I’ve always hated “Clear”, the pay-$100-to-skip-to-the-front-of-the-security-line card. Firstly, because it’s private enterprise falsely dressed as security, and secondly because it creates a class system at the airport line. So my socialist side is smug to see the bourgeoisie get its comeuppance. Have fun changing your biometrics, folks.
Filed under
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clear
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privacy
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security
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SFO
“The way things are going, I half-expect to hear a quiet electric “peep” noise each time I flush the toilet; another bowel movement logged by Bumland Security.”
The owner of donotreply.com blogs emails that have bounced to him when corporations (and government agencies) have sent email “from” @donotreply.com.
Filed under
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email
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privacy
Clever hack — sniff a user’s browser history, work out what blogreading/bookmarking/OpenID sites they use, and reduce clutter by only display options for those sites.
Been putting off joining the EFF? Now might be a bloody good time to break out your chequebook. Anyone know of a link to the original New Yorker article on which this scare-story is based?
Filed under
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nsa
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politics
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privacy
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scary
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usa
Even if you’re using Facebook’s privacy settings to opt-out of their new “Beacon” “service”, the info is still getting sent to Facebook who may or may not be gathering it. Thank gawd for Adblock.
Search the complete land-history records (mortgages and deeds) for Massachusetts. Find out how badly your friends and family are in debt!
Filed away for ammunition the next time someone excuses gov’t massive-database-building with the platitude “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
Splendid article explaining the whats and wherefores of Google’s new “Web History” feature, so you don’t have to install it to experiment.
Somewhere between kinda-cool and terrifying: Allow Google to know Every Single Page you visit, and they’ll let you search against them. Yes, useful, but there’s no need for this to happen on Google’s servers in the sky.
Attractive approach to giving plausible deniability when someone fakes your name posting comments, without having your IP address posted publicly.
Scenes from my life (No. 96 in an occasional series)
I don’t particularly like giving out my personal information when not absolutely necessary. I also try to avoid being a good source of data to datamarts. So on those principles, I have several supermarket loyalty cards for the two local chains in my glove box, all acquired under false names and addresses. When Joy & I go shopping, I pull one out at random, and that’s our identity for the day.
(I also trade them from time to time with friends, so in the datamarts’ eyes, I switch from junk-food-loving lactose-intolerant dog-owner to crunchy-granola family-of-four in the blink of an eye)
This recently led to a cashier looking at her terminal, and then asking me, “Is your name really Bubba?” (Oh yeah, I should mention that the names are always ludicrous, and frequently alliterative.)
This evening, as we did our shop, I realised that we’d forgotten to bring a card in with us. Hurrah! An excuse to sign up for a new card. (This is particularly easy at our local Shaws, as the customer service booth is before the checkouts rather than after, so I can go sign up while Joy frets about the amount of frozen shite in our cart and considers throwing in at least some fresh fruit, which may or may not get eaten)
So I get my form, fill it out and hand it over to the customer service person. Normally they just chuck it into a folder and give me my card, but this lady decided to double-check my details.
Her: OK, so that’s Lionel Q. Butterkinger?
Me: No, ButterFinger. Like the candy bar. Sorry, I just have bad handwriting.
Her: (Without batting an eyelid, amends my form to make the “F” in Butterfinger clearer). And that’s 17 Hershey Street?
Me: No, not “Hershey”—Hersey St
Her: OK, here you go. (Hands me card)
Me: (Returns to Joy, who always keeps a safe distance while I perform this nonsense) Tsk. They only have checkboxes for “Mr”, “Mrs”, or “Ms”. I wanted to be Sir Lionel Q Butterfinger.
Excellent cartoon. From October 2001, but still as true today, sadly.
Interesting offering from the Googleplex — Sync your bookmarks, saved passwords and cookeis across your Firefox installations, via Google’s big-ass database in the sky. If there were a way to do this using my own server, I’d be all over it.
Read this Cory rant about a proposed Firefox feature that would allow advertisers to track click throughs in an opt-outable manner, then count the number of undisclosed un-opt-outable click-through mechanisms in use by the horde of advertising links littering the page. I counted five (boingboing.net, clk.atdmt.com, adserver.fmpub.net, c2.edapebaf.com and click.adbrite.com)
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