Tag: privacy

Better to know or to live in blissful ignorance?

23andme box

Following my brush with death I have taken a much deeper look at my family genes.

But one of the ultimate ways to know more is by signing up to 23 and me.

Although the idea freaks most people out, when you’ve been so close to death theres really little which can freak you out. So I have been considering the process quite a lot and looking through there material and some of the backstory of 23 and me.

Besides my thoughts of a world like Gattaca, I’m wondering if its better to know or live in a world of blissful ignorance? Although I do have to say blissful ignorance is part of the reason why I ended up in hospital. I do however wonder about 23 and me’s terms of conditions. There privacy statement is interesting too…

You may learn information about yourself that you do not anticipate. This information may evoke strong emotions and has the potential to alter your life and worldview. You may discover things about yourself that trouble you and that you may not have the ability to control or change (e.g., your father is not genetically your father, surprising facts related to your ancestry, or that someone with your genotype may have a higher than average chance of developing a specific condition or disease). These outcomes could have social, legal, or economic implications.

Genetic Information that you choose to share with your physician or other health care provider may become part of your medical record and through that route be accessible to other health care providers and/or insurance companies in the future. Genetic Information that you share with family, friends or employers may be used against your interests. Even if you share Genetic Information that has no or limited meaning today, that information could have greater meaning in the future as new discoveries are made. If you are asked by an insurance company whether you have learned Genetic Information about health conditions and you do not disclose this to them, this may be considered to be fraud.

We do not sell, lease, or rent your individual-level Personal Information without your explicit consent. As a general rule, 23andMe will not disclose your individual-level Personal Information to any third party, except under the following circumstances:

  • Partners or service providers (e.g. credit card processors or our contracted genotyping laboratory) process and/or store the information in order to help us provide, understand or improve 23andMe’s Services.
  • If you have consented for research, research contractors may access your individual-level Genetic and Self-Reported Information onsite at 23andMe’s offices for the purpose of scientific research, provided that all such research contractors will be supervised by 23andMe and subject to 23andMe’s access rules and guidelines.
  • If you have consented to use of your individual-level data in the Research Portal feature, qualified researchers (who must comply with certain requirements) may access your individual-level Genetic and/or Self-Reported Information for the purpose of scientific research, which could lead to commercial use.
  • We are required to do so by law or we do so in coordination with regulatory authorities (see the section below titled “Information Disclosure Required By Law”).
  • You have provided explicit consent for us to do so.

On a whole I don’t quite feel at ease with there terms of conditions or privacy statements. 23andme is a company and that worries me. If they were a charity or something like that, I would feel a slight bit better. How long will it be till they sell out on there users? You only have to look at what’s happened with Flickr to see the bizarre things that can happen.

So its not the information I’m worried about, its the way its stored and disclosed, now and into the future…

 

 

Top 10 Good Tech Habits

don't feel blue


Lifehacker has a list of 10 good tech habits to have… Luckily I seems to have most of them, however its good to share them because lots of my friends have fallen fowl of some of them.

  1. Search Google Like a Pro
    Absolutely! You got to know how to use search engines fully…
  2. Back Up Your Computer
    The amount of friends who don’t do this is terrible. I don’t backup everything but the essential stuff I have backed up on Spideroak. The less important stuff I have backed up on Dropbox.
  3. Use Secure Passwords
    If I got a pound for everytime I’ve shouted Keepass!
  4. Know What Maintenance Your Computer Needs (and Doesn’t Need)
    Of course building PC’s in the past and still doing bits here and there, I certainly feel like I know my stuff, although since I moved to Ubuntu I’ve kind of lost touch with my Windows background.
  5. Be Smart About Hoaxes, Scams, and Internet Myths
    Oh I’m across this, snopes and wikipedia is your friend. Generally if you think its all makes sense
  6. Stay Safe on Public Wi-Fi
    I’m aware of the risks and never do anything serious on a non-SSL connection. I’m aware of the sniffers and have been known to throw open wireshark every once in a while.
  7. Avoid Getting Malware (and Spreading It to Others)
    Running Ubuntu over Windows means the chances of Malware is less but I’m also very aware of the risks. I usually avoid passing stuff on by just deleting them but I’ve sometimes I report them. Specially banking phishing.
  8. Keep Your Desktop and Hard Drive Free of Clutter
    Check, all good…
  9. Know When You’re Paying Too Much for a Product
    Yes although I won’t go totally out of my way for a deal, as I put a price on my time and effort
  10. Regularly Audit Your Privacy Settings on Social Networks
    My general rule applies… If its private, it shouldn’t be online. No matter what privacy settings you have check the End user licence agreement! That will tell you everything you need to know…

