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Although its almost impossible to completely wipe out your entire digital footprint as if you’ve never had access to the internet, but you can get close. If you’d like to make an attempt to completely remove yourself from the internet, we’ve got a few tips and tricks that could help you along the way.

To go the full off-the-grid route, “it’s cash, barters,” Bradley Shear, a lawyer specializing in social media told The Washington Post. “Do not use any electronic device that can lead back to your whereabouts.” Which leads us to the first item to consider.

The first thing you want to do is the hardest for some, but its the most obvious. You need to quit appearing online. Stop posting on Facebook or Twitter and no longer use search engines. All of those will track your location and Internet usage leaving behind your digital footprint. Of course, just not using the internet isn’t quite enough if you’d like yourself completely gone in full-off-the-grid fashion.

The next step would be deleting your online accounts. Every single one of them. Having a social media account is, more or less, ensuring your active participation in letting the Internet learn more about you. Facebook, in particular, knows a lot about you and is very good at tracking what you do across the rest of the Web, even when you’re not actively using it. If you need help deleting your accounts, consider JustDelete.Me, which provides tips and links to remove accounts. But you can’t just remove your accounts and expect that it’s done and over with. You will also need to remove any and all information and content that is posted about you by others.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Your Privacy Is Over

May 3, 2018

Your Privacy Is Over

A plausible case for a future with no privacy, and why it should concern you

Three Things Should Frighten You

In China, the government is using data to control the country’s population. By building a firewall around China and then replacing the blocked global tech services with locally owned versions it can control, the government is able to create a digital profile of each person’s actions, affiliations, statements, acts, and misdemeanors. On this, people are “scored” within a “social credit” system and rewarded or penalized accordingly.
The recent coverage of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook shows just how much corporations in the West know about us without us knowing. The sting on Cambridge Analytica and extensive reporting by Carole Cadwalladr, along with the Facebook Senate hearings, have shown how companies that manipulate public opinion are operating in a way that very few people, and clearly not our lawmakers, can really understand.
Quantum computing will soon be able to break modern encryption, laying open everything we so far thought was private and safe, and more powerful computers will be able to search and map this data going back through digital time. Yes, today’s quantum computing is far off from doing this, but think of your current iPhone compared to your first PC, and assume that somewhere in the future, computers will be more powerful and capable than anything we can imagine today.

In all three scenarios, let alone all three combined, privacy is threatened on a scale we have never thought about. We are entering the post-privacy age.

Most of all, I feel for our children. They are growing up in a world where everything is connected, viewable, shared. They obsess over their image, worry about their following and who likes their posts.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Facebook and the Future of Online Privacy

April 26, 2018

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee

Facebook and the Future of Online Privacy

The EU has taken the lead in responding to abuse by the likes of Facebook, thanks to its new privacy standards and proposed greater taxation of peddlers of online personal data. Yet more is needed and feasible.

NEW YORK – Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, recently notedthat the public scrutiny of Facebook is “very much overdue,” declaring that “it’s shocking to me that they didn’t have to answer more of these questions earlier on.” Leaders in the information technology sector, especially in Europe, have been warning of the abuses by Facebook (and other portals) for years. Their insights and practical recommendations are especially urgent now.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before the US Senate did little to shore up public confidence in a company that traffics in its users’ personal data. The most telling moment of testimony came when Illinois Senator Richard Durbin asked whether Zuckerberg would be comfortable sharing the name of his hotel and the people he had messaged that week, exactly the kind of data tracked and used by Facebook. Zuckerberg replied that he would not be comfortable providing the information. “I think that may be what this is all about,” Durbin said. “Your right to privacy.”

Critics of Facebook have been making this point for years. Stefano Quintarelli, one of Europe’s top IT experts and a leading advocate for online privacy (and, until recently, a member of the Italian Parliament), has been a persistent and prophetic critic of Facebook’s abuse of its market position and misuse of online personal data. He has long championed a powerful idea: that each of us should retain control of our online profile, which should be readily transferable across portals. If we decide we don’t like Facebook, we should be able to shift to a competitor without losing the links to contacts who remain on Facebook.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Right to Privacy Means Nothing

April 6, 2018

The Right to Privacy Means Nothing

QUESTION: Has the world lost sight of what is a Protection Priority??
Equifax CEO Richard Smith Resigns after Backlash Over Massive Data Breach Equifax that compromised the PERMANENT data (SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS ) of 143 million Americans. AND IS REWARDED $18.4 million. (including a $7.6 million bonus.)
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has to testify next week on Capitol Hill regarding recent revelations about uses of people’s data (where they shop, eat, play) that they made public in the first place.
What are our security priorities??

