links for 2008-08-25

• Privacy in an Age of Terabytes and Terror
  Scientific American (SciAm) magazine devotes the whole September issue to privacy/technology. Many known things, but it's a pretty meaty and thorough look at various aspects, full of interesting anecdotes and examples. This link brings to the introduction, with links to all the stories. The three most interesting (data fusion, social hacking and social networks) are linked below.
  (tags: privacy)
• Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?
  From SciAm: "Young people share the most intimate details of personal life on social-networking Web sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, portending a realignment of the public and the private. ... Technology has led to a generational divide. On one side are high school and college students whose lives virtually revolve around social-networking sites and blogs. On the other side are their parents, for whom recollection of the past often remains locked in fading memories or, at best, in books, photographs and videos. For the current generation, the past is preserved on the Internet, potentially forever. And this change raises the question of how much privacy people can expect—or even desire—in an age of ubiquitous networking."
  (tags: privacy)
• How I Stole Someone's Identity
  From SciAm: Author Herbert Thompson asked some of his acquaintances for permission to break into their online banking accounts using the information about them, their families and acquaintances that is freely available online in blogs, resumes etc and some basic logic. "I decided to conduct an experiment to see how vulnerable people's accounts are to mining the Web for information. I asked some of my acquaintances, people I know only casually, if with their permission and under their supervision I could break into their online banking accounts. After a few uncomfortable pauses, some agreed. The goal was simple: get into their online banking account by using information about them, their hobbies, their families and their lives freely available online. To be clear, this isn't hacking or exploiting vulnerabilities, instead it's mining the Internet for nuggets of personal data. Here's one case ... illustrates a pretty serious weakness that most of us have online."
  (tags: privacy security)
• Data Fusion: The Ups and Downs of All-Encompassing Digital Profiles
  From SciAm: "The process of collecting information from multiple sources and merging it, known as data fusion, is supposed to create an information resource that is more powerful, more flexible and more accurate than any of the original sources. Proponents of data fusion say that their systems let organizations make better use of the data they already have; critics say that fusion threatens civil liberties by using information in ways that were never envisioned when it was first collected. Both sides assume that data-fusion systems actually work. The reality is that the systems are nowhere nearly as omniscient, as reliable or as well developed as many people think."
  (tags: privacy)