Slashdot Mirror
Guilty By Association
dmf writes "News.com is running a little piece about Microsoft's forays into researching aspects of social computing. With AOL Buddy Lists, Yahoo Messenger, Friendster, and other mappable relationship environments, is it possible the information will soon be used against you? Scenarios such as governments tracking private citizens, investigating terrorist links, political groups finding potential donor lists, marketing departments finding affinity groups, and other easily imagined data mining opportunities could open the doors for information abuse and misinterpretation of individual ties. What implications can it bring in the future of the personal life?"
PGP was a good start, it is basically an uncrackable form of cryptography based on public keys, that a very brave guy almost spent his life in prison for posting on a BS back ni the day. Click here for info on it.
Many Slashdot'ers probably are already familiar with this, but hey, you never know. We will all be fighting for privacy in the coming years it seems, best to know what tools are available to you. :)
PGP is available on almost every OS, Windows 95/98/NT/2000, MacOS, AIX, HPUX, Linux, Solaris, and DOS. And can be easily configured to work with most popular email programs as well.
Privacy means that only the intended recipient of a message can read it. By providing the ability to encrypt messages, PGP provides protection against anyone eavesdropping on the network. Even if the information is intercepted, it is completely unreadable to the snooper. Authentication identifies the origin of the information, certainty that it is authentic, and that it has not been altered. Authentication also provides an extremely valuable tool in network security: verification of the identity of an individual. In addition to secure messaging, PGP also provides secure data storage, enabling you to encrypt files stored on your computer. Version 6.5.8 also includes PGPnet - a powerful VPN client which enables secure peer-to-peer IP-based network connections - and Self-Decrypting Archives (SDAs) which allow you to exchange information securely even with those who do not have PGP.
I received a notice that my personal email address got listed on their site from someone apparently looking for information on me. So, I used my anonymous email address and registered as having information about the person who owns my personal address. So far, my anonymous alter-ego has not been contacted, though BOTH addresses have seen a marked increase of spam. When I started bouncing emails to my personal address from WordOfMouthResearch.com, I received the same "Someone is searching for information on you" message from a different source email address. After about 5 or 6 of these, I bounced the entire domain.
Anyone else have information on these guys? Again, I think they're just harvesting email addresses for spammers under the guise of providing a service (that no one seems to be using - again, if my "alter-ego / evil twin" email is the only address that has information on me, which when I checked last it was, these "people" looking for information on me would have contacted my alternate email by now.
And as far as using AOL IM and Friendster and all that to data mine, I suspect that the spammers will be the first to use this data, since they can't reliably harvest email addresses with web spiders anymore since people are trying to actively avoid them - however, there is a valid email address associated with an AOL IM login, and also with Yahoo IM, and with MSN Messenger, so there's some major sources that the spammers can get email addresses from, and they'll also cross reference the information, and you'll get more, and more targetted spam. Do you like guitars, for example? Here comes spam offering Guitar Strings cheap, along with the 50 others promising natural male enhancement.