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		<title>The High Price of Facebook</title>
		<link>http://www.shazzle.com/the-high-price-of-facebook</link>
		<comments>http://www.shazzle.com/the-high-price-of-facebook#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 16 May 2010 13:11:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Clifford Boyle</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.shazzle.com/?p=816</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The problem with internet privacy is that the web by its very nature, central servers receiving and storing all transmissions, is not and can never be private. Shazzle has a different idea. Instead of carrying your content to the recipient, we tell you where the recipient is on the internet (IP address) and connect the two of you so you can deliver that content yourself. Shazzle does not copy or store your content in transmission. It never passes through our hardware or servers. Your communication remains absolutely private. You don’t have to trust us, you only have to trust yourself and your recipient.

The High Price of Facebook
You pay for it with your privacy.
By Daniel Lyons &#124; NEWSWEEK
Published May 13, 2010
From the magazine issue dated May 31, 2010
If you don&#8217;t spend your days glued to tech blogs, you might not know about the latest trend among hipster techies: quitting Facebook. These [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The problem with internet privacy is that the web by its very nature, central servers receiving and storing all transmissions, is not and can never be private. Shazzle has a different idea. Instead of carrying your content to the recipient, we tell you where the recipient is on the internet (IP address) and connect the two of you so you can deliver that content yourself. Shazzle does not copy or store your content in transmission. It never passes through our hardware or servers. Your communication remains absolutely private. You don’t have to trust us, you only have to trust yourself and your recipient.</p>
<blockquote><p>
<strong>The High Price of Facebook</strong><br />
<em>You pay for it with your privacy.</em><br />
By Daniel Lyons | NEWSWEEK<br />
Published May 13, 2010<br />
From the magazine issue dated May 31, 2010</p>
<p>If you don&#8217;t spend your days glued to tech blogs, you might not know about the latest trend among hipster techies: quitting Facebook. These folks, including a bunch of Google engineers, are bailing out because Facebook just changed its rules so that much of your personal profile information, including where you work, what music you like, and where you went to school, now gets made public by default. Some info is even shared with companies that are special partners of Facebook, like Yelp, Pandora, and Microsoft. And while there are ways to dial back on some of this by tinkering with your privacy settings, it&#8217;s tricky to figure out—intentionally so, according to cynics.</p>
<p>The fear is that people are being lured into Facebook with the promise of a fun, free service, and don&#8217;t realize that they&#8217;re paying for it by giving up loads of personal information. Facebook then attempts to &#8220;monetize&#8221; one&#8217;s data by selling it to advertisers that want to send targeted messages.</p>
<p>Most folks using Facebook have no idea this is happening. Even if you&#8217;re very tech-savvy and do know what the company is up to, you still have no idea what you&#8217;re paying for Facebook, because people don&#8217;t really know what their personal data is worth.</p>
<p>The biggest problem, however, is that the company keeps changing the rules. Early on, you could keep everything private. That was the great thing about Facebook—you could create your own little private network. Last year, the company changed its privacy rules so that a lot of things—your city, your profile photo, the names of your friends—were set, by default, to be shared with everyone on the Internet. Sure, you could change everything back and make it private. But most people probably didn&#8217;t bother. Now Facebook is going even further by insisting that unless you agree to make things like your hometown, interests, and friends&#8217; names public, then you can&#8217;t list them at all.</p>
<p>The whole kerfuffle is a misunderstanding, according to Elliot Schrage, Facebook&#8217;s vice president of communications and public policy. In his version of events, the company is simply making changes to improve the service it provides to users by giving them more &#8220;granular&#8221; control over what they share, and if people don&#8217;t share information they have a &#8220;less satisfying experience.&#8221; Facebook is innovating so rapidly, he says, that people don&#8217;t fully understand what the company is doing, and that change is scary.</p>
<p>Some critics think this is more about Facebook looking to make more money. Its original business model, which involved selling ads and putting them at the side of the page, totally flopped. Who wants to look at advertisements when they&#8217;re online connecting with their friends? Facebook denies that financial motives drove the changes. &#8220;Of all the criticisms, that&#8217;s the one I find most distressing—that anything we&#8217;ve done is damaging to users in order for us to make more money,&#8221; says Schrage.</p>
<p>And not everyone thinks it&#8217;s such a bad thing to have less privacy online. Some users, like Robert Scoble, applauded Facebook&#8217;s new policies. &#8220;I wish Facebook were MORE open!!!&#8221; he wrote on his blog. &#8220;I haven&#8217;t cared about privacy for years.&#8221;</p>
<p>But others are saying that this isn&#8217;t what they signed up for when they joined. The privacy issue has already landed Facebook in hot water in Washington. In April, Sen. Charles Schumer and two other senators called on Facebook to change its privacy policy. They also urged the Federal Trade Commission to set guidelines for social-networking sites. In May, a group of 15 online-privacy groups filed a formal complaint with the FTC accusing Facebook of &#8220;unfair and deceptive trade practices.&#8221; &#8220;I think the senators rightly communicated that we had not been clear about what the new products were and how people could choose to use them or not to use them,&#8221; Schrage concedes.</p>
<p>Losing a few people won&#8217;t hurt Facebook, which has more than 400 million registered members, most of them oblivious to the debate over privacy. In fact, I suspect Facebook will end up being to this decade what Microsoft was to the 1990s—an ever-more-powerful company with tentacles that reach into everything. I also suspect that whatever Facebook has done so far to invade our privacy, it&#8217;s only the beginning. Which is why I&#8217;m considering deactivating my account. Facebook is a handy site, but I&#8217;m freaked by the idea that my information is in the hands of people I don&#8217;t trust. That is too high a price to pay.</p>
<p>Link to <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/237993/page/2">original article</a>.