Public 2.0: The era of personal data openness

The era of personal data openness

I was in London Thursday for the Public 2.0 conference, which the guys behind the Data Art  project put together. It was a nicely put together conference with a mix of speakers and topics.
I kicked off the day with my presentation titled The era of personal data openness.
When I was approached about doing a presentation for the data art conference. I wasn’t sure which angle to take. After a few thoughts, I decided to contact the data art guys and see what they were exactly after. After a brief chat, I decided to take the more interesting path in this presentation
The premise of the presentation is Open data from organisations like the government, companies is interesting and the movement around this has finally sunk in. There wasn’t a single government proposed agenda last year which didn’t include something about releasing more open data. And every startup and online business is building APIs, so they can take advantage of the overwhelming power of the rich ecosystem of developers, hackers and early adopters. But I’ve noticed a increase in tools and systems to take advantage of our own data and the data we generate everyday.
I was tracking this very much from the sidelines and had not found a decent way of explaining the topic of self documentation. That was till I had lunch with Rain Ashford.
We talked through a bunch of stuff but got talking about my presentation which I was due to give next day. And after describing the premise like I am now. She said it sounds a lot like Quantified Self
Bingo! Having never heard of the movement, it instantly made sense and further research clarified everything.
Quantified Self is the Era of personal Data Openness….
Its also worth noting Walter De Brouwer’s presentation at Thinking Digital also had some influence but I forgot to mention it. Two links from that session http://curetogether.com & www.patientslikeme.com all fit perfectly…

Facebook dataportability at long last

I have to give Facebook some credit, this week they launched the ability to dump your data out of facebook.

First, we’ve built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information.

If you want a copy of the information you’ve put on Facebook for any reason, you can click a link and easily get a copy of all of it in a single download. To protect your information, this feature is only available after confirming your password and answering appropriate security questions. We’ll begin rolling out this feature to people later today, and you’ll find it under your account settings.

Second, we’re launching a new dashboard to give you visibility into how applications use your data to personalize your experience. As you start having more social and personalized experiences across the web, it’s important that you can verify exactly how other sites are using your information to make your experience better.

As this rolls out, in your Facebook privacy settings, you will have a single view of all the applications you’ve authorized and what data they use. You can also see in detail when they last accessed your data. You can change the settings for an application to make less information available to it, or you can even remove it completely.

Its a total dump and although slightly impressive on the surface, other services such as 37signals Basecamp have had the ability to export your data for a long time. Interestingly there doesn’t seem to be a way to import your data, but then again I can’t see that coming anytime soon. It will be interesting to see what happens in this area when Diaspora comes along and gains traction. I’ll actually really like to add the ability to export to twitter right now, so I can see all the tweets mentioning me which were sent to me while I was in hospital.

London Geekdinner Facebook group

Geekdinner london logo

After some minor issues with Facebook networks, I have finally sorted out a global geekdinner group on facebook. You can sign up here or search for geek dinner to find the girl geekdinner group along side the geekdinner group.

As you may have noticed in some of the blog comments else where (Regular Jen) not everyone could sign up to the previous group because I left the default network of London instead of setting it to Global. This was stupid because I even after I knew the problem I couldn't change it. So please makes ure you're signed up to the correct group (the one with the geekdinner logo not the red x).

I do make the joke that everyone is on Facebook but I won't be using Facebook as the official way to tell people about events and news. As Regular Jen points out.

The catch, as I see it, is that you still have to be a member of Facebook to view it. That is not what I would call open… it is open to members of Facebook only. That’s fine and fair and there is no reason to hold back from creating such a group, however, it absolutely divides the followers of London Geek Dinners (and London Girl Geek Dinners). You now have a group within Facebook and ‘the rest of us’

Total agreement and I expect to be using some sort of aggregation to allow good communication between the different spaces. This isn't the first time I've had this problem. It would be very easy for me to stop using our tradional geekdinner blog and setup some group on upcoming and urge people to use that instead but I don't. Instead I prefer the older comment system on the geekdinner blog and then allow sign up on upcoming.org. Ideally I would aggregate the upcoming results via there API back on the geekdinner site but this will all make sense hopefully in the near future.

