Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Privacy Under Serious Threat

How much do they know about you? Have you ever figured out all the personal information you already shared around? Not only information collected online as everything you unfolded about your life to banks, stores, universities, clubs, etc. The recent scandal of unauthorized data mining, eavesdropping and real espionage the NSA (National Security Agency) led all over the US shows off the massive misuse of state power as well as how our privacies are at risk.

In fact, recently, Americans have watched with growing alarm a series of big mistakes that have resulted in the personal information of millions falling into the wrong hands. The extent of fraud that will result from these privacy breaches can probably never be quantified. What is known, however, is that privacy has become a serious issue for everyone.

Sound Advice (from cio.com)

Latanya Sweeney, founder and director of the Laboratory for International Data Privacy at Carnegie Mellon University, says the snowballing of collected personal data can be measured by what she calls global disk storage per person. Sweeney calculates GDSP by dividing the amount of hard disk storage sold each year by the world’s adult population. The GDSP has grown from 20KB of data in 1983 to 472MB in 2000, and the number continues to grow. “Experience shows that once our information is captured, someone will inevitably use it at some time for their strategic advantage,” Sweeney says

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It´s important to define "wrong hands", because we can divide at least in two groups as follow:

Wrong and BAD hands: People who buy or steal data to use against those people, for example, using credit card information, try to intimidate people, or even use data to have any advantage for smthg.


Wrong, but WARM hands: People who use this privacy data to increase his contact net, try to sell smthg, or even to prepair some jokes.

If you're a victim of the second group, welcome board, because nowadays it's very usual this kind of stuffs happen, we have our profile in lots of websites, orkut, webmails, etc..

But buddy... if you're a victim of the first group.. call 911! hehehe

Cheers guys!

Anonymous said...

Que tal ser monitorado através de dispositivos implantados nas roupas que você comprou?
O "Consumidor RS" publicou essa semana:
A tecnologia de etiquetas com microtransmissores de rádio (RFIDs), que já tem uma década de desenvolvimento, promete ser uma das maiores revoluções para o setor de varejo e para a cadeia de suprimentos, em escala mundial. Mas o grande senão é o crescente temor por parte dos consumidores de que os transmissores quase invisíveis permaneçam ativos após a compra, enviando sinais para bancos de dados remotos. É claro que muitas dessas preocupações não têm base técnica: há muita desinformação a respeito da tecnologia, mas é justamente esse grau de desinformação que representa o maior risco para a adoção global dos RFIDs.