ANSWER: Our entire loss of privacy rights should be a major class action lawsuit. To sign up for anything, they have tremendous detailed legal agreements where effectively you waive all your rights to privacy. It is a situation where UNLESS you waive your rights, you cannot participate in the digital world. My personal legal theory is straightforward. I will be glad to help any law firm that wishes to bring such an action. You CANNOT possibly waive any Constitutional right whatsoever BECAUSEsuch an act of waiver means that every person in this country, even if not a citizen, can constructively amend the Constitution. That means the Constitution is a scrap of paper with no substance. The only authority to amend anything in the Constitution remains Article Five and that requires two-thirds of Congress to vote for such a change.

Constitution Article Five

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Facebook Admits “Most” Of Its 2.2 Billion Users Exposed To Data Scraping, “Malicious Actors”

April 5, 2018

Facebook Admits “Most” Of Its 2.2 Billion Users Exposed To Data Scraping, “Malicious Actors”

Facebook has admitted that “most” of its 2.2 billion users “could have had their public profile scraped” by third parties without their knowledge, and that the personal information of up to 87 million people was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, the company disclosed on Wednesday.

“In total, we believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people — mostly in the US — may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica,” said Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer.

Initial reports set the number of users affected by the CA data purchase at 50 million. The London-based political data company bought the data from two psychologists (one of whom currently works for Facebook) who developed a data harvesting app disguised as a fitness app.

One of the methods used by “malicious actors” to “scrape” user data has been to enter another person’s phone number or email address into a Facebook search, allowing information to be harvested or scraped. “We believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way,” Schroepfer said.

The Wednesday admissions were accompanied by the announcement of nine major changes aimed at safeguarding user privacy following the data harvesting scandal that has pummeled Facebook stock and resulted in Congressional inquiries. CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on April 11, which chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) and Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ) said would be “an important opportunity to shed light on critical consumer data privacy issues and help all Americans better understand what happens to their personal information online.”

In addition to eliminating the ability to search for users by email and phone number, Facebook will also ensure that it does not collect the content of messages sent via its Messenger app or Facebook Lite on Android.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Dawn of Psychographic Outcome-based Warfare

March 27, 2018

The Dawn of Psychographic Outcome-based Warfare

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the Israeli intelligence-surveillance-military complex – perhaps, in a dozen or more highly-secured computer systems laboratories in Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Ramat Gan, and Petach Tikva – the idea was first stumbled upon. Borrowing from the psychographic tools developed by online marketing firms and coupling them with age-old propaganda methods and more-modern psychological warfare techniques used by military and intelligence services, it was determined that elections can be manipulated, not at the ballot box, but by influencing the voters. Welcome to the world of psychographic outcome-based warfare or “POW.”

It is no longer vogue to interfere with vote counting. Instead, psychographic warfare experts have decided that it is much more advantageous to influence the voters before they cast their votes. This form of information warfare was initiated in 2006 after the development of the Megaphone Desktop Tool, a software program designed to respond to what was considered anti-Israeli content on the web. Using RSS (Rich Site Summary) news feeds, Megaphone and an umbrella propaganda organization called Give Israel Your United Support (GIYUS) were able to martial support for Israeli policies by automatically casting votes in on-line polls, respond to comments deemed negative toward Israel in chat rooms and on-line forums, and directing email to various news organizations, including the BBC, Independent Television News (ITN), and Reuters. According to “The Register” in the United Kingdom, what Megaphone provided was “a high-tech exercise in ballot-stuffing.” Megaphone received the nickname of “lobbyware.”

In 2007, Megaphone was re-programmed for other uses and a revised version was marketed by Collactive, a firm that was at the center of providing spamming software to unscrupulous on-line marketers. The seed money for Collactive was provided by Sequoia Capital, a Menlo Park, California-based venture capital firm active in financing high-technology ventures in Israel. It is no coincidence that Sequoia Capital’s headquarters is located a mere 7.5 miles from Facebook’s headquarters in East Palo Alto. The nexus of spamming software developers and deep data mining firms like Facebook and Google, the latter just 10 miles from Sequoia, would soon pose a significant threat to the conducting of democratic elections in over 100 countries and regions and provinces around the world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Facebook is killing democracy with its personality profiling data

March 26, 2018

Facebook is killing democracy with its personality profiling data

What state should you move to based on your personality? What character on “Downton Abbey” would you be? What breed of dog is best for you? Some enormous percentage of Facebook’s 2.13 billion users must have seen Facebook friends sharing results of various online quizzes. They are sometimes annoying, senseless and a total waste of time. But they are irresistible. Besides, you’re only sharing the results with your family and friends. There’s nothing more innocent, right?

