Action Against Govt. Surveillance in Germany

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/opinion/sunday/germans-loved-obama-now-we-dont-trust-him.html?hp&_r=0

Malte Spitz, NyTimes, 063013

Six months of metadata, stored by my cellphone provider, T-Mobile. This list of metadata contained 35,830 records. That’s 35,830 times my phone company knew if, where and when I was surfing the Web, calling or texting.

With these 35,830 pieces of data, you can follow my travels across Germany, you can see when I went to sleep and woke up, a trail further enriched with public information from my social networking sites: six months of my life viewable for everybody to see what exactly is possible with “just metadata.”

All of this data had to be kept so that law enforcement agencies could gain access to it. That meant that the metadata of 80 million Germans was being stored, without any concrete suspicions and without cause.

This “preventive measure” was met with huge opposition in Germany. Lawyers, journalists, doctors, unions and civil liberties activists started to protest. In 2008, almost 35,000 people signed on to a constitutional challenge to the law. In Berlin, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest data retention. In the end, the Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of the European Union directive was, in fact, unconstitutional.

Data Mining Of Personal Info

From Campaign War Room to Big-Data Broom

By MICAH COHEN, nytimes, 061913

By merging voter files with information scoured from the Web, political candidates hope to be able to closely tailor their appeals to each potential supporter. 

The Criminal N.S.A.

By JENNIFER STISA GRANICK and CHRISTOPHER JON SPRIGMAN

Published: June 27, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/the-criminal-nsa.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contract employee and whistle-blower, has provided evidence that the government has phone record metadata on all Verizon customers, and probably on every American, going back seven years. This metadata is extremely revealing; investigators mining it might be able to infer whether we have an illness or an addiction, what our religious affiliations and political activities are, and so on.

BIG DATA 2013 JUN 19, 9:49 PM

New Ways Marketers Are Manipulating Data to Influence You

By TANZINA VEGA, NyTimes

Information from social media, credit card histories and Web habits helps marketers create advertisements that are increasingly personalized and nuanced. READ MORE…

Ways to Make Your Online Tracks Harder to Follow

By NATASHA SINGER, nytimes

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/ways-to-make-your-online-tracks-harder-to-follow-2/?_r=0

There are ways to minimize our digital footprints and at least nominally impede surveillance. READ MORE…

ADDITIONAL OPTIONS
Use a Proxy Server, like Proxify, to make web surfing anonymous
Use a search engine that doesn't track you, like www.duckduckgo.com

MAY 3, 2013, 5:03 PM11 Comments

Do-Not-Track Talks Could Be Running Off the Rails

By NATASHA SINGER

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/do-not-track-talks-could-be-running-off-the-rails/

Privacy advocates, for their part, argue that consumers have a right to choose not to be tracked by companies they don’t do business with. If the price consumers have to pay is more generic ads that are not tailored to them, they say, so be it.

“Most people don’t realize the extent to which this brazen online tracking is done, but when the practice is described, they want to be able to control it,” John M. Simpson, the privacy project director at Consumer Watchdog, wrote in a blog post earlier this week. “Why should a company I know nothing about, have no say over and no relationship with be able to collect information about my online activity?”

If the tracking protection group of the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C, the international standards body that has been trying to create a consensus for the privacy mechanisms...

UK asks Google to delete data collected by Street View cars

Kounteya Sinha, TNN | Jun 24, 2013, 05.54 AM IST

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/internet/UK-asks-Google-to-delete-data-collected-by-Street-View-cars/articleshow/20736446.cms?

But while accumulating images in 2010, oneGoogle engineer created a software that could snoop and pull out data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks the car encountered during its drive through towns and cities. The data included personal emails and financial details.

Google later said collecting such data or snooping into emails wasn't part of its programme and it was carried out by the engineer who was acting independently.