</p></blockquote>
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		<item>
		<title>Net Privacy At Risk</title>
		<link>http://www.shazzle.com/google-privacy-breaches</link>
		<comments>http://www.shazzle.com/google-privacy-breaches#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 16 May 2010 13:03:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Clifford Boyle</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.shazzle.com/?p=809</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The problem with internet privacy is that the web by its very nature, central servers receiving and storing all transmissions, is not and can never be private. Shazzle has a different idea. Instead of carrying your content to the recipient, we tell you where the recipient is on the internet (IP address) and connect the two of you so you can deliver that content yourself. Shazzle does not copy or store your content in transmission. It never passes through our hardware or servers. Your communication remains absolutely private. You don’t have to trust us, you only have to trust yourself and your recipient.

German official slams Google for ‘alarming’ privacy breaches
Search giant vacuumed up activities on public Wi-Fi networks
Associated Press updated 10:26 a.m. CT, Sat., May 15, 2010
Germany&#8217;s consumer protection minister blasted Google Inc. on Saturday after the U.S. Internet giant acknowledged widespread breaches of privacy in response to a German [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The problem with internet privacy is that the web by its very nature, central servers receiving and storing all transmissions, is not and can never be private. Shazzle has a different idea. Instead of carrying your content to the recipient, we tell you where the recipient is on the internet (IP address) and connect the two of you so you can deliver that content yourself. Shazzle does not copy or store your content in transmission. It never passes through our hardware or servers. Your communication remains absolutely private. You don’t have to trust us, you only have to trust yourself and your recipient.</p>
<blockquote><p>
<strong>German official slams Google for ‘alarming’ privacy breaches</strong><br />
<em>Search giant vacuumed up activities on public Wi-Fi networks</em><br />
Associated Press updated 10:26 a.m. CT, Sat., May 15, 2010</p>
<p>Germany&#8217;s consumer protection minister blasted Google Inc. on Saturday after the U.S. Internet giant acknowledged widespread breaches of privacy in response to a German inquiry.</p>
<p>Google confirmed on Friday that it has been vacuuming up fragments of people&#8217;s online activities broadcast over public Wi-Fi networks while expanding a mapping feature called &#8220;Street View.&#8221;</p>
<p>The &#8220;alarming incident&#8221; shows that Google still lacks an understanding of the need for privacy, Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner&#8217;s office said in a statement. &#8220;According to the information available to us so far, Google has for years penetrated private networks, apparently illegally.&#8221;</p>
<p>Google said it only recently discovered the problem in response to questions from German regulators. The company has apologized.</p>
<p>&#8220;Maintaining people&#8217;s trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short,&#8221; Alan Eustace, Google&#8217;s top engineering executive, wrote in a blog post Friday.</p>
<p>Google characterized its collection of snippets from e-mails and Web surfing done on public Wi-Fi networks as a mistake, and said it has taken steps to avoid a recurrence. About 600 gigabytes of data was taken off of the Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries, including the U.S. Google plans to delete it all as soon as it gains clearance from government authorities.</p>
<p>None of the information has appeared in Google&#8217;s search engine or other services, according to Eustace.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, Google&#8217;s decision to hold on to the Wi-Fi data until it hears back from regulators shows the company realizes it could face legal repercussions. At the very least, company officials concede that snooping on Wi-Fi networks, however inadvertent, crossed an ethical line.</p>
<p>&#8220;We are acutely aware that we failed badly here,&#8221; Eustace wrote.</p>
<p>Is contrition enough?<br />
Google&#8217;s contrition may not be enough to allay growing concerns about whether the company can be trusted with the vast storehouse of personal information that it has gathered through its search engine, e-mail and other services.</p>
<p>Fears that Google is morphing into a real-life version of &#8220;Big Brother&#8221; has spurred previous privacy complaints, as well as pleas for more stringent regulation of the company.</p>
<p>Consumer Watchdog, a group that has become one of Google&#8217;s most outspoken critics, renewed its call for a regulatory crackdown Friday.</p>
<p>&#8220;Once again, Google has demonstrated a lack of concern for privacy,&#8221; said Consumer Watchdog&#8217;s John Simpson. &#8220;Its computer engineers run amok, push the envelope and gather whatever data they can until their fingers are caught in the cookie jar.&#8221;</p>
<p>Happened during mapping process<br />
The Wi-Fi data was sucked up while Google expanded a mapping feature called &#8220;Street View&#8221; that also has pressed privacy hot buttons. Street View provides photographs of neighborhoods taken by Google cameras that have sometimes captured people doing things they didn&#8217;t want to be seen doing, or in places where they didn&#8217;t want to be seen.</p>
<p>As it set out to photograph neighborhoods around the world, Google equipped its vehicles with antenna as well as cameras so it could create a database with the names of Wi-Fi networks and the coding of Wi-Fi routers.</p>
<p>What Google didn&#8217;t know, Eustace said, is that some experimental software was being used in the Street View project, and that programming picked up the Web surfing on publicly accessible Wi-Fi networks if the company&#8217;s vehicles were within range of the signal.</p>
<p>Google only gathered small bits of information because its vehicles were on the move and its tracking equipment switched channels five times a second.</p>
<p>The incident has prompted Google to abandon its effort to collect Wi-Fi network data. In an apparent show of its commitment to privacy, Google also said it will introduce a new option next week that will allow its users to encrypt searches on its Web site as an added protection against unauthorized snooping.</p>
<p>Link to <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37157584/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/from/ET">original article</a>.