Wrong.

Facebook is in the business of exploiting your data. The company is worth billions of dollars because it harvests your data and sells it to advertisers. Users are encouraged to like, share and comment their lives away in the name of staying connected to family and friends. However, as an ethical hacker, security researcher and data analyst, I know that there is a lot more to the story. The bedrock of modern democracy is at stake.

You are being psychographically profiled

Most people have heard of demographics – the term used by advertisers to slice up a market by age, gender, ethnicity and other variables to help them understand customers. In contrast, psychographics measure people’s personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests and lifestyles. They help advertisers understand the way you act and who you are.

Historically, psychographic data were much harder to collect and act on than demographics. Today, Facebook is the world’s largest treasure trove of this data. Every day billions of people give the company huge amounts of information about their lives and dreams.

This isn’t a problem when the data are used ethically – like when a company shows you an ad for a pair of sunglasses you recently searched for.

However, it matters a lot when the data are used maliciously – segmenting society into disconnected echo chambers, and custom-crafting misleading messages to manipulate individuals’ opinions and actions.

That’s exactly what Facebook allowed to happen.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops

March 24, 2018

The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops

Bryan Bedder/Getty ImagesAlexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, addressing the Concordia Summit in New York, September 19, 2016

Apparently, the age of the old-fashioned spook is in decline. What is emerging instead is an obscure world of mysterious boutique companies specializing in data analysis and online influence that contract with government agencies. As they say about hedge funds, if the general public has heard their names that’s probably not a good sign. But there is now one data analysis company that anyone who pays attention to the US and UK press has heard of: Cambridge Analytica. Representatives have boasted that their list of past and current clients includes the British Ministry of Defense, the US Department of Defense, the US Department of State, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and NATO. Nevertheless, they became recognized for just one influence campaign: the one that helped Donald Trump get elected president of the United States. The kind of help the company offered has since been the subject of much unwelcome legal and journalistic scrutiny.

Carole Cadwalladr’s recent exposé of the inner workings of Cambridge Analytica shows that the company, along with its partner, SCL Group, should rightly be as a cautionary tale about the part private companies play in developing and deploying government-funded behavioral technologies. Her source, former employee Christopher Wylie, has described the development of influence techniques for psychological warfare by SCL Defense, the refinement of similar techniques by SCL Elections through its use across the developing world (for example, a “rumor campaign” deployed to spread fear during the 2007 election in Nigeria), and the purchase of this cyber-arsenal by Robert Mercer, the American billionaire who funded Cambridge Analytica, and who, with the help of Wylie, Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, and the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix, deployed it on the American electorate in 2016.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Only Reason We’re Examining Facebook’s Sleazy Behavior Is Because Trump Won

March 23, 2018

The Only Reason We’re Examining Facebook’s Sleazy Behavior Is Because Trump Won

Trust me, there’s nobody more thrilled to see Facebook’s unethical and abusive practices finally getting the attention they deserve from mass media and members of the public who simply didn’t want to hear about it previously. I’ve written multiple articles over the years warning people about the platform (links at the end), but these mostly fell on deaf ears.

That’s just the way things go. All sorts of horrible behaviors can continue for a very long time before the corporate media and general public come around to caring. You typically need some sort of external event to change mass psychology. In this case, that event was Trump winning the election.

The more I read about the recent Facebook scandal, it’s clear this sort of thing’s been going on for a very long time. The major difference is this time the data mining was used by campaign consultants of the person who wasn’t supposed to win. Donald Trump.

To get a sense of what I mean, let’s take a look at some excerpts from a deeply troubling article recently published at the Guardian, ‘Utterly Horrifying’: Ex-Facebook Insider Says Covert Data Harvesting Was Routine:

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, according to a new whistleblower.

Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Breaching the Public Trust – Facebook is the Beginning

March 23, 2018

Last night I was chatting with a friend while waiting for my daughter. She told me her phone now informs her when her bills are due. Now, that may not seem like a big deal, but it is when you realize that she never told her phone to do that.

Her phone is scanning her emails and letting her know her when her electric bill is due.

I told her Google likely pushed down an update which she agreed to without realizing it (or getting the opportunity to opt-out of) which authorized them to not only scan her inbox but set up alerts for her.

She was angry about it, and rightfully so.

This is why I don’t use any of the Google apps on my Android phone. Outlook for email, Opera for my browser. Office for my productivity apps. It was a conscious choice. I moved to Android under protest because Microsoft willfully destroyed Windows Phone.

I know it’s not much better, but at least Microsoft appreciates my business, now, for the first time in their miserable existence.

And I wasn’t willing to shell out $600+ for a comparable iPhone. Pennywise and pound-foolish, I know, but no one’s perfect.

As a hardware-savvy guy I know when software is over-burdening hardware and why.

And I can tell you the data harvesting on my phone was so out of control by Facebook and Google that it became nigh unusable on wake-up. Upwards of a minute or two would go by before the phone was usable because so much data was being harvested off it before it would deign to allow me to use it.

I will switch to the iPhone when I can justify the money.

Once I deleted Facebook and all its crap from my phone, it miraculously became almost functional again. I could answer calls as they came in. I could reply to texts and approve blog comments/pingbacks.

I will never reinstall Facebook on any device I own.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why I Disagree With The Strategy Of Exiting Facebook, Twitter And YouTube

March 21, 2018

Why I Disagree With The Strategy Of Exiting Facebook, Twitter And YouTube

Earlier this month Ben Swann, an important voice for whom I have nothing but respect, expressed a sentiment in one of his excellent Reality Check videos that I’m seeing more and more in anti-establishment circles, and I happen to strongly disagree with it.

In a presentation titled “Internet Purge of Dissenting Voices?” on the recent increase in censorship of anti-establishment voices by large social media corporations, Swann said the following:

The problem for any dissenting voice is that if you are using your voice on someone else’s property, i.e., YouTube or Facebook, you will never have control of it. Which is why the next frontier must be decentralized platforms. Platforms like Dtube and Steemit, built on blockchain, will be future of how content, the good the bad and ugly, will be stored. And the efforts to silence dissenting voices, will actually be the undoing of YouTube and Facebook.”

I disagree not with Swann’s endorsement of decentralized platforms like Dtube and Steemit (which are both excellent and essential weapons in our revolution against the establishment oppression machine), but with Swann’s assertion that the social media giants’ censorship of dissenting voices will be their undoing. It will not.

“2017 was a strong year for Facebook, but it was also a hard one,” saidFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last month. “In 2018, we’re focused on making sure Facebook isn’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being and for society. We’re doing this by encouraging meaningful connections between people rather than passive consumption of content. Already last quarter, we made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people’s time is well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Then Why Is Anyone STILL on Facebook?

March 21, 2018

Then Why Is Anyone STILL on Facebook?

Where’s the panicked rush to “delete” accounts?

Things at Facebook came to a head, following the disclosure that personal data from 50 million of its users had been given to a sordid outfit in the UK, Cambridge Analytica, whose business model is to manipulate elections by hook or crook around the world, and which is now getting vivisected by UK and US authorities.

The infamous “person familiar with the matter” told Bloomberg that the Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into whether Facebook violated a consent decree dating back to 2011, when Facebook settled similar allegations – giving user data to third parties without user’s knowledge or consent. Bloomberg:

Under the 2011 settlement, Facebook agreed to get user consent for certain changes to privacy settings as part of a settlement of federal charges that it deceived consumers and forced them to share more personal information than they intended. That complaint arose after the company changed some user settings without notifying its customers, according to an FTC statement at the time.

If Facebook is found to be in violation of the consent decree, the FTC can extract a fine of $40,000 per day, per violation. Given the 50 million victims spread over so many days, this could be some real money, so to speak.

Facebook said in a statement, cited by Bloomberg, that it rejected “any suggestion of violation of the consent decree.” It also said with tone-deaf Facebook hilarity, “Privacy and data protections are fundamental to every decision we make.”

That Facebook is collecting every little bit of personal data it can from its users and their contacts and how they react to certain things, their preferences, their choices, physical appearance – photos, I mean come on – clues about their personalities, and the like has been known from day one. That’s part of its business model. It’s not a secret.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Profit-Maximizing Data-Mining Undermining Democracy?

