some pics on Facebook, and maybe this bar you’re in just isn’t too classy. We’re thinking of somewhere that might have exotic dancers, mud- wrestling or midget tossing, you know? Sure, you are free to go to those places but do you really want future employers to know about it before they get to know the real you? Go ahead, tweet/post/comment from wherever you want but once you give any social media the ability to pinpoint your current location, you’re opening the door to this kind of snooping.

Photo of mobile phone with Facebook statuses on it. — **In this photo, Kevin is away for the weekend. We even know where he is. Can you see any danger in posting that information?**

TIP: Get to know your mobile device or tablet. Figure out where you can turn your location settings off, or on, depending on your personal wishes. We’re not saying that telling others where you are is a bad thing, it’s just that sometimes it’s definitely not a good thing.

Here is a link that we found which describes real situations where location mapping caused problems. Check it out and, hopefully, this will reinforce out point:

http://blog.sherweb.com/geo-tagging-convenience-can-be-dangerous/

Thanks for reading!

Privacy, Security

My View on Internet Freedom

February 20, 2012 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

Remember the Berlin Wall? It was one of the last relics of the Cold War. Built in 1961, it was a symbol of backward thinking politicians, persecution and the loss of personal freedom until it was torn down in 1989. You might also remember Ronald Reagan’s famous line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” How dramatic that line was! It’s still used in stirring and patriotic speeches about God Bless America and freedom. Unfortunately, the western world is far less free than it was in 1989.

This week, Canada will enact legislation that will allow police and governments to spy on its citizens without a warrant of any kind. The legislation will force ISPs to provide vast amounts of information without any kind of judicial control. Canadians, showing their natural good humour (we spell it with the ‘u’), reacted to this legislation by using Twitter to make fun of the government minister who promoted the bill. We tweeted everything we were doing, everything we were thinking and everything that our cats and dogs were doing. Providing a mass of unrelated information just might be a way to hide your tracks if you are up to something sinister. Unfortunately, this would also hide real criminals and terrorists from being identified.

Hasan Elahi used much the same kind of tactic when he was questioned by the FBI for six months in 2009. Here’s a description of what he did: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/sunday/giving-the-fbi-what-it-wants.html?pagewanted=all

Hasan’s website is here: http://www.elahi.umd.edu/track/ and you can track him virtually everywhere in the world. He’s taken privacy to a whole other level. By making himself completely open in all of his activities, he has invented a way to, perhaps, cloak his actions in behind a wall of transparency. Here he is on Youtube (Ted TV):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAdwurHhv-I

explaining what happened and how he handled the situation.

Americans have already lost their freedoms. You might not know it but you have. The NSA, the FBI, the CIA and even the EOP (look it up) are already spying on you. Through the use of expert scaremongering, successive presidents and legislators have teamed up to deny your constitutional rights. The Occupy riots have proven that even the most basic right of freedom of assembly, is long gone.

Canadians are by nature quite peaceful. This bill, hopefully, will stir us into action to defeat the government that introduced and supported it. Our political system is different from the American system. If we get ticked off with the current party in power, it’s not unusual for us to completely trash them in the next election. We’re not a two party country up here and we don’t vote along team lines. It’s a little bit harder for Americans to get rid of a party that threatens to limit their freedom but it’s still possible. As the Arab Spring might* have shown us, change is possible if we work collectively to promote it. Isn’t it curious that the communist principle of a collective voice against oppression seems to be the ideal tool in our post-capitalist society.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to see a few comments on this post.

*I say ‘might’ simply because neither Egypt or Libya seems to have succeeded in enacting the ideals that they fought for. In the power vacuum that was created after the ouster of the old leaders, it seems that the military in both countries has taken over. Just as church and state should be separate, there is no place in the world for a military state.

Privacy, Security, TOR

Online Privacy Part 2 : TOR

February 16, 2012 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

What is TOR? Here is the description from the TOR website:

“Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.”

What this means is that once you are using the TOR browser, your surfing habits are hidden from prying eyes. TOR also hides your location from the rest of the world. Here is how TOR describes what it does:

“Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.”