</p></blockquote>
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		<title>Goldman Sachs in Email Trap</title>
		<link>http://www.shazzle.com/goldman-sachs-in-email-trap</link>
		<comments>http://www.shazzle.com/goldman-sachs-in-email-trap#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:45:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Clifford Boyle</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.shazzle.com/?p=623</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Goldman trader Fabulous Fabio thought he was writing personal emails to his girlfriend, but now those emails have put him under SEC indictment. What will your erosion of privacy cost you? Shazzle sends data direct and secure, with no permanent copies anywhere but where you specify. And just for you, it’s free! Actually it is free for anyone. Coming soon is personal, secure email services. Keep an eye on us.

Goldman&#8217;s &#8216;Fabulous&#8217; Fab&#8217;s Conflicted Love Letters
by Steve Eder and Karey Wutkowski
Monday, April 26, 2010
by Reuters
Fabrice Tourre and his girlfriend talked like a couple very much in love.
They emailed back and forth about how they wanted to curl up in each other&#8217;s arms and how they looked forward to tender moments together. Tourre, a Goldman Sachs bond trader, also wrote in the emails of the impending collapse of the subprime mortgage market and how he was masterminding ways at Goldman to [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The Goldman trader Fabulous Fabio thought he was writing personal emails to his girlfriend, but now those emails have put him under SEC indictment. What will your erosion of privacy cost you? Shazzle sends data direct and secure, with no permanent copies anywhere but where you specify. And just for you, it’s free! Actually it is free for anyone. Coming soon is personal, secure email services. Keep an eye on us.</p>
<blockquote><p>
<strong>Goldman&#8217;s &#8216;Fabulous&#8217; Fab&#8217;s Conflicted Love Letters</strong><br />
by Steve Eder and Karey Wutkowski<br />
Monday, April 26, 2010<br />
by Reuters</p>
<p>Fabrice Tourre and his girlfriend talked like a couple very much in love.</p>
<p>They emailed back and forth about how they wanted to curl up in each other&#8217;s arms and how they looked forward to tender moments together. Tourre, a Goldman Sachs bond trader, also wrote in the emails of the impending collapse of the subprime mortgage market and how he was masterminding ways at Goldman to make money from it.</p>
<p>Little did they know that three years later these very personal emails written through Tourre&#8217;s Goldman Sachs e-mail account would become part of one of the biggest investigations into the subsequent financial crisis.</p>
<p>In the email exchanges between Tourre and his girlfriend, Marine Serres, Tourre comes off as a young, hotshot trader who foresaw the subprime meltdown while still selling shoddy subprime-backed products so prolifically he could peddle them to &#8220;widows and orphans.&#8221;</p>
<p>But Tourre &#8212; the only individual the Securities and Exchange Commission charged in its fraud case against the firm &#8212; also seems ethically conflicted.</p>
<p>&#8220;Anyway, not feeling too guilty about this, the real purpose of my job is to make capital markets more efficient and ultimately provide the U.S. consumer with more efficient ways to leverage and finance himself, so there is a humble, noble and ethical reason for my job <img src='http://www.shazzle.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_wink.gif' alt=';)' class='wp-smiley' />  amazing how good I am in convincing myself !!!&#8221; Tourre said in an e-mail to Serres in January 2007.</p>
<p>That portion of the e-mail reflecting Tourre&#8217;s conflicted views on his role in the subprime meltdown immediately followed another part of the e-mail that the SEC released in its complaint earlier this month.</p>
<p>The SEC&#8217;s complaint only included Tourre referring to himself as &#8220;fabulous Fab&#8221; and talking about &#8220;standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities!!!&#8221;</p>
<p>The SEC left out Tourre&#8217;s ethical musings in its complaint.</p>
