Slashdot Mirror

David Brin is interviewed and provides some strong words on modern conceptions of privacy and why they're off-base. Brin asserts - and argues well - that a land with little privacy is a freer land.

griffjon writes: "Wired has an article on Richard M. Smith's (the other RMS) retirement from The Privacy Foundation to focus on safety using personal information, saying 'Most citizens, including me, have now put privacy concerns on the back burner. Sept. 11 completely changed everything, and one of the things it changed is that people are far less concerned about what the private sector is doing with information, and far more concerned about what the government is doing to keep them safe.'" I hope that he'll be keeping an eye out for privacy violations regardless.

Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this article in The New York Times (free registration required), a trick enables someone to essentially bug an e-mail message so that the spy would be privy to any comments that a recipient might add as the message is forwarded to others or sent back and forth. The vulnerability could facilitate the harvesting of e-mail addresses. Widely used e-mail programs that are vulnerable to the exploit (because they enable JavaScript) include Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Netscape 6." A snippet from the article: "The potential for such e-mail spying was first discovered by Carl Voth, an engineer in British Columbia. 'What bothers me is that in this case, my vulnerability is a function of what you do,' Mr. Voth said. 'I can be careful, I can take every precaution, I can turn off JavaScript, and it doesn't matter. If my neighbor isn't diligent and I send him an e-mail, I'm still vulnerable.'" "The Privacy Foundation, an educational and research organization based in Denver, plans to publicize and demonstrate the technique today."

mcleodnine writes "Wired news pointed me to this article about a report (pdf) recently released by the Privacy Foundation on 'chatty' browser extensions. They examined how much information several different free extensions will send to the mother ship. The report also makes some interesting points about the 'flexible' privacy policies of the companies who 'give away' the extensions. Did you get what you paid for or more than you bargained for?"

ephraim writes "According to The Privacy Foundation, Microsoft Word documents have a 'feature' which allows the documents' creators to place web bugs within the documents that inform the author whenever somebody has opened the document via a web server's logging facilities. This 'feature' can also be used to set and view cookies on the reader's copy of Internet Explorer. The story can be found here. While this might be useful for tracking the distribution of confidential documents, it also raises serious red flags about privacy since most people probably aren't expecting their copy of MSWord to announce their reading habits every time they use it." Props to their CTO Richard M. Smith.

Here is what Microsoft had to say about it (emphasis added)...

Vendor Contact and Response

Microsoft was contacted about this issue on 8/4/00, and again on 8/25/00. They confirmed that Microsoft Word will access the Internet in order to fetch Web images that are linked to in a Word document. They went on to say that Word uses Internet Explorer to fetch images and therefore standard Web browser cookies can be both read and set from inside a Word document. However, the company claims that Word users can mitigate the use of cookies.

Regarding the potential use of Web bugs to track Word documents, Microsoft said that there is no evidence that such activities are occurring.

ephraim writes "According to The Privacy Foundation, Microsoft Word documents have a 'feature' which allows the documents' creators to place web bugs within the documents that inform the author whenever somebody has opened the document via a web server's logging facilities. This 'feature' can also be used to set and view cookies on the reader's copy of Internet Explorer. The story can be found here. While this might be useful for tracking the distribution of confidential documents, it also raises serious red flags about privacy since most people probably aren't expecting their copy of MSWord to announce their reading habits every time they use it." Props to their CTO Richard M. Smith.

Here is what Microsoft had to say about it (emphasis added)...

Vendor Contact and Response

Microsoft was contacted about this issue on 8/4/00, and again on 8/25/00. They confirmed that Microsoft Word will access the Internet in order to fetch Web images that are linked to in a Word document. They went on to say that Word uses Internet Explorer to fetch images and therefore standard Web browser cookies can be both read and set from inside a Word document. However, the company claims that Word users can mitigate the use of cookies.

Regarding the potential use of Web bugs to track Word documents, Microsoft said that there is no evidence that such activities are occurring.