Big Brother in the Restroom

Wikes! This is nasty, and while the porn industry has commercialized the idea a long time ago, I never imagined the levels of crime in public restrooms would "reach" levels requiring CCTVs to be installed -- if there's so much vandalism going on in public restrooms, these will definitely get stolen as well, picture the situation! Norway installs surveillance cameras in park restrooms.

Hint : once you get involved in the CCTV irony, I say irony mainly because the dude behind the 40 motion detection and face recognition wall is having another CCTV behind his back, you end up spending tax payers money to cover "blind spots", and end up with a negative ROI while trying to achieve self-regulation, if one matters!

Surveillance and Society's journal still remains the most resourceful publication on surveillance studies and its impact on society.

Further reading and previous cases:
The Hidden Camera
Iowa Judge Says Hidden Restroom Camera Case Can Proceed to Trial

The Feds, Google, MSN's reaction, and how you got "bigbrothered"?

There's still a lot of buzz going on, concerning which search engine provided what type of data to law enforcement officials, and the echo effect of this event resulted in waves of angry end users, that among feeling "bigbrothered", now have yet another reason to switch back to Google, simple. MSN's silent reaction to this is the worst thing they could do given how actively they're trying to catch-up on search traffic. What did they provide anyway?

"Specifically, we produced a random sample of pages from our index and some aggregated query logs that listed queries and how often they occurred. Absolutely no personal data was involved. With this data you :

CAN see how frequently some query terms occurred
CANNOT look up an IP and see what they queried
CANNOT look for users who queried for both “TERM A” and “TERM B”

So picture, the following, "someone" requests his name, his friends' names, physical locations giving clues on possible area and while it isn't personal information(exact names, address etc.) it is personally identifiable one! If it happens once, it would become a habit, my point is that aggregating search info on ECHELON's wordlist is so realistic that you need a company to say NO, and evaluate the reactions of the others. The best thing is that I'm sure the majority of adult entertainment seekers don't need to take advantage of Echelon's Trigger Words Generator :)

Why you don't need to issue a subpoena to find out what's hot in the online porn world?

- take Google's advice into consideration, or start using Overture's keyword selector tool
- now ensure you have the most popular porn related keywords, and if in doubt, consult with an "insider" who would be definitely aware of what's hot, and who's to keep in mind
- use the first 20 pages from each popular search for your sample, these get the majority of traffic
- do a little research over Alexa to further back up your statements, and even use Google to measure the relative popularity of the first site that pop ups when you search for porn.
- ensure you have first consulted with traffic aggregators or paid reports on who's who online
- make sure before going online, another distribution vector so to say, the iPod is taken care of
- envision what's to come in the future, and mostly the interest and the social implications of these issues
- now, come up with ways to restrict children from using these going beyond the usual "But of course I'm over 21 years old" terms of use

What's to come up in the future? In one of my previous posts "Still worry about your search history and BigBrother?" I pointed out the possibilities for Search engines regulation and P3P, but the current self regulation is simply not working anymore.

Further resources on the topic can be found at :

Lorrie Cranor's Searching for Privacy : Design and Implementation of a P3P-Enabled Search Engine
PrivacyBird
An Analysis of P3P-Enabled Web Sites among Top-20 Search Results
Protecting Your Search Privacy: A Flowchart To Tracks You Leave Behind
Using search engines data, Google and forensics - clip

Technorati tags :
privacy,search engine,google,MSN,surveillance,porn

Image originally uploaded at Flickr by villoks

Insecure Irony

What’s the worst thing that could happen to BigBrother and any of its puppets? – Have their confidential info exposed due to the negligence of a commercial organization, one that is used for gathering the majority of intelligence data these days. Now, that’s an insecure irony. 

It is a public secret that any government is gathering enormous information on its citizens through commercial organization's extremely rich databases. Everyone's in the system though, even the ghosts!

I also advise you to go though a great research on the topic of "Commecial Data and National Security" in case you want to know more on how governments and intelligence agencies use/abuse the data.

Technorati tags :
bigbrother,surveillance,privacy,security breach,security,information security