<p>Goldman Sachs released the Tourre emails over the weekend as it readies for its appearance before a Senate panel on Tuesday. Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and Tourre are scheduled to testify, along with other former and current executives.</p>
<p>The collection of e-mails also show that Tourre was not the only person at Goldman with confidence the subprime market was doomed.</p>
<p>Daniel Sparks, a former head of the mortgages department at Goldman, is also expected to testify on Tuesday before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.</p>
<p>&#8220;According to Sparks, that business is totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last so long!!!&#8221; Tourre wrote in a March 7, 2007, email to his girlfriend.</p>
<p>Tourre &#8212; who refers to Serres at one point as a &#8220;super-smart French girl in London&#8221; &#8212; also tells her about selling to unwitting investors the type of synthetic collateralized debt obligation, or CDO, at the center of the SEC case.</p>
<p>The SEC charges that Tourre and Goldman fraudulently marketed an &#8220;Abacus&#8221; CDO by hiding vital information from investors, including the role that hedge fund Paulson &#038; Co played in picking mortgage products tied to the CDO. Paulson &#038; Co betted against the CDO.</p>
<p>&#8220;Just made it to the country of your favorite clients!!! I&#8217;m managed (sic) to sell a few abacus bonds to widow and orphans that I ran into at the airport, apparently these Belgians adore synthetic abs cdo2,&#8221; Tourre wrote in June 2007.</p>
<p>Earlier in 2007, in an e-mail to a friend, Tourre shares his fears that the product he helped create is crumbling &#8212; and he has a sense of humor about it.</p>
<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s bizarre I have the sensation of coming each day to work and re-living the same agony &#8211; a little like a bad dream that repeats itself,&#8221; Tourre writes. &#8220;In sum, I&#8217;m trading a product which a month ago was worth $100 and which today is only worth $93 and which on average is losing 25 cents a day &#8230;That doesn&#8217;t seem like a lot but when you take into account that we buy and sell these things that have nominal amounts that are worth billions, well it adds up to a lot of money.&#8221;</p>
<p>Tourre, 28 when he wrote the emails, reflects on the strangeness of being so young, yet being in such a critical role with pressures from those above him at the firm to make money.</p>
<p>&#8220;&#8230; I am now considered a &#8220;dinosaur&#8221; in this business (at my firm the average longevity of an employee is about 2-3 years!!!) people ask me about career advice. I feel like I&#8217;m losing my mind and I&#8217;m only 28!!! OK, I&#8217;ve decided two more years of work and I&#8217;m retiring.&#8221;</p>
<p>(Reporting by Steve Eder in New York and Karey Wutkowski in Washington; Editing by Bernard Orr)</p>
<p><a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/109388/goldmans-fabulous-fabs-conflicted-love-letters">Original article</a> on Yahoo! Finance
</p></blockquote>
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		<title>Here Come the Feds</title>
		<link>http://www.shazzle.com/here-come-the-feds</link>
		<comments>http://www.shazzle.com/here-come-the-feds#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:17:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Clifford Boyle</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.shazzle.com/?p=610</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The US Government is arguing that it has the right to read your email any time it wants to by accessing the server of your email provider. In their view you do not even need to be suspected of a crime, and they do not need a warrant.  See the article below for more information.
Shazzle&#8217;s private, secure email service does not pass through a server, but travels directly from sender to receiver over an encrypted line, so the government would not be able to snoop on any of these mails, either with or without a warrant. This service will be available in Beta form in the coming months but will not be marketed to the general public for some time after. Please write to Shazzle if you would like to try it before the public launch.

