Tag: Privacy

An AP story nicely summarizes the controversy over the U.S. government’s plan to add RFID chips to U.S. passports, starting in 2005. The chips will allow the passport holder’s name, date of birth, passport issuance information, and photograph to be read by radio. Opponents claim that the information will be readable at distances up to…

A Xerox engineer says that color printers from Xerox and other companies print faint information in the background of printed-out pages, to identify the model and serial number of the printer that printed the pages. According to a story, the information is represented as a set of very small yellow dots. (We already knew that…

One reason for the growing concern about privacy these days is the ever-decreasing cost of storing information. The cost of storing a fixed amount of data seems to be dropping at the Moore’s Law rate, that is, by a factor of two every 18 months, or equivalently a factor of about 100 every decade. When…

Rebecca Bolin at LawMeme discusses novel applications for the toll transponder systems that are used to collect highway and bridge tolls. These systems, such as the EZ-Pass system used in the northeastern U.S., operate by putting a tag device in each car. When a car passes through a tollbooth, a reader in the tollbooth sends…

A Mark Glassman story at the New York Times discusses the didtheyreadit email-tracking software that I wrote about previously. The story quotes the head of didtheyreadit as saying that the purpose of the software is to tell whether an email reached its intended recipient. “I won’t deny that it has a potentially stealth purpose,” he…

Alex Halderman has created a page about the Word tracking bugs I described yesterday. He offers an example Word tracking bug for you to examine, and a scanner program that can find and remove Word tracking bugs on your computer.

When I wrote Monday about the new didtheyreadit.com privacy-invading email tracking system, I had no idea that an even more invasive system has been on the market for two years or so. This system, called readnotify.com, was pointed out by commenter Brian Parsons. readnotify.com is an email tracking system that uses Web bugs (like didtheyreadit)…

A company called didtheyreadit.com has launched a new email-spying tool that is generating some controversy, and should generate more. The company claims that its product lets you invisibly track what happens to email messages you send: how many times they are read; when, where (net address and geographic location), and for how long they are…

I have to admit I’m surprised at the magnitude of the recent controversy about Gmail, Google’s new webmail service. Gmail is a free webmail service, giving you up to one gigabyte of storage for email. The service shows you text ads alongside your messages, and provides various search features for your mail. The service has…