March 19, 2018

Is Profit-Maximizing Data-Mining Undermining Democracy?

If targeting political extremes generates the most profit, then that’s what these corporations will pursue.

As many of you know, oftwominds.com was falsely labeled propaganda by the propaganda operation known as ProporNot back in 2016. The Washington Postsaw fit to promote ProporNot’s propaganda operation because it aligned with the newspaper’s view that any site that wasn’t pro-status quo was propaganda; the possibility of reasoned dissent has vanished into a void of warring accusations of propaganda and “fake news” –which is of course propaganda in action.

Now we discover that profit-maximizing data-mining (i.e. Facebook and Google) can–gasp–be used for selling ideologies, narratives and candidatesjust like dog food and laundry detergent. The more extreme and fixed the views and the closer the groups are in size (i.e. the closer any electoral contest), the more profitable the corporate data-mining becomes.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the data-mining gets all the important stuff wrong. As correspondent GFB explains, oftwominds.com was identified as “propaganda” by data-mining, which concluded that any site that posted content that wasn’t pro-Hillary was automatically propaganda:

At least we now know why your site was flagged as a source of Russian disinformation:

Cambridge Analytica is hired by the Russians to data mine to find the most efficacious targets for their disinformation campaign – and in the course of doing research, they find that a number of individuals who visit your site have shown – in other social media actions – to have anti-Hillary, or anti-powers-that-be tendency. They conclude the number of visitors that have that data profile would suggest that it is likely most, if not all visitors to your site would likely have the same view – and so any visitor to your site gets flagged to be targeted, if possible, by the disinformation campaign.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Connected devices quietly mine our data, privacy experts say

February 1, 2016

Connected devices quietly mine our data, privacy experts say

Hackers could use them as stepping stone to another part of your network

The Internet of Things - gadgets we wear and install that are connected to a network - quietly mines information about us and can leave consumers vulnerable to a hacker, cybersecurity experts say.

The Internet of Things – gadgets we wear and install that are connected to a network – quietly mines information about us and can leave consumers vulnerable to a hacker, cybersecurity experts say. (iStock)

The explosion of the so-called Internet of Things — the gadgets we strap to ourselves or install in our homes, offices and cars that are connected and controlled by a network — leaves a data trail for hackers. It can tell them when we’re home, what we’re saying, and about our health.

And attacks on machines, like the Jeep Cherokee that had its brakes and other controls remotely disabled last summer, also shows that these connected devices can be a back door for hackers.

It’s largely happening because manufacturers push technology to what it’s capable of, says Wright, president of Security Perspectives Inc., says. But they aren’t designing with security in mind, he said.

And most of us aren’t buying things with that in mind either.

Voice-activated TVs

It may come as a surprise, then, that if you’re watching TV, it could be listening to you.

“Smart TVs and appliances are sort of communicating either with each other, just monitoring your activity and deciding what you might want to do next,” Wright says. “You can give them commands like the way you do to Siri, but the TV manufacturers haven’t really had a lot to think about in terms of security like Apple.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Facebook of the Future Has Privacy Implications Today

September 18, 2015

The Facebook of the Future Has Privacy Implications Today

It’s well established that joining a social network means trading privacy for information. Your Facebook friends, for example, get to see that picture of you looking like you might be stoned, and you get to “like” their posts celebrating the legalization of marijuana in Washington and Colorado. Or, perhaps you simply post about your 50th birthday party or celebrating Ramadan. Potential employers get to see all that stuff too, depending on your privacy settings, and there is evidence that some of them discriminate on the basis of age and against Muslims. Facebook, meanwhile, gets to target ads at you.

What’s not as well appreciated, but becoming increasingly clear, is that users of social networks in general, and of social networking kingpin Facebook in particular, are ill-equipped to evaluate the price they’re paying in this trade — to determine just how much privacy they’ll lose over time in exchange for status updates from their friends, and what that loss will eventually mean for themselves and their loved ones.

Part of the reason it’s hard to think clearly about privacy tradeoffs is that data collection now occurs at a staggering scale. Facebook earlier this year announced that it had figured out how to store a billion gigabytes, known as an “exabyte,” in each “data hall” room in its data centers. As people upload two billion pictures a day to the social network, older photos are moved to these “cold storage” exabyte systems.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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