Yahoo, Feds Battle Over E-Mail Privacy
From Wired.com
By David Kravets
April 14, 2010 
Yahoo and federal [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The US Government is arguing that it has the right to read your email any time it wants to by accessing the server of your email provider. In their view you do not even need to be suspected of a crime, and they do not need a warrant.  See the article below for more information.</p>
<p>Shazzle&#8217;s private, secure email service does not pass through a server, but travels directly from sender to receiver over an encrypted line, so the government would not be able to snoop on any of these mails, either with or without a warrant. This service will be available in Beta form in the coming months but will not be marketed to the general public for some time after. Please write to Shazzle if you would like to try it before the public launch.</p>
<blockquote><p>
<strong>Yahoo, Feds Battle Over E-Mail Privacy</strong><br />
From <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/emailprivacy/">Wired.com</a><br />
By David Kravets<br />
April 14, 2010 </p>
<p>Yahoo and federal prosecutors in Colorado are embroiled in a privacy battle that’s testing whether the Constitution’s warrant requirements apply to Americans’ e-mail.</p>
<p>The  legal dust-up, unsealed late Tuesday, concerns a 1986 law that already allows the government to obtain a suspect’s e-mail from an ISP or webmail provider without a probable-cause warrant, once it’s been stored for 180 days or more. The government now contends it can get e-mail under 180-days old if that e-mail has been read by the owner, and the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections don’t apply.</p>
<p>Yahoo is challenging the government’s position and defying a court order to turn over some customer e-mail to the feds. Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy &#038; Technology and other groups late Tuesday told the federal judge presiding over the case that accessing e-mail under 180 days old requires a valid warrant under the Fourth Amendment, regardless of whether it has been read.</p>
<p>“The government says the Fourth Amendment does not protect these e-mails,” Kevin Bankston, an EFF lawyer, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “What we’re talking about is archives of our personal correspondence that they would need a warrant to get from your computer but not from the server.”</p>
<p>If the courts adopt the government’s position, the vast majority of Americans’ e-mail would be accessible to the government without probable cause, whenever law enforcement believes the messages would be relevant to a criminal investigation, even if the e-mail’s owner is not suspected of wrongdoing.</p>
<p>The legal jockeying began Dec. 3, when a Colorado magistrate ordered Yahoo to hand over to authorities e-mail communications under six months old “received by the specified accounts that the owner or user of the account has already accessed, viewed, or downloaded.”</p>
<p>Yahoo refused, claiming the Stored Communications Act requires the government to show probable cause to obtain that e-mail. The government asserted a lesser, warrantless standard that the “communications sought are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”</p>
<p>The difference between those standards is the subject of fierce debate in the legal community.</p>
<p>But all sides agree that obtaining unopened e-mail less than 180 days old requires the authorities to make a probable-cause showing to a judge, and that after 180 days stored e-mail — read or unread — can be accessed without such a warrant.</p>
<p>The 1986 Stored Communications Act was enacted at a time when e-mail generally wasn’t stored on servers at all, but instead passed through them briefly on their way to the recipient’s inbox. In today’s reality,  e-mail can, and is, being stored on servers forever. A consortium of businesses, including Google and Microsoft, recently asked Congress to update the law and require probable cause to obtain any e-mail.</p>
<p>But the government’s position in the Colorado case pushes the outdated law even further. Prosecutors are arguing that opened e-mail less than 180 days old is no longer in “electronic storage” as defined by the law — which allows the feds to obtain it with the lower standard.</p>
<p>The 1986 law defines electronic storage as “(A) any temporary, intermediate storage of a wire or electronic communication incidental to the electronic transmission thereof; and (B) any storage of such communication by an electronic communication service for purposes of backup protection of such communication.”</p>
<p>The government, in urging the Colorado court to compel Yahoo to comply, wrote in in a brief unsealed Tuesday that “[s]torage of previously opened e-mail (.pdf) does not fall within the subsection (A) of this definition because its storage is no longer temporary, intermediate, or incident to transmission. It does not fall within the subsection (B) of this definition because that subsection includes only copies of electronic communications stored by a service provider for its backup protection.”</p>
<p>In response, Yahoo said in a Tuesday unsealed court filing that the distinction is immaterial, “misguided” (.pdf) and settled in a recent civil case.</p>
<p>The EFF, Google and CDT asserted in its filing that all e-mail — regardless of its age or whether it was opened — should be subject to a probable-cause warrant. “The Fourth Amendment protects stored e-mails (.pdf) just as it does conversational privacy and private papers.”</p>
<p>The nature of the criminal case is under seal. The only available public record of the case concerns the constitutional issues surrounding the Stored Communications Act. All three of those filings are linked above.
</p></blockquote>
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		<title>How Privacy Vanishes Online</title>
		<link>http://www.shazzle.com/how-privacy-vanishes-online</link>
		<comments>http://www.shazzle.com/how-privacy-vanishes-online#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:15:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Clifford Boyle</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.shazzle.com/?p=365</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Even the New York Times is now sounding the alarm about the erosion of privacy on the web. Shazzle avoids these pitfalls by acting as your own PRIVATE internet. You can share directly with your friends and associates. Nothing needs to travel on the World Wide Web. In fact, not even Shazzle gets a copy of your content. No one can steal your identity without access to your content. Keep it private. Share Shazzle.
From the New York Times:

How Privacy Vanishes Online
by Steve Lohr
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?
Probably not.
Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae &#8212; birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Even the New York Times is now sounding the alarm about the erosion of privacy on the web. Shazzle avoids these pitfalls by acting as your own PRIVATE internet. You can share directly with your friends and associates. Nothing needs to travel on the World Wide Web. In fact, not even Shazzle gets a copy of your content. No one can steal your identity without access to your content. Keep it private. Share Shazzle.</p>
<p>From the New York Times:</p>
<blockquote><p>
<strong>How Privacy Vanishes Online</strong><br />
<em>by Steve Lohr<br />
Wednesday, March 17, 2010</em></p>
<p>If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your name, Social Security number and e-mail address?</p>
<p>Probably not.</p>
<p>Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet that allows such identifying data to be deduced. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae &#8212; birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched.</p>
<p>Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person&#8217;s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number.</p>
<p>&#8220;Technology has rendered the conventional definition of personally identifiable information obsolete,&#8221; said Maneesha Mithal, associate director of the Federal Trade Commission&#8217;s privacy division. &#8220;You can find out who an individual is without it.&#8221;</p>
<p>In a class project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that received some attention last year, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree analyzed more than 4,000 Facebook profiles of students, including links to friends who said they were gay. The pair was able to predict, with 78 percent accuracy, whether a profile belonged to a gay male.</p>
<p>So far, this type of powerful data mining, which relies on sophisticated statistical correlations, is mostly in the realm of university researchers, not identity thieves and marketers.</p>
<p>But the F.T.C. is worried that rules to protect privacy have not kept up with technology. The agency is convening on Wednesday the third of three workshops on the issue.</p>
<p>Its concerns are hardly far-fetched. Last fall, Netflix (NFLX) awarded $1 million to a team of statisticians and computer scientists who won a three-year contest to analyze the movie rental history of 500,000 subscribers and improve the predictive accuracy of Netflix&#8217;s recommendation software by at least 10 percent.</p>
<p>On Friday, Netflix said that it was shelving plans for a second contest &#8212; bowing to privacy concerns raised by the F.T.C. and a private litigant. In 2008, a pair of researchers at the University of Texas showed that the customer data released for that first contest, despite being stripped of names and other direct identifying information, could often be &#8220;de-anonymized&#8221; by statistically analyzing an individual&#8217;s distinctive pattern of movie ratings and recommendations.</p>
<p>In social networks, people can increase their defenses against identification by adopting tight privacy controls on information in personal profiles. Yet an individual&#8217;s actions, researchers say, are rarely enough to protect privacy in the interconnected world of the Internet.</p>
<p>You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.</p>
<p>&#8220;Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,&#8221; said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. &#8220;In today&#8217;s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.&#8221;</p>
<p>Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive &#8220;social signature,&#8221; researchers say.</p>
<p>The power of computers to identify people from social patterns alone was demonstrated last year in a study by the same pair of researchers that cracked Netflix&#8217;s anonymous database: Vitaly Shmatikov, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas, and Arvind Narayanan, now a researcher at Stanford University.</p>
<p>By examining correlations between various online accounts, the scientists showed that they could identify more than 30 percent of the users of both Twitter, the microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing service, even though the accounts had been stripped of identifying information like account names and e-mail addresses.</p>
<p>&#8220;When you link these large data sets together, a small slice of our behavior and the structure of our social networks can be identifying,&#8221; Mr. Shmatikov said.</p>
<p>Even more unnerving to privacy advocates is the work of two researchers from Carnegie Mellon University. In a paper published last year, Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross reported that they could accurately predict the full, nine-digit Social Security numbers for 8.5 percent of the people born in the United States between 1989 and 2003 &#8212; nearly five million individuals.</p>
<p>Social Security numbers are prized by identity thieves because they are used both as identifiers and to authenticate banking, credit card and other transactions.</p>
<p>The Carnegie Mellon researchers used publicly available information from many sources, including profiles on social networks, to narrow their search for two pieces of data crucial to identifying people &#8212; birthdates and city or state of birth.</p>
<p>That helped them figure out the first three digits of each Social Security number, which the government had assigned by location. The remaining six digits had been assigned through methods the government didn&#8217;t disclose, although they were related to when the person applied for the number. The researchers used projections about those applications as well as other public data, like the Social Security numbers of dead people, and then ran repeated cycles of statistical correlation and inference to partly re-engineer the government&#8217;s number-assignment system.</p>
<p>To be sure, the work by Mr. Acquisti and Mr. Gross suggests a potential, not actual, risk. But unpublished research by them explores how criminals could use similar techniques for large-scale identity-theft schemes.</p>
<p>More generally, privacy advocates worry that the new frontiers of data collection, brokering and mining, are largely unregulated. They fear &#8220;online redlining,&#8221; where products and services are offered to some consumers and not others based on statistical inferences and predictions about individuals and their behavior.</p>
<p>The F.T.C. and Congress are weighing steps like tighter industry requirements and the creation of a &#8220;do not track&#8221; list, similar to the federal &#8220;do not call&#8221; list, to stop online monitoring.</p>
<p>But Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University who studies social networks, is skeptical that rules will have much impact. His advice: &#8220;When you&#8217;re doing stuff online, you should behave as if you&#8217;re doing it in public &#8212; because increasingly, it is.&#8221;
</p></blockquote>
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		<title>Privacy and the Web</title>
		<link>http://www.shazzle.com/privacy-and-the-web</link>
		<comments>http://www.shazzle.com/privacy-and-the-web#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:35:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Clifford Boyle</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[privacy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.shazzle.com/?p=252</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Google announced today they are now sharing your data and information with the National Security Agency (NSA) as reported on MSNBC:
