Google Launches Opt-Out Village - Parody Video

FaceBook Timeline & Apps Integration The reverse-chronological display of a user's history on Facebook and other life events, which replaces and combines a user's Facebook Wall and Profile, will become non-optional

Google will merge data from the products you use and then analyze it to make new assumptions. Google suggests that the purpose of this shift in policy is to make the consumer experience simpler. There will be no opt-out.

SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, & H.R. 1981 Vs Internet Freedom

Advertising Using Predictive Psychological Behavioral Analysis

Copyright protection has existed since 1998 through the The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Millions of web sites contain embedded videos. Google - Youtube promotes embedding videos. Under the new SOPA and PIPA proposed laws it could be illegal to show these Youtube embebbed video clips due to "copyright infingement". However due to the efforts from groups like EEF this is still legal. EFF asked for legal protections for artists and critics who use excerpts from DVDs or Internet video services to create new, remixed works. This may change and time will tell. It would appear the dawn of Interent censoreship has begun.

CIA Receives More FaceBook Funding - Parody Video

65 percent of those polled said they would cancel their account with Google due to the new policy. Google's new privacy policiy with the no opt-out, is now under investigation.

A growing number of people are concerned about what happens to deleted user emails or data associated with closed accounts.

The Gmail privacy policy says that deleted messages remain active on Google servers for up to 60 days after deletion, but that "may remain in our offline backup systems."

• One of the largest file-sharing sites Megaupload which was based in Hong Kong, had its domain name seized and shutdown Jan 19 2012. The Justice Department said it was “among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States.” The government said Megaupload”s “estimated harm” to copyright holders was “well in excess of $500 million.” Other file-sharing sites are making drastic changes to avoid the same fate and either voluntarily shutting down or deleting copyrighted files. The operators of ThePirateBay are now awaiting jail time and a $6.8 million fine.

Hundreds of domains (web sites) have been taken over by Homeland Security ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement). Web site owners are suing the US government over domain seizures.

Some of America's largest corporations have invested in and promoted file sharing technology companies, and are directly responsible for enabling the world wide file sharing phenomenon.

• BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data over the Internet. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files, and it has been estimated that it accounted for roughly 43% to 70% of all Internet traffic. Although it has been associated with sharing copyrighted materials, it is also used to distribute large amounts of legitimate commercial files including video. Facebook uses BitTorrent to upgrade its servers. Internet Service Providers have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for many years. Utorrent.com is ranked #1,608 in the world with over 18,000 links pointing to it.

Microsoft's Hypocritical Parody of The Gmail Man

• ACTA (Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) A signing ceremony was held on 1 October 2011 in Tokyo, with the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea signing the treaty. Electronic Frontier Foundation said: ACTA threatens personal and digital freedoms. A number of controversial proposals were included, or rumored to be included, in early drafts of the treaty. But in part to an intense public backlash, most of these provisions were stripped out, or at least watered down, in the final version of ACTA. Netherlands, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are delaying the international trade agreement's ratification process. Lawmakers demanded more clarity on the privacy implications for Internet users.

30,000 Polish Demonstration March Protest ACTA

Most web sites track and store user activity, even from site to site. Google and Facebook have now announced new methods of aggregating tracking, analysis of user's personal data and habits. Even with public out-cries of privacy invasion, more and more personal data is being collected, analyzed and sold to 3rd parties each year. Until now users could opt-out of some of this tracking. FaceBook's Mark Zuckerberg says "The age of privacy is over". Invasion of privacy is very profitable. At the end of 2011 Facebook had $3.9 billion in cash, making $4 per user and Google had $45 billion in cash making, $30 per user. Left unchallenged they will collect enough personal data to perform predictive psychological behavioral analysis on all their users. Put simply, they will know more about you and what you will likely do in the future then you will, yourself. This information is invaluable to financial and marketing companies as well as law enforcement. Unfortunately, this will enable prejudgment without your knowledge or input.

• Google’s new policy replaces more than 60 existing product-specific privacy documents, for services including Gmail, YouTube and Google Docs. Google says the unified terms will provide better search results and serve up ads that are more likely to be of interest. By combining your history across products, it will have more data to work with. Google will merge data from the products you use and then analyze it to make new assumptions. Google has taken an-all-or-nothing position. "If you continue to use Google services after March 1 2012, you’ll be doing so under the new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service", which you can not opt-out of. If you have an Android phone, Google already knows your location. After public discovery and distain over Google's Wi-Fi location data collection, finally offered a Wi-Fi Opt-Out in Nov 2011. Google has been mining your Gmail contacts database to figure out which competing social networks you belong to.  Deleting your profile won't delete your Google Account. First delete your profile then delete your account. Gmail usernames cannot be recreated after they've been deleted. Your public data will be hidden but Google never really deletes your data.