I want to address something Jen talked about in the same post.

Making something very clear: this isn’t about London Geek Dinners, but the recent LGD Facebook group creation solidified a feeling I already had forming in my subconscious about Facebook dividing people. I posted about Facebook last week. I caved to social pressures and joined the service. I wish I hadn’t. I have only me to blame for that (well, and Facebook. Bastards. /images/emoticons/happy.gif.
What I hope I’ve brought forward more than anything is that every time a link is posted to a page within Facebook to the world outside of Facebook, that link (and its poster) excludes people. The ‘welcome’ page non-members get is a stark, uninviting login screen with no other content— it’s the equivalent of a giant, muscly body guard outside an exclusive club’s door. You aren’t welcome to the content within the Facebook walls unless you give up something in return, and in this case, it’s your data. Forever. I have never felt so unwelcome on a site. Even without the information brought to light by the video I linked to in another post, I felt this way.

This is not the way to start or nurture relationships. It’s high-level data mining wearing a social network cloak and at the same time subtly creates social outcasts out of the ones who want nothing to do with it.

I joined it and now I can never truly leave. Sounds dramatic, but Rachel called Facebook a new Hotel California. She’s right you know

 

 

 

I hate social networks for the sake of social networking, this includes Facebook. Facebook is the new roach motel as one of the gilmor gang use to say. I like Jen resisted till the bitter end but once they included a developer API and I started to see some applications being built I signed up.

I heard rumors that the facebook guys didn't sell to Yahoo because they are working on a operating system or something. Well currently you can certainly see how once your in facebook it would be easy to ignore most of the net if your thinking that way already. Its like the portals of the late 90's but with social networking layed through-out it. This may be all good for most people and at this very moment just about bearable for me too. I still can't find a way to put my blog rss into my facebook profile for example and I'm a sucker for owning my own data.

I think Facebook is almost unstoppable without some radical game changing from someone else. I'm hoping that other thing is open and decentralised (the first person to make the concept of FOAF work or the concept of FOAF work will bite a huge chunk out of Facebook) and puts a end to facebook but till then i'm forced to use it because thats where the attention and people are right now. Sad but true.

Please note I haven't mentioned Plaxo 3.0 or Plaxo Pulse which I'm sure will come up when I decide to do a post about lifestreams.

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Make no mistake the battle lines have been drawn, Sony Rootkits and its DRM

Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far. Plain and simple, if you buy a Sony DRM CD like Get Right with the Man by the Van Zant brothers, agree to the EULA and install the DRM on your machine. Sony will also install a rootkit to make sure there XCP DRM is never removed. Is Sony taking this too far? In the words of Miles Money talks, Ian.

What makes this different from the other DRM currently deployed on CD by Macrovision, SunnComm, etc? Well a kernel rootkit will give access to your whole system and is undetectable by Virus killers and Spyware scanners. It will also rewrite the routines of your system, so you, your administrator and even the system can not see the files and/or process. Once installed, its pretty impossible to get rid of without erasing your whole system drive. As Microsoft themselves say, Be afraid, be very afraid.

Slashdotted and Digged. But Miles diggged a little deeper. Its really interesting following Ceri Coburn (a developer from first 4 internet, makers of the XCP DRM) around the internet. I wasnt sure of exact what he was doing but Miles explain some of his postings and where First 4 internet have been hacking stuff up.

Some examples, Trying to write a Snort logfile parser, maybe XCP is Ceri's first windows driver? We wonder if the XCP dll's are dialing home? Dont get us wrong, I'm sure Ceri is a nice guy but the posts and dont suggest a very well thoughout, stable and secure rootkit (if there is such a thing). And even when you read through Mark Russinovich entry, he points out mistakes and things which could have been better thoughtout to avoid detection and deletion. So Instead we're wondering how soon will it be till others exploit XCP, specially if Sony/BMG avoid being sued and other Record labels deploy XCP like have deployed DRM from Macrovision and SunnComm.

This is indeed a worrying trend for digital music lovers and does not look like ending at root access to your machine. As someone said in the comments. Forget ghosts and goblins. This scary Haloween story sent shivers up my spine.

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