&#8220;Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google — and its users — from future attack. Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership.&#8221;
If Google’s aim is to defend you from attack, why won’t it comment on the partnership with the NSA?  One of the arguments web users employ to rationalize big businesses like Google keeping copies of all their web data and transactions is that there are so many billions and billions of pieces of information who could make sense of what one individual person was [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Google announced today they are now sharing your data and information with the National Security Agency (NSA) as reported on MSNBC:</p>
<p>&#8220;Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34831106/ns/technology_and_science-security/">a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China</a> and targeted its <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35231454/ns/technology_and_science-washington_post/##" target="_blank">computer</a> networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google — and its users — from future attack. Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership.&#8221;</p>
<p>If Google’s aim is to defend you from attack, why won’t it comment on the partnership with the NSA?  One of the arguments web users employ to rationalize big businesses like Google keeping copies of all their web data and transactions is that there are so many billions and billions of pieces of information who could make sense of what one individual person was doing? We imagine our emails and transactions to be lost in all that data like the Arc of the Covenant sequestered in a large army warehouse at the conclusion of the movie RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC, never to be found again. But Google makes sense of trillions of pieces of data on the web already, and serves them up to you at your command. And who better to do an even more targeted search than the NSA?</p>
<p>Is it good news that they are teaming up to thwart the Chinese, who are also after your information? We believe the only good news is we don’t have to live in a world where all of our data and communications are stored outside of our physical control and thus subject to prying by either businesses and governments we trust, or those we do not.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.shazzle.com">Shazzle.com</a> provides a p2p network in a community setting which allows you to establish groups and share content among friends and group members in complete privacy. You can choose settings so your transmissions go peer to peer without ever hitting even the Shazzle servers, so not even your host will know what you are up to. Call it one small step toward restoring privacy to communications.</p>
<p>Shazzle expects to launch a private email service this Spring which will allow you to send mail without any copies to Shazzle, or anyone else but the intended recipient. Call this a second step toward restoring privacy. There will be more.</p>
<p>We ask for your help in letting others know of this free service, and also letting us know of any other services that increase privacy, or blogs that deal with it so we may help get the word out.</p>
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		<title>Internet Privacy</title>
		<link>http://www.shazzle.com/iternet-privacy</link>
		<comments>http://www.shazzle.com/iternet-privacy#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:20:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Clifford Boyle</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[privacy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[internet privacy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.shazzle.com/iternet-privacy</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[We are convinced that as privacy erodes, so does freedom. We are most free when we are in control of our personal space, our personal decisions, and our personal information. Shazzle’s Peer Fusion technology will put this control back in your hands as you access the internet. ]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Privacy</p>
<p>The lines between private and public information have become blurred in the age of the Web. Large corporations and government organizations collect voluminous data on most actions we take on our computers. The client server architecture of the Web plays right into their hands because all messages on the web travel from the computers where they originate, through servers owned for the most part by large corporations where they are copied and stored, and only then passed on to the intended recipient. Did you know that Google keeps copies of emails passed through its gmail service? So do Yahoo and MSN. It is the way the system works. Likewise Google’s YouTube keeps records of what each user has watched, when, and for how long, and now Viacom has gotten a court order that allows it to review those records. So if you’ve ever been on YouTube not one, but at least two large corporations as well as the court that has jurisdiction in the case will know what you were doing there. In much the same way web companies implant cookies on your computer to track your profile information and what you are doing on the web. How might these corporations use this information for their own profit? Well consider that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco (confirm this) recently turned over thousands of names of suspected dissident Chinese bloggers to the Chinese Government. Now some of these people are jailed for exercising free speech while Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco continue to turn over user names to the Chinese government to protect their business arrangements with the Chinese.</p>
<p>Big Brother can be stopped in his tracks.</p>
<p>Peer Fusion LLC believes that free political speech can advance the cause of freedom, and free commercial speech can advance the cause of equity. We reject the client server architecture of the World Wide Web that puts the servers in the service of big government (including Red China) and big business. We refuse to cede the field to those businesses that put profits before people. We determined that there had to be a better way, and, with a team of engineers, we have developed a peer-to-peer internet communications protocol that takes a hammer to the central command and control architecture of the servers and places the control instead with the individual user at the peer (PC) level. It is simple yet elegant: move the organizational and tracking tasks (the computer logic) from the server to the individual peer by creating an index and data managing capability at the peer level that persists in communities.</p>
<p>What this means to the layperson is that you can send an email with this architecture directly to the intended recipient without the message passing through any servers at all. No one but you and your recipient will have a copy, not even us at Peer Fusion who facilitate the message. Our application server merely gives you the address of your recipient. You become your own postman, delivering the message directly.</p>
<p>You could watch videos with this technology as well without Peer Fusion knowing what videos you accessed. Viacom could then serve court orders on Peer Fusion until the cows came home without discovering from us what you are watching because we do not know. We do not ever get a copy or record of it. It is your own private business, not ours, not Viacom’s, and not Red China’s. Out of the same respect for your privacy we do not use cookies, nor does our architecture allow anyone else to use them, either. You control what information you give to the sites you access.</p>
