Square Galaxy » Digital Privacy

NBCOlympics gave away my email address

Jacob — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:52:39 +0000

Before the 2008 Olympics, I was at NBCOlympics.com looking for information. I noticed how they had a form where you could enter your email address to receive Olympic coverage updates or something like that. I entered the email address: nbcolympics@jacob…com.

I have an email system where anything@jacob…com will land in my inbox. That makes it really easy to give a custom email address to different people/sites so I can filter my email based on the TO address.

I didn’t receive a single email about the Olympics in all of that time. But I have received emails from Rotoworld.com about some sort of Fantasy sports thing.

What does this mean? The only person I gave that particular email address to was NBCOlympics. If I’m getting other email to that address, the only conclusion is that NBCOlympics sold off or gave away my email address to others.

Not that I’ll be bothered by the spam, because I’ve now switched all email to that address to arrive in a special spam email account.

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Wells Fargo, stop calling me

Jacob — Wed, 28 May 2008 02:54:50 +0000

Dear Wells Fargo,

I really want a bank that just keeps my money safe and accessible. I don’t want you calling me many times selling some soft of subscription package to your many programs. I signed up for the national do-not-call list, which means that I really don’t like being bothered my various offers made by calling me. Just because I bank with you, doesn’t mean that I really want to be bothered by you.

Tonight you called me, hiding the caller identification of the source call. Thats just plain sneaky, and something I wouldn’t expect from a bank that I would like to trust.

If you call me, I will refuse any offer you present. Please stop calling me. I told that last caller not to call me again. If I receive any more phone calls from you that do not directly concern my financial accounts, I will strongly consider moving my funds to a different institution.

July 17, 2008 update:
BOB, in comment 10180, was very nice to describe to me Wells Fargo’s privacy policy. According to his suggestion, I went to their website and found my privacy settings already set to the following:

My Wells Fargo Privacy Settings

So my question now is the following? Were my privacy settings always prohibiting contact? Or were they changed by the Wells Fargo representative who called me last with whom I requested that they no longer call me?

The good news is that I haven’t been called in quite a while. Also, now I know that any calls I may receive in the future are in contradiction to my privacy settings and against Wells Fargo’s privacy policy.

Does anyone know where I can find similar privacy settings on the Discover Card website?

Update July 24 Today I received another phone call which introduced itself as being associated with Wells Fargo. When I asked the guy if he was aware that I had specified in my Wells Fargo privacy settings that I wish not to be contacted, he asked me what privacy settings I was talking about, and then he suggested that my system was incorrect.

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BYU’s new website theme fosters identity theft

Jacob — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 20:05:12 +0000

On February 15th, BYU will launch a new look and feel for its various websites including the BYU homepage, Route Y, and department and college sites. The administrators for BYU’s webpages have nicknamed this new look and feel Collage. The Collage theme sports new colors and new methods for user interaction, but will increase a hacker’s ability to steal student’s identities.

An essential component to Collage is a login form on the top of every page. Students can type their username and password into the form to be shown a custom set of Internet links. Webpage administrators expect that students will frequently enter their password to gain access to their preferred links. Students will then be trained to frequently type their password on top of any page with the Collage theme.

Within a matter of minutes, anyone with a technical background can set up a page using the Collage theme. They can make it look like a genuine and legitimate BYU site. In particular, hacker’s can create a fake site that looks like a BYU site, but it really just a technique to trick student users. Many student users could be tricked into giving their username and password to a fake site created by a hacker. The hacker could then gain access to the student’s personal information, email, and financial accounts. Once the hacker has access to the student’s information,

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Hiding IP address with Firefox

Jacob — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 09:06:17 +0000

Quick answer to the title: you can’t.

One of the search queries on my other blog was: firefox how to keep ip address off internet. I thought I would help this person out and explain things to them.

When you load up a web page, Firefox (or any Internet browser) sends a request to a web server that in English might say, “Please send the contents of this page http://example.com/ back to me at address 10.1.2.3.” The web server receives this request and sends the contents of the page back to Firefox at the provided address where it is displayed to the user. This makes it really difficult to download web pages while not revealing your IP (Internet Protocol) address to others.

There are ways by using a proxy so that your address doesn’t go all the way to the end web server. In this way, your browser sends the request to the proxy, and the proxy creates its own request to the web server. The web server sends the page contents to the proxy, and the proxy forwards the contents back to your Firefox browser as a response to your original request.

There is this proxy service out there called the Anonymizer which does this sort of thing. I believe they charge money for their service, but you might be able to find a similar service out there. I do not endorse or recommend any products, I’m only stating here that they exist.

Firefox however, is a browser that is designed to be more secure and keep your information more private. You can download it by clicking here.

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Untraceable messaging

Jacob — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 09:51:07 +0000

Today on Slashdot there was a story about a messaging service called VaporStream that allows for completely recordless digital communication. They say “messages cannot be forwarded, edited, printed or saved.” See, I don’t buy into stories like that. Obviously, the message must be displayed at some point. What is keeping me from taking a digital camera and taking a picture of the screen. Then I have a record of what was sent. Maybe legally it is recordless, but I think it is important to remember there is always ways to take a camera or a tape recorder to things that weren’t meant to be recorded.

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Is Google protecting privacy?

Jacob — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 22:49:58 +0000

“In court papers filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, the Justice Department stated that Google had refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for one million random Web addresses from Google’s databases as well as records of all searches entered on Google during any one-week period.” (source)

The Justice Department said that it needed the information to renew the 1998 Child Online Protection Act which made it illegal to make pornography available to minors.

Many are praising Google for standing up for privacy rights and not complying with the subpoena. I’m not so quick to give such priase.

I think there may be two reasons that are less discussed why google is non-compliant with handing over the information.

The first of which deals with privacy. Google may not want to turn records over because it doesn’t want to reveal how much information it actually collects. Google may indeed collect large amounts of information, and is afraid of coming under attacks by privacy groups again by revealing exactly how much information it actually collects.

The second possible reason deals with pornography. How much of Google’s business deals with porn? How much does Google support the porn industry by helping users find their porn? If Google feels that their popularity is dependent partially at least on people trying to find sick materials, then they may not be motivated to help a law that would make it more difficult for people to find those materials.

Is Google evil and not turning over information because they have something to hide? Is Google evil and trying to hedge anti-filth laws so that they can be the access providers to filth? Or is Google not evil and really trying to protect their user’s privacy?

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MSN Blog Censorship

Jacob — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 05:26:14 +0000

I found this article about how MSN is censoring the blogs that it hosts. I’m actually not too upset about it, since most users are probably pretty aware of whats happening and they can move to another hoster like blogger.com, or even have their stuff hosted here on peargrove.com. But there is something else that really bugs me. Its in the end user license agreement of using MSN blogs:

Unlike rival services such as Blogger, MSN Spaces forces new users to grant Microsoft permission to “use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat” their blog postings.

Wow, that is really horrible. What it is saying, is that if you use MSN Spaces, Microsoft owns your content. I don’t want Microsoft to own anything I create. I create it, and it is mine. Thats why my blog is hosted by me instead of by Microsoft, so I own my own content. I’m free.

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