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Websites Still Failing Basic Privacy Practices
DigitAl56K writes "Large companies still can't seem to get the basics of privacy and security on the Web pulled together. Today I went to enter a competition from Duracell to win a Nintendo Wii by filling out an online form. It requires entering your full name, address, and date of birth, and then proceeds to submit it via an unencrypted HTTP POST. The ultimate irony is the message at the bottom of the page that reads: 'Trust is a cornerstone of our corporate mission, and the success of our business depends on it. P&G is committed to maintaining your trust by protecting personal information we collect.' Which websites have you found to be lacking in their basic privacy practices?"
That Firefox saves the nasty warnings for Web sites that are encrypted!
HTTP is sent unencrypted, but it's not that easy for a random person who wants to steal your address to be on the correct subnet at exactly the right time to sniff it. Also, address and date of birth aren't usually considered confidential, even if you might not want to publish them.
This isn't a lot different than many of those post-card questionnaires many people fill out and mail in.
I think in this case, it's more important what they do with the information once they receive it.
That said, I think there should be default encryption wherever possible automatically.
That level of privacy is not considered important by anybody. Seriously.
Credit Card data - encrypted; you're first and last name? short of being in the witness protection program it is NOT considered a privacy issue. sorry.
(I know, I know, it would be nice if it was).
Whitehouse.com seems to have no regard for the security of web visitors.
"XXXXX is committed to maintaining your trust by protecting personal information we collect."
Means nothing when every website harvesting your info says that.
A few years ago I was buying a state tax program and realized that their form that asked for all my private data was an http page! I was shocked. Then I added "s" after http and it happily connected me over SSL. How many people who buy Taxcut will check the protocol and change it?
"It requires entering your full name, address, and date of birth, and then proceeds to submit it via an unencrypted HTTP POST"
If I wanted a list of names, birth dates and addresses to use for nefarious purposes I don't need to steal yours from some dinky website or sniff packets. I'd just take one of the plentiful lists of birth records on the internet like this one then cross reference it with property tax records of the area which are more plentiful than the birth records and it'll give probable name, dob, and address combinations. A good portion of probable matches can be confirmed through freely available court records. All of that data is fairly trivial to collect in bulk (i used to collect databases, was a pretty fun hobby actually), is perfectly legal and will provide a much better profile of matches than just name/dob/addr combinations stolen from a website or data stream.
Being that anal about your name, birth date and address is actually quite silly. Theres so much low hanging fruit as far as collecting that type of data is concerned (and you're probably already included in it) that all you really did by not continuing with that form was taking yourself out of the running for a Wii.
The best thing you can really do is just keep close tabs on your credit report and get signed up for all the fraud alerts or freezes they offer. Thats the best place to prevent and quickly repair most identity theft. Stop being so anal about info thats almost guaranteed to be out there already, set up your defenses where they're most effective and go get your Wii.
I stopped providing security on my websites when browsers made it too difficult for the average user (that I deal with) to continue using the site with a self signed certificate.
Sure, it won't help against a man in the middle attack. But that is truly the only attack that using self signed certificates is vulnerable to. Unlike completely unencrypted content.
If godaddy, verisign etc. didn't charge insane prices like £107 per year for a wildcard certificate for one domain, I would do actually buy the certificates needed. I already find 10USD too much for a wildcard certificate for the numerous domains I operate, so it would have to be quite a significant drop. It's not like they do any verification with the £107 certificates, they just want a credit card number.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
They stopped this practice recently, but for over a year, my student loan company required me to sign up for monthly paperless statements if I wanted to pay electronically. The statements were e-mailed in the form of a PDF attachment. The e-mail body assured me my privacy was intact because the file was password protected -- by my Social Security number!
Brilliant! If an interloper intercepted my e-mail, not only could he brute force my password with easy to find, easy to use tools (in a matter of minutes, since he knows the number of characters in it), but he'd know my SSN once he cracked it. I would have been better off with no password protection.
When I e-mailed Sallie Mae with the above information, the representative brushed it off. It was safe, he said, as long as I opened it on a non-public computer, because my SSN was not being sent over the Internet when I typed it in.
(The Consumerist didn't find it interesting, either.)
What about slashdot? Strangely there is no https://slashdot.org/login.pl, even though here is a https://slashdot.org/my/logout. You can logout with SSL, you just can't log in with it.