<p>This decentralized structure presents a nightmare scenario to censors since there is no central spot to control as in server based architecture. The index of content at the peer level presents a moving target to censors because if one peer is shut down a user can easily be redirected to one of many other peers and connect to uncensored information this way. There are no fixed ‘sites’ to shut down, but merely free information flowing between hundreds, or thousands, or even millions of users so that if one is chopped down many more can spring up in its place.</p>
<p>In summary, the data managing capabilities Peer Fusion has built into its peer to peer technology can bring privacy to the internet by keeping your personal information and habits off servers owned by large corporations who use this information for their own ends. Only you and the people you interact with will have information on what you are doing. In short the permanent ‘wiretap’ that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others have built into the web architecture will dissolve, putting you back in charge.</p>
<p>Peer Fusion has licensed this technology to Shazzle LLC to get it into user’s hands. Shazzle has recently launched its beta that allows filesharing including very large files, IM, and community search and creation. Email will be coming soon.</p>
<p>We hope you are as excited about these new developments as we are. We are convinced that as privacy erodes, so does freedom. We are most free when we are in control of our personal space, our personal decisions, and our personal information. Shazzle’s Peer Fusion technology will put this control back in your hands as you access the internet. Just say no to the corporations and governments that want to track your every move. They should only know what you choose to tell them. If we wean ourselves from the Web and its client server technology that makes spying so easy, that will be all they will be able to know.</p>
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		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
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		<title>You&#8217;re Running out of Time to Be A Beta User</title>
		<link>http://www.shazzle.com/youre-running-out-of-time-to-be-a-beta-user</link>
		<comments>http://www.shazzle.com/youre-running-out-of-time-to-be-a-beta-user#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:50:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Clifford Boyle</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Shazzle Versions]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://127.0.0.1/shazzle/?p=88</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[You&#8217;ve only got a few days left to sign up to be a beta user for the new file sharing software program Shazzle. We already have over 200 beta users signed up who are anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new free file sharing program. Shazzle offers live chat, file sharing, and web browsing all on a community-based platform that could be private or public. Shazzle is the first program to offer high quality community based file sharing that allows users a more interactive feel while using a p2p platform. Whether it&#8217;s just creating a private community with a group of your friends or co-workers or if it&#8217;s creating a large public community that allows you to monetize your community, you&#8217;ll be able to customize your community just like you would a website!
So sign up to be one of the first people in the world to see this newest invention [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>You&#8217;ve only got a few days left to sign up to be a beta user for the new <a href="http://www.shazzle.com/">file sharing software</a> program Shazzle. We already have over 200 beta users signed up who are anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new <a href="http://www.shazzle.com/filesharing.html">free file sharing</a> program. Shazzle offers live chat, file sharing, and web browsing all on a community-based platform that could be private or public. Shazzle is the first program to offer <em>high quality</em> community based file sharing that allows users a more interactive feel while using a p2p platform. Whether it&#8217;s just creating a private community with a group of your friends or co-workers or if it&#8217;s creating a large public community that allows you to monetize your community, you&#8217;ll be able to customize your community just like you would a website!</p>
<p>So <a href="http://www.shazzle.com/download.html">sign up</a> to be one of the first people in the world to see this newest invention that could revolutionize the file sharing industry!</p>
]]></content:encoded>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>E-Learning Tool</title>
		<link>http://www.shazzle.com/e-learning-tool-how-shazzle-can-help-your-classroom</link>
		<comments>http://www.shazzle.com/e-learning-tool-how-shazzle-can-help-your-classroom#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:50:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Clifford Boyle</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[e-learning]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://127.0.0.1/shazzle/?p=90</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Shazzle is one of the best free p2p file sharing programs that also offers live chat, message boards, and web browsing all in one easy to use software platform. The advantages of all of these features in one program shows the obvious capabilities for Shazzle as an e-learning tool. Upload and download important classroom material in a matter of seconds in educational classroom communities created by your group. Share any kind of file that is relevant to your classroom, whether if it&#8217;s a power-point for a classroom presentation or important classroom notes for this weeks lesson. Use Shazzle&#8217;s Media Player to play any kind of educational audio or video files without having to leave the program. We also offer live chat, so even when you&#8217;re not in the classroom you can still have that interactive classroom feel from wherever you may be.
If you&#8217;re a teacher or a student looking for [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Shazzle is one of the best <a href="http://www.shazzle.com/filesharing.html">free p2p file sharing programs</a> that also offers live chat, message boards, and web browsing all in one easy to use software platform. The advantages of all of these features in one program shows the obvious capabilities for Shazzle as an <a href="http://www.shazzle.com/education.html">e-learning tool</a>. Upload and download important classroom material in a matter of seconds in educational classroom communities created by your group. Share any kind of file that is relevant to your classroom, whether if it&#8217;s a power-point for a classroom presentation or important classroom notes for this weeks lesson. Use Shazzle&#8217;s Media Player to play any kind of educational audio or video files without having to leave the program. We also offer live chat, so even when you&#8217;re not in the classroom you can still have that interactive classroom feel from wherever you may be.</p>
<p>If you&#8217;re a teacher or a student looking for that perfect free e-learning tool <a href="http://www.shazzle.com/download.html">come check us out</a>!</p>
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