Thế giới của Sao: privacy

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Chủ Nhật, 12 tháng 5, 2013

Protect your privacy on Google

Do you know every Google search you've ever performed is stored on the search giant's servers? And that data is cross-linked to your search data from YouTube, Google Maps and any other Google services you use.

With that mountain of information, Google can tell a lot about you: where you live, your hobbies, age, health problems, religion and more.

Of course, Google uses that data mostly to target you with ads. If you spend 20 minutes doing research on a gadget, for the next few weeks you'll probably be hounded by ads for that gadget wherever you go online.

Because search sites and other Web services have become so ingrained in our daily digital lives, it isn't really an option to stop using them.

However, you can keep a lower profile and put a little more distance between your personal data and Google. To start, you can clear out your Google search history.

To see what forgotten secrets lurk in your Google history, go to google.com/history and sign in with your Google account information. You'll see a list of everything you've ever searched for on Google.

If you spend 20 minutes doing research on a gadget, for the next few weeks you'll probably be hounded by ads for that gadget.

You can browse through your searches and find them by day or Google service. Additionally, Google shows you personalized search trends, which can be interesting to look at.

To remove an unwanted search term, simply select click the checkbox next to it and then click the Remove Items button. You can select as many entries as you want at a time, or click the checkbox next to the Remove item button to select everything.

Once your information is removed, click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the page and choose Settings. Here you have the option to turn off your Web history. This will stop Google from recording anything else.

There is a catch to all this, of course - your information isn't really gone. Google will still keep your "deleted" information for audits and other internal uses. However, it won't use it for targeted ads or to customize your search results.

After your Web history has been disabled for 18 months, the company will partially anonymize the data so you won't be associated with it.

If you don't have a Google account, or don't usually sign in to it, Google still tracks your history. To accomplish this, it uses a cookie stored in your browser.

You can wipe out the information by deleting the cookie, but Google will just start recording new information. Instead, you can opt out of interest-based ads altogether by going to google.com/settings/ads.

If you're still concerned about stored information, your best bet might be to avoid using Google Search as much as possible. Alternative search sites DuckDuckGo and IxQuick parallel Google Search in features and performance, but don't collect any private information about you.

Microsoft's Bing Maps is a good replacement for Google Maps. Try using the venerable Firefox Web browser instead of Google's Chrome.

The more you mix and match Web services, the less any one company is able to form a complete picture of you.

Don't forget that while you're busy surfing the Internet, your browser is also busy making a list of the sites you visit. Anyone who gets access to your computer can see it.

You can delete some or all of the websites you've visited by going to your browser's options menu. Or you can use a free third-party cleaner program like CCleaner.

If you want to surf the Web without leaving a trace, all modern browsers have private, or incognito, browsing. While in this mode, your browser will ignore cookies and won't record visited sites to your browser's history. Click here to use this mode in your browser of choice.

Just don't confuse private browsing with anonymity. Your Internet service provider (and your employer if you're on a work computer) can still track the sites you're visiting. Avoiding that tracking requires an entirely different set of steps.

Kim Komando hosts the nation's largest talk radio show about consumer electronics, computers and the Internet. To get the podcast, watch the show or find the station nearest you, visit: www.komando.com/listen. To subscribe to Kim's free email newsletters, sign-up at: www.komando.com/newsletters.

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Chủ Nhật, 14 tháng 4, 2013

NSA data center front and center in debate over liberty, security and privacy

Twenty-five miles due south of Salt Lake City, a massive construction project is nearing completion. The heavily secured site belongs to the National Security Agency.

"The spy center" -- that's what some of the locals like Jasmine Widmer, who works at Bluffdale's sandwich shop, told our Fox News team as part of an eight month investigation into data collection and privacy rights that will be broadcast Sunday at 9 p.m. ET called "Fox News Reporting: Your Secrets Out.”

The NSA says the Utah Data Center is a facility for the intelligence community that will have a major focus on cyber security. The agency will neither confirm nor deny specifics. Some published reports suggest it could hold 5 zettabytes of data. (Just one zettabyte is the equivalent of about 62 billion stacked iPhones 5's-- that stretches past the moon.

One man we hoped would answer our questions, the current director of the NSA General Keith Alexander, declined Fox News's requests to sit down for an interview, so we stopped by the offices of a Washington think tank, where Alexander was speaking at a cyber security event last year.

Asked if the Utah Data Center would hold the data of American citizens, Alexander said, "No...we don't hold data on U.S. citizens," adding that the NSA staff "take protecting your civil liberties and privacy as the most important thing that they do, and securing this nation."

But critics, including former NSA employees, say the data center is front and center in the debate over liberty, security and privacy.

"[It] raises the most serious questions about the vast amount of data that could be kept in one place for many, many different sources," Thomas Drake told Fox News.

Drake -- who worked at the NSA from Aug. 2001 to Aug. 2008 and was unsuccessfully prosecuted on espionage charges -- says Americans should be concerned about letting the government go too far in the name of security.

"It's in secret so you don't really know," Drake explained. "It's benign, right. If I haven't -- and if I haven't done anything wrong it doesn't matter. The only way you can have perfect security is have a perfect surveillance state. That's George Orwell. That's 1984. That's what that would look like."

Fellow NSA whistleblower Bill Binney, who worked at the NSA for nearly four decades, says it's about the possibility that the government's stunning new capacity to collect, store and analyze data could be abused.

"It's really a-- turnkey situation, where it could be turned quickly and become a totalitarian state pretty quickly," he said. "The capacities to do that is being set up. Now it's a question of if we get the wrong person in office, or if certain people set up their network internally in government, they could make that happen quickly."

According to NSA's chief compliance officer John Delong, whose job is to make sure the laws and policies designed to protect the privacy of U.S. persons is being enforced, part of the frustration is that the rules are specific and secret.

"I think that's sort of the collision, is you have classified rules," DeLong explained during an hour long meeting with Fox News at the NSA. "You now have a somewhat more public data center,"

"These aren't just, like, general policy pronouncements of 'You shall protect privacy.'" he said.

DeLong added that another misconception is that there is only internal oversight, when he says there is "a tremendous amount of external oversight" from the Justice Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and others.

In an email, Vanee' Vines, a public information officer for the NSA, said that the Utah Data Center will be "a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the Intelligence Community’s efforts to further strengthen and protect the nation. NSA is the executive agent for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and will be the lead agency at the center.”

Because the Utah Data Center is a "secure facility" and you cannot go inside without the needed security clearances, Fox News rented a helicopter and took to the skies, where the depth and breadth of the Utah Center were stunning.

The aerial video footage is exclusive to the Fox News investigation and posted here. Two weeks after our filming, the helicopter pilot reported to our Fox News team that he had been visited by the FBI on a "national security matter."

The pilot said, according to the FBI agents, that the NSA had taken photos of the helicopter once it made several flyovers. These photos allowed the NSA to identify the make and manufacturer of the helicopter in California who, in turn, told the NSA who operates it in the Salt Lake City area.

The FBI wanted to know if we had the proper air space clearances to flyover the site, which the Fox News team did. Satisfied that the pilot was not flying "terrorists" over the site, the questioning concluded. While the pilot passed along the Fox News contact information, there was no further inquiries.

Binney said the helicopter incident "showed the capability of the U.S. government to use information to trace people, their relationship to others and to raise suspicions about their activities and intentions."

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