Google has been slow to react to 3rd party discoveries of over 1,000 malicious apps. Google and other advertising companies have been bypassing the privacy settings of the Apple Web browser on the iPhones and computers, tracking the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked. Microsoft says Google is employing similar methods to get around the default privacy protections in IE and track IE users with cookies.

• FaceBook announced Timeline and Apps Integration. The reverse-chronological display of a user's history on Facebook and other life events, replaces and combines a user's Facebook Wall and Profile, will become non-optional. Facebook has sparked an outcry after announcing users will have just seven days to add or remove things from their Timeline before the new, controversial feature goes public. This latest change to Facebook will allow people to access easily their friends' status updates and photographs, in a far more visual way, from as far back as 2004. Timeline integration, in a nutshell, posts activity from other Web sites and services that you use in your Facebook Timeline. Tried to leave Facebook and found out they only allow you "deactivate" your account? All your personal data, including photos, interests, friends etc, will be saved indefinitely. To "permanently" delete your account and personal data follow these instructions carefully. FaceBook had a major security breach with100 million Facebook profile pages leaked to a torrent site in 2010, as well as numerous privacy breach issues. Over 3 years later, "deleted" Facebook photos are still online. Facebook admitted systems "did not always delete images". Facebook's "Ticker" broadcasts everything you do. The company has put political veterans in key executive roles and board positions with a powerhouse lobbying operation.

•  LexisNexis Group who has been data mining since 1977, "delivers authoritative global news, business intelligence, legal information and public records", which is only available for a fee. They have one the world's largest databases.

•  DoubleClick has been around since 1996. The FTC launched an investigation into DoubleClick's collection and compilation of personal information shortly after the 1999 Abacus acquisition. This raised fears that the combined company would link anonymous Web-surfing profiles with personally identifiable information and the merger was stopped. DoubleClick is considered to be malware by most anti-virus companies. Google purchased DoubleClick in 2007 for $3.1 billion, to aquire their technology and, more importantly, its relationships with Web publishers, advertisers and advertising agencies.

• Browser cookies are used to track users' web browsing habits. Most browsers can easily delete these cookies except for Flash cookies. Firefox has a plugin to delete these type of cookies. More than half of the top websites use Flash cookies (local shared objects) to track users and store information about them but only four of them mention it in their privacy policy. Some websites use Flash cookies as hidden backups, so that they can revive HTTP cookies when the user deletes them.

• Epsilon a subsiduary of Alliance Data, has more than 2,500 corporate clients. It monitors social networking and other sites to see what people are saying about a company, and offers Abacus, "the world's largest cooperative database with over 8.6 billion consumer transactions and 4.8 billion business transactions" used for creating lists of prospective customers. They provide a broad range of loyalty marketing services spanning database marketing, direct mail, email marketing and sends billions of email ads every year. The data Epsilon sells includes age, profession, residence, ethnic information and political affiliation. The Epsilon database was breached in April 2011 with over 100 companies affected. DataLossdb.org tracks them and other company data breaches. Hundreds of millions of records have being stolen, containing end users' personal data.

• Apple's iDevices were logging geo locations for up to a year and was easily accesible from an iTunes backup. After its discovery was made public, Apple reduced the tracking to 7 days and removed it from the iTunes backup. Apple allows developers free access to iPhones contact information and some apps are collecting that info. Any iOS app can, without asking for your permission, upload all of the information stored in your address book to its servers. Twitter, Path and Hipster iPhone apps were discovered to leak sensitive data without notification. Apple "said" it would require apps to notify users that their contact data might be transmitted, precipitated by inquiries posed by two U.S. congressmen. Apple's Gatekeeper in OS X Mountain Lion will block the installation of apps from third-party developers without an Apple Developer ID by default, and will serve to reinforce Apple's control of the OS X software sales channel.

• Microsoft has developed technology to secretly intercept, monitor and record communications on voice over IP networks. Microsoft purchased Skype for $8.5 billion. Their patent pending application for a technology will provide a backdoor in communications equipment to record VOIP conversations and chat, called "Legal Intercept" in the patent application. Skype uses complex obfuscation and anti-reverse engineering techniques. Skype has around 330 million active users each month.

• Carrier IQ claims its software is installed on over 140 million mobile devices with partners including Sprint, HTC, Apple and Samsung. The software is capable of logging user keystrokes, recording telephone calls, storing text messages, tracking location and more. After its disclosure and public out-cry, most carriers have "said" they will cease using it in the future. In Dec 2011 Carrier IQ released a pubic relations damage control report. The first draft of the Mobile Device Privacy Act, which requires mobile companies and app creators to inform users of all monitoring software is now in the works.

