The following news scares me something wicked …

Google’s ambition to maximize the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off.

Eric Schmidt, Google?s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organize the world?s information. Source: FT.com / Companies / Media & Internet – Google?s goal: to organize your daily life

I love how useful and ubiquitous Google search is. But the more I learn of the personal data they are gathering the more I get nervous. *Now* they are coming right out and telling us it’s their goal to get everything there is to know about us stuffed into their data hungry servers. The risk for misuse it obvious the means of misuse are infinite.

Further, even if Google has no intention – and even develops guarantees – they will never misuse the data, they will become ever more attractive targets for corruption, espionage, and government subpoena.

Imagine Google’s desire to be able to tell you what job you should have. Now imagine an Orwellian scene where social manipulation steps in and starts identifying persona traits and gathering up people “who possibly could be violent” or even more subtle, just tweaks the “your best job would be …” to suggest reclusive or dangerous pursuits.

Imagine Google wants to target OTC medicines and holistic health options, spa resort packages, and other ads to the individual. Not realize that same data could be used by health care providers to deny coverage or place you in a high risk category with higher premiums. To get more subtle, you might find you emergency room wait getting longer when the admitting system tricked Google into thinking it was you and now they know you could be a costly and time consuming case – aka poor ROI !

These are simplistic and obvious examples. The list could go on and on. Universities could filter applicants under the guise of targeted marketing. Pyramid schemes to target susceptible elders. Terrorists could identify recruits. The list goes on and on.

So, even if you disagree with everything I’ve said. Even if you think I’ve seen conspiracy theory too many times, answer just one question …

“Do you want Google to have that much of your personal information ?”

If not, what are you doing to prevent it from happening ? … Because it *is* happening …

The last piece of the Home Office IT upgrade arrived today and it’s been installed. Last week ended with the arrived of 2 750GB SATA drives. I started this week by replacing my very modern but overly faulty Linksys router with a middle of the road and very stable Netgear router. I paired it with a Netgear Gigabit switch. To speed things up a bit, I updated my media server with a Gigabit PCI card.

Today, The ReadyNAS NV+ arrived. The first thing that struck me was the heft of the NAS. It’s no bigger than a two-slice toaster but it weighs about 8-10 lbs.

The SATA installations went smoothly. The instructions were easy. About 5 minutes later, the NAS had 1.5GB of HDD loaded (only 666GB are usable because of RAID1 and journaling).

The ReadyNAS configuration UI is an intuitive albeit lengthy web interface. It took about 15 to get through all of the configuration. The NAS has every conceivable service. I configured SMB, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, and an iTunes Server. I opted for group and user level security. I could have gone with the basic Microsoft based WORKGROUP (and it also supports Microsoft Domains) but I wanted some familiarity across to my Linux servers.

I was very impressed by the email notification support – it worked without messy interfacing to my ISP SMTP. It not only sends alerts for warning and error situations but it also email notifies users when FTP accounts are created for them.

The one surprise was the “synchronization” phase. I installed two unformatted disks. The NAS automatically formatted the first drive and configured it right away. Within about 15 minutes the NAS was “open for business”. The second drive was formatted quick enough but it was another 5 hours (that’s not a typo) for it to synchronize with the first drive. I found that really strange since the first drive was empty to start.

The real work will be transferring all the data off the media server onto the NAS. The Gigabit switch will be busy !

A news story on NRP’s “All Things Considered” this evening, had an interesting subtext. The initial context of the news story highlighted that students at Virginia Tech have been using Facebook and MySpace as a means of communicating with each other and with distant friends. The subtext was how the news media has used this same content for dual purposes – both as news content and as potential news *contacts*.

(I preface the next paragraph by saying I wrote it before I took the time to read Facebook’s terms of use.)

News outlets have used these public Internet sites to harvest background content, quotes, and story lines. To a greater or lesser extent, this is reasonable or reasonably expected. The content in the public domain.

More interesting (and unfortunate) is that media personnel have used the information from Facebook and MySpace to identify potential interviewees for the purpose of securing quotes from students involved as well as friends and family of students effected. In some cases, the media were insistent in their pursuits – to the point of harassment.

I was not familiar with the policies at Facebook so I took a closer look. It turns out, the media’s behavior could be found in violation of the terms of the service.

You further agree not to harvest or collect email addresses or other contact information of Users from the Service or the Site by electronic or other means for the purposes of sending unsolicited emails or other unsolicited communications.

Source Facebook Terms of Use

To be honest, I was not expecting the above section of the terms of use. I had assumed the user content would be deemed “in the public domain”. It’s refreshing – but the pessimist in me suspects it goes mostly ignored.

What all of this means is that “if it’s in the Internet, it’s considered fair game”. It means those who choose to publish in the Internet, should evaluate all the good and bad ways that information may be used. It is our responsibility to protect ourselves, our family, and our friends.

This is an unfortunate state of affairs. However, it is reality. If someone wants to misuse or subvert a situation, there are too many possible ways for us to prevent them all. Information and privacy are the latest victims.

If you work from a home office – i.e. single employee, family business, independent consultant, small Internet business, farmer, new entrepreneur, etc. - you don’t have a big corporate IT department to support you. You *are* the IT department !

With today’s business, “data” has a value that belies it’s invisibility and the tiny physical space it occupies. All of those records could easily hid in a space no bigger than kitchen toaster.

That data takes storage and needs protecting. Even if the data does not have monetary implication, just think of the pain losing 10 years of family photos, vacation pics, and special events. Add in the e-files of your tax records, bank statements, downloaded credit card statements. So, if you are like me, it may be well past the time to improve your storage and backup capabilities. Continue reading ‘More than a "Home Office"’ »

There has been a significant amount of blogging and press regarding anonymity on the Internet. I have recently blogged on the subject.

However, now I am taking a look at the issue from the other side. In the back of my mind, I knew there were two sides to “authentic sources” and the Internet but the shock of that recent story skewed my internal debate. Here is a justification to support the need for anonymity. China’s Ministry of Information proposed a “real-name blogger registration system”. As if to demonstrate the problem …

The first meeting about the real-name blogger registration system two weeks ago was disclosed by the media, and it caused a stir everywhere.

Source: Zhao Ling (??)

I don’t have a good answer. How do we balance human rights ? It’s not right to allow one person to malign another behind an “identity cloak”. At the same time, how are people supposed to speak out against injustice if they will be persecuted and prosecuted.