e-ignite

Well, it seems that the issue of privacy is becoming more important. Perhaps to set herself as far from the Bush administration as possible, Hillary Clinton has announced that she intends to introduce a “Privacy Bill of Rights” to protect the privacy of American citizens in light of the many surveillance issues introduced during the Bush presidency. I’m not going to take a stance on the forthcoming election and push my political opinion on you all – not being from the USA kind of disqualifies me from doing so anyway! However, this is something that I thought was extremely interesting in terms of global privacy issues. It is a fact that recent “counter-terrorism measures” and other surveillance practices have been steadily eroding the privacy of the general public, and personally, I was worried that once lost, we would never regain our right to privacy in today’s digital world. A recent article I wrote discussed the effects of these new “security” measures and how they have actually taken away our right to privacy. I find it extremely interesting (possibly even heart-warming) that I’m not the only one thinking like this.

Hillary Clinton’s new “Privacy Bill of Rights” is covered in detail in this Wired News article, but it brings up the issue of “opt-in” as opposed to “opt-out” when it comes to privacy: Why should your details be given to just anyone unless you specifically object? In my opinion, your details should be kept in strict privacy until you give permission for them to be given to specific parties.

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A recent article on The Register reported that msn messenger (the network itself rather than the program) bans you from sending certain phrases to your contacts. One of which is “scroogle.org” – this is odd considering that Scroogle is a tool that alters Google searches and has nothing to do with Microsoft whatsoever. As El Reg also stated, it may just be that the term “Scroogle” is something particularly unsavoury and it’s just that nobody knows it’s true meaning. However, this story got me (and hopefully you) thinking.

Every time you perform a Google search, your IP address is logged and a uniquely identifiable cookie is placed on your system. This means that there will always be a record somewhere of all the searches you’ve ever made. Google say that they won’t hand out this information to anyone unless requested to by a law enforcement agency. But this begs the question… if Google don’t use the data, why do they keep it?

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An incredible news story was recently published by the Telegraph that shows details of just how much information about you is given to the US authorities if you fly from Europe to America.? A recent Freedom of Information request showed that when you book your flights to the USA electronically (using a Credit Card, giving an email address etc), the US authorities have the right to examine past purchases on your credit card, and even to gain access to your past emails. The news article goes into detail about the previous fight between the EU and US over illegal passenger data transfer, but shows that the US has demanded access to far more data than they did originally.? What is most worrying is the fact the the European Union seems to have simply rolled over and given the US whatever they wanted!

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