• TomTom has admitted to The Australian Financial Review that every GPS device sold in Australia in the past three years has been built to report details, such as journey times, speeds and routes taken, back to the maker. Most of the roughly 1 million users of the TomTom global positioning system device will have details of their travel sold to the highest bidders. In the UK TomTom will report back to insurers on driver behaviour. Tracking device will monitor driving habits and adjust charges accordingly. Anyone that signs up to the Fair Play Insurance service will be issued a TomTom Pro 3100 navigation.

• UK network provider O2 had been giving out mobile numbers when customers browsed websites from their handsets. Only after the news of the leak hit the mainstream, O2 confirmed that it had fixed problem which initiated spam texting.

• Employers and law enforcement are discreetly using Google, FaceBook and Twitter to get personal information on people, which they could not normally obtain. U.S. law-enforcement agencies are increasingly obtaining warrants to search Facebook, often gaining detailed access to users' accounts without their knowledge.

• Google and Apple were among seven technology companies that must face a lawsuit claiming they violated antitrust laws by entering into agreements not to recruit each other’s employees. This in part is an attempt to keep their internal "secrets" from leaving their company and possibly being publically disclosed.

• Twitter which prides itself in promoting unfettered expression in a stunning role reversal, planned to allow country-specific censorship of tweets that "might" break local laws. This sparked a backlash. Twitter now says that it will not filter tweets, but instead will be "reactive only" and will withhold specific content only when "required" to do so. Twitter stores the contacts of iPhone users for a period of 18 months, if they used Twitter to search their iPhone contacts for Twitter accounts.

• WikiLeaks was the #1 whistle blowing site on the Internet. After releasing embarrassing US "secrets" the US government attempted to shut them down. Twitter logs of WikiLeaks supporters were subpoenaed. WikiLeaks was taken down for a while but it was mirrored by over 1,000 websites around the world. Then they hit WikiLeaks where it hurts, by "convincing" all of WikiLeaks' donation collection companies to drop them, killing their revenue. According to WikiLeaks "Despite Visa and MasterCard cutting off payments to WikiLeaks, they have found some ways around the banking blockade"

• SOPA (Stop Online Piracy) and PIPA (Protect IP Act)  were very poorly written bills, opening the door for censorship. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the bills is that the conduct it would criminalize is so poorly defined. With 7 million signatures and 7,000 websites who coordinated a service blackout, or posted links and images in protest against SOPA and PIPA, the bills are postponed until issues raised about the bills are resolved.

• Bill HR 1981 is titled the "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act". It would give law enforcement the power to review Internet service providers user logs for nearly any reason. All ISP's would be required to store all users' Internet activity for up to 18 months, The most public champion of data retention is the U.S. Department of Justice, which has been quietly lobbying for the sweeping new requirements since 2005.

• The U.S. government is seeking software that can mine social media to predict everything from future terrorist attacks to foreign uprisings, according to requests posted online by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

• In Syria's cyberwar, the regime's supporters have deployed a new weapon against opposition activists -- computer viruses that spy on them. The cyberespionage campaign passes information it robs from computers to a server at a government-owned telecommunications company in Syria. Syria restricted its citizens' access to the internet, using an American company's technology. Blue Coat acknowledged the use of its technology in Syria.

• Canada reintroduces the Copyright Modernization Act as Bill C-11. In 2010 it was Bill C-32. In 2008 it was Bill C-61. Under Bill C-11, transferring a movie with a lock to a portable device like an iPad could hold a penalty of $100 to $5,000. Again this is a poorly written bill getting more intrusive with each new incarnation (mimicking SOPA & PIPA). None of these bills have been passed. If the current form of the copyright bill becomes law, it could be subject to a constitutional challenge.

• Canada's Bill C-30 "Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act", previously called "Lawful Access" means Internet service providers and cellphone companies won't be able to say no to law enforcement if they ask them for subscriber information of any of their customers. The bill will also require ISPs and cellular phone companies to install equipment for real-time surveillance and create new police powers designed to obtain access to the surveillance data. The privacy commissioner of Canada said  "it is a serious infringement of civil liberties." In a letter to Public Safety Canada from Canada's Privacy Commissioners Quote "the provisions of Bills C-50, C-51, and C-52 (augmented by changes in Bills C-22 and C-29) would substantially diminish the privacy rights of Canadians". Warrantless surveillance details are here.

Microsoft's Hypocritical Parody Googlighting Backfires