Privacy on the Internet: what do we know about you or your business?
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
May 5, 2006 [4981 views]
This session will cover some of the issues you have already met but will also give you an opportunity to see some tools and consolidate your understanding.
As you have already seen, when you explore the web or use other electronic services you leave your footprints behind:
- We can record when you visit a web site
- We can track when you open an email
- We can look at the search words you type into a search engine
- We can follow the paths you take through a site
- We can keep a history of your behaviour
- We can connect your visits to different sites
- We can collect your email address, phone number and postcode
- We can link the information we store with the information you give us offline
- We can sell your information to other people
- We can build a detailed profile of you, your interests, your contacts, your preferences and your behaviour and we can keep doing it
Key technologies and techniques
IP Addresses
Static versus dynamic
Find out where they are
Use them as an ID
URLs
Look for the additional information being passed in the URL
Browsers
When you browse a request is send to the server
Exploring requests
We can use analytics software to understand what has been requested, and tracking customers through sites
Cookies
“A cookie is a short line of text that is created by a web site and stored in a file on your computer. Cookies are used to store information about your preferences and activity during and after your visit to a web site. Cookies are also used widely in electronic commerce programs to keep track of which items a user has selected for purchase. Cookies cannot gather any information from your computer other than which you provide directly or that which is provided routinely by your browser software. Any user has the right and ability to refuse or delete cookies. However, such refusal or deletion may prevent the user from properly using the site’s cookie-dependent features.”
Web servers
Need to have a basic understanding of how they work
How web servers work
SSL Encryption
How encryption works
Spiders
Spyware
Monitoring what you are doing
Stealing your identity
Introduction to spyware
Introduction to the honeypot project
Phishing
Fake sites that try to trick you into revealing your personal data
Antiphishing
Your ISP is watching (including your mobile ISP)
All unsecured requests can be monitored by your ISP
News about ISP monitoring
Google is watching
Search history
Gmail
Images
Search duration
Some more links that help you become a private detective
http://www.knowx.com/
http://www.publicrecordfinder.com/
http://www.ip2location.biz/
http://www.cyscape.com/showbrow.aspx?bhcp=1
http://adwords.google.com
http://inventory.overture.com
Protecting your information and your identity
- Take care what where you go online
- Take great care what you download
- Scan for spyware
- Check for encryption whenever you are buying
- Anonymise your mail with www.mailinator.com
- Anonymise your surfing with www.the-cloak.com or www.proxify.com
- Avoid phishing
- Erase your history
- Erase your cache
- Delete cookies
Explore Internet privacy further
Recent comments:
What do you think?
On February 21, 2007 at 11:52 AM, Miroslav wrote:
As part of this lesson we-should-be-able' to understand the internal works and implement public/private key encrypyion within our favourite email client. Two are sugested, Mozilla integrated which is pretty cool and of course Outlook.
This is a must for a conscientious mobile businessmans communication. However, it does not matter if something is untowards within "the secret memos" as governments listening TCP IP gadgets will pick it up even if 2048bit is used ;-/.
Anywho only my openion.