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Privacy isn't a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It's about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It's about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me "public by default, private when necessary" but this doesn't suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.

Worth reading and understanding. Main take away is privacy isn't dead, as much as some people may think it is. The fact all this is causing such a stir should be enough to understand people still value privacy.

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.

This sort of data mining is becoming increasingly popular and the spread of social networks means we give more and more about ourselves away either knowingly or unknowingly. I had not even considered the power to profile people in various ways without even looking at the contents of their profile but simply looking at their friends. Of course, the best results were a hybrid of the two methods, but still, the predictive power of such a thing is a marketer/government's dream and someone concerned with privacy's nightmare. Now, for most things there are simple recommendations for how you conduct yourself online that can help protect you, but this one I cannot really think of one. Does anyone have idea?

I went over the list of companies on the website today in our proxy web hosting plans and removed around 10 plans (6 companies?) that don't seem to have functioning websites anymore. If you have moved/deleted in error, we're sorry, please re-submit with updated info.

As most informed citizens of the world now now, Iran is having a lot of turmoil over its recent elections. The most interesting part about it (ok perhaps second most interesting after the chance of a potential revolution in Iran) is the power of the internet and how news and information has traveled. The story was largely ignored by major news networks (looking at you CNN) but it gained life on Twitter (@ProxyHost now on twitter). They re-scheduled maintenance around the event and news from Iran has been all but cut off with the exception of Twitter.

Why is Twitter the exception?
*Open network - Anyone can join
*Open API - Tons of applications, services and proxies can access and post information

I think those are the two main reasons. The first gave rise to a service and the second cemented it's power for the users. With a completely open API anyone around the world can access it, build apps and allow other services to interact on their behalf. So let's say government Y blocks access to twitter.com, they still have to block every proxy (web service that allows you to interact with the service/post information to it/etc) to effectively shut the service down. Now that Twitter has grown and developers have taken the challenge of building applications for it on, it simply can't be stopped. News, leaks and videos pop up onto the service constantly no matter how hard a government tries to stop it.

The US government has dropped - for now - a plan to classify the use of 'proxy' servers as evidence of sophistication in committing a crime.

Proxy servers are computers that disguise the source of Internet traffic. They are commonly used for legitimate purposes, like evading Internet censors and working from home. But they can also be used to hide from law enforcement.

Just like I could use a kitchen knife to cut veggies or kill someone. Should we ban kitchen knives? Proxies are important today. Even western governments have begun censoring content (see wikileaks about these lists). While I don't promote or condone the content listed at many of the censored sites I think it is a step in the wrong direction and the wrong way to handle such things. We have law enforcement which should investigate crimes, not block all uses of technology/create arcane laws to 'protect' citizens from the potential harm. We might as well all jump into bubbles and never experience life because that is where the ultra strong paternalistic state seems to want to push us.

For every noble human desire, in this case, the strong protective feelings most adults have towards children, opportunists such as Senator Conroy and his German equivalent, CDU Minister Ursula von der Leyen, stand ready to exploit these feelings for their own power and position.

Von der Leyen apparently hopes to raise her profile before a national election by promoting a national censorship "solution" to child pornography.

But forcibly preventing the average parent from seeing evidence of what may be an abuse against a child is not the same as stopping abuses against children. Absense of evidence is not evidence of absense.

Censoring the evidence promotes abuses by driving them underground, where they are difficult to track. Such schemes divert resources and political will away from proven policing solutions which target producers and consumers.

Children depend, even more than their parents, on the quality and viability of government. An assault against those systems and ideals which keep government honest and accountable - public oversight, natural justice, and protection from state censorship - is not just an affront to Enlightment ideals, but an assult on the long term interests of children and adults alike.

Based on my Tripod experience, I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media - it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test - if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.

In late 1996, we noticed that Tripod was receiving a great deal of traffic from Malaysia. Searching through the server logs, we found lots of pages in Bahasa Malay talking about “Reformasi” and “Anwar Ibrahim”. I had to visit the Political Science department at Williams College to figure out that we were apparently hosting much of the Malaysian opposition political movement, dedicated to helping deposed and imprisoned deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim return to power. Malaysian media was largely closed to opposition voices, but investment in internet infrastructure meant that the opposition was able to access the internet and publish material that couldn’t be disseminated any other way. (Several of these pages still exist on Tripod.)

SHOULD we modify our conception of privacy thanks to the seemingly unstoppable spread of CCTV surveillance networks? Jack Brassil thinks so. He's a computer scientist at Hewlett-Packard's laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, who is testing a technology called Cloak that aims to limit the extent of privacy invasions. "Rather than prohibit surveillance, our system seeks to discourage surveillers distributing video without the authorisation of the surveilled," he says.

Sounds science-fictionesque. The requirements for such a system is merely tracking the location of every single person, all the time. What a great idea... not. How about we accept that a right to privacy is a basic human right and not become a big brother state that would put Orwell to shame? Thanks.

A Teenage pupil has been withdrawn from her school after CCTV cameras were installed in the pupils' toilets.

Anthony White, from Llandysul said the cameras at Ysgol Dyffryn Teifi in Ceredigion were an "outrageous invasion" of his daughter Jade's privacy. Jade, 14, said: "I am not going back while the cameras are there. It must be against the law to have them there."

Ok. Not an internet privacy issue, but a more general one. CCTV in the girls bathroom at school? I can't imagine ever looking at a parent in the eye and being able to justify this. I would fear for my physical safety if I did that to them. I don't care what reasoning, no reasoning can logically justify this. Public, private, religious, don't care what kind of school. There HAS TO BE SOME PLACES YOU CANNOT BE WATCHING. Privacy is a fundamental human need and the bathroom should be one of the most sacred places and is in virtually every culture I am familiar with.

The Home Office claims the new database, which can track phone calls and emails, is necessary in an advancing digital world to allow it to tackle terrorism and serious crime.

I sometimes feel like the government watches hollywood movies and takes them under advisement. Are you fucking serious? The very symbols of modern democracy are being taken away to fight terrorism which is against those principals. I know saying this isn't anything new, but my god, think about that just one more time. We lose. At least our governments do unless/until we force them to behave properly. There is always dangers everywhere, that is life, there are risks, we need to stop cowering around and give up everything that makes life worth living for an extra measure of 'security' which can never be proven effective. If technology were our savior from all evil, then we wouldn't see all sorts of malware, spyware and viruses succeed so wildly. Technology is a tool not a complete solution. Life has ambiguity and risks, by waking up you are dealing with them and taking them: that is what makes us, us.

On a similar note, since technology isn't some all supreme power and people have the right to privacy, that's what this site is here for: providing you with info and tools to protect your privacy namely through use of proxies.