If you’ve watched any recent cop show on TV, you’ll know that tracing a criminal can be easy, depending on the time limit in the plot. As far back as Three Days of the Condor (Six Days in the novel), smart operatives defeated tracking software simply by bouncing their source signal from place to place, either in a telephone exchange as Robert Redford did in Condor or through various servers around the world as Lisbeth Salander did in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Once you start using TOR, your surfing might slow down a bit but you will be as anonymous as you can get on the Internet. Take a journey with me as I begin to discover TOR’s capabilities. I’ll also try to test it’s effectiveness at hiding my IP address in several places around the world. I should say now that TOR is free. There are other ways to hide your IP address from prying eyes but every one that I can think of involves spending some bucks. I’m all for free, aren’t you?

Start by reading the documentation here: https://www.torproject.org/docs/documentation.html.en Start to discover on your own what TOR is about, download everything and pop back for more updates on Monday. (I’m donating blood tomorrow so I’ll be tied up most of the day.)

Thanks for reading!

Email, Hotmail, Security

Hide Yourself Online

February 15, 2012 Computers Made Simple Leave a comment

These days, there is absolutely no guarantee that what you do online is private. While there are many ways to hide your surfing habits from your family, cloaking yourself from unwanted and unnecessary snooping by local, state or federal authorities is much more difficult. As conservative politicians push for more restrictions of personal freedom, it is increasingly difficult for the regular citizen to maintain their right to privacy. Over the next few posts, I will investigate some of the things you can do to protect those rights. Consider this the first of a series.

The most important thing I can suggest to you, dear reader, is to immediately STOP using your ISP’s email. If you don’t know what that is, it’s the free email you get when you signed up for your particular ISP or Internet Service Provider. Instead, sign up for an account with any of the free email services from such sites as Microsoft, Gmail or Yahoo. Personally, I use Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo, each for different purposes. You don’t have to go as wild as I have but make sure you use at least one of them for yourself.

Why use a free service? There are two reasons, essentially. One is simple. When you change ISPs, you don’t have to send emails around to all of your contacts to tell them that you’ve changed your email address. The chance that any of the three services I have mentioned will go out of business is very slim. Secondly, free email accounts are much harder to trace. Authorities can pressure your ISP to reveal the address you use with them and, probably, your password. In Canada, a bill is in Parliament right now that would allow them to do that without a warrant. Imagine what certain people could do with your personal emails. Anyone who the party in power considers and enemy could be investigated. More on this a bit later.

The other thing that is open to scrutiny is your surfing habits. Let’s say that you’re a public figure or a politician or a high-profile civil servant. With the new rules in place, any security official could track your surfing habits without a warrant. Unless you are doing something illegal, there is no reason for them to know what sites you visit, is there? If you are committing a crime or if you are suspected of being involved in criminal or terrorist activity, wouldn’t it be fairly easy to get an official warrant to snoop around in your life? The trick to hiding your surfing habits is fairly simple. I will be investigating the TOR network over the next few posts. In the meantime, check out the TOR Project here: https://www.torproject.org/

Lastly, if you’ve been watching any modern TV detective series or movie, you’ll know that your lowly cell phone can give just about anyone your exact location in the world. The GPS locator in your phone sends out complete details of your movements every day. As you know, hackers can listen in on your conversations, access your voice mail and even download photos from your cell phone for their own uses.

Smart phones are wonderful pieces of technology but you might want to stop and think about how much of your private information your little friend is keeping track of. A tip here might be to have a cheap, throwaway phone for day to day use and a iPod Touch, for example, for all of your other Internet and GPS uses. There are other ways around this but now is the time to start thinking about your privacy and how your cell phone impacts it.

Look forward to more tips and tricks here in future posts. I am all for the rights of victims of crime and/or terrorism but I cannot put up with this growing trend of normal citizens losing their right to privacy. What do you think? Comments and questions are welcome.

Thanks for reading!

a little bit of hi-tech, a little bit of